—the soup and salad bowl of Canada, as it's known in the mind of the member and perhaps other places as well.
Chair, I see there are bells going. Is that relevant to us or not? That's just signalling, I suppose, not the end of anything other than the proceedings of the chamber. Normally it signals a vote, but nobody has called a vote at this time, so I'll continue.
I do welcome a number of members who've joined us. I want to assure the new members who are entering the room that we have successfully established that Standing Order 119 applies in this committee, so you are welcome to be here and exercise your rights as members of Parliament.
We have before us an amendment and a subamendment that no doubt have some relationship to the rural top-up, but also deal with the broader aspects of the budgetary policy of the government. It proposes, as I was discussing, that no fewer than 12 hours be allotted for hearing from witnesses. I've emphasized, given the length of the budget, that that works out to roughly one page of the budget per one minute of testimony, which, I would say, is the floor, not the ceiling, in terms of the amount of testimony this committee would want to hear.
That's the aspect of the subamendment that deals with the amount of time the committee would spend hearing from witnesses. One other aspect—and the motion continues—is an invitation to Mr. Mark Carney to appear “as a witness to testify with respect to the Budget 2024, the economy and the environment for no fewer than two hours”. As members know, that is an invitation which Mr. Carney could decline. This subamendment does not propose a summons for Mr. Carney, it proposes a gracious invitation, and we shall see how he will respond to that invitation.
It may be that Mr. Mark Carney is interested and wants to appear. If he does, he might wish to send a note to his supporters in the Liberal caucus saying that he would like to have that opportunity to appear before the committee. I did make the observation that he has seemed to prefer the gentle halls of softball interviews to the substantive opportunities for discourse of a potentially sharper nature that one might find in the hallowed halls of this great institution.
Mr. Carney's core thesis in his—at least by Liberals—much-discussed book, Value(s), is what might be described as stakeholder capitalism. It's the idea of stakeholder capitalism. In that sense, his thesis is fairly similar to a book written by Klaus Schwab called Stakeholder Capitalism, which also provides that argument. Mr. Carney's book is longer, and it contains more specific and detailed discussions of certain points of history, but his thesis is essentially the same.
The defenders of stakeholder capitalism are providing, in my judgment, what is essentially a defence of plutocracy. Plutocracy is defined as a country or society governed by the wealthy. I am strongly opposed to plutocracy. I think it should be one person, one vote, not one dollar, one vote or one shareholder, one vote. It should be one person, one vote.
Defenders of stakeholder capitalism don't announce themselves as defenders of plutocracy. Substantively, that is the nature of the system that is being proposed. The idea of stakeholder capitalism is advanced as an alternative—