I will confess that I don't think I've ever been involved in a debate over when clause-by-clause starts on a pre-budget, so I'm struggling to work through what the implications are.
However, I'm conscious of this fact: If we didn't have this motion here today, what would the status quo be? The status quo would be that the legislation would be tabled sometime, I presume. We would come to this committee sometime in the fall. We would have nothing determined about when clause-by-clause starts. I don't know, to be honest, whether two weeks....
By the way, I agree with my colleague—“two sitting weeks”, I think, is good.
I don't know what the massive legislative implications of starting after two weeks or three weeks are. However, I think the Conservative motion saying “no later than three weeks” gives us the opportunity, as a committee, to determine if it's less than that, so I think we should pass this motion now. I'm okay with starting “no later than three weeks”, because it preserves the option to have this discussion in the fall, once we have the legislation in front of us. It's going to take a vote of the committee at that point, anyway. If, at that point—once we have the legislation—we decide we're going to start clause-by-clause a week or two weeks after, or take the full three weeks, we'll make that determination then.
I think this gives us a compromise that meets everybody's objectives. It puts a certain date on it for the government side, but it allows the discretion to make it less than that once we have legislation, which I think meets the Conservatives' concerns. I'm personally okay with it being “no later than three weeks” on the understanding that how it turns out in the fall will, in my view, be determined by the evidence we hear and by how complex the discussion turns out to be.