Thank you, Mr. Chair.
We forwarded the motion. We spoke with the clerk two days ago. We missed the deadline by 16 minutes in terms of submitting this for debate today.
However, there is an emergency that the country is facing right now. There's the Emergencies Act that we're debating in the House of Commons.
Part of the Emergencies Act, of course, implicates the Canadian financial system and what's going to happen to the security of our monetary system, with the government, I think, haphazardly—but we can determine that—forcing banks to actually freeze the accounts of people it thinks are involved with any of the blockades, protests, and so on, that are happening in Ottawa.
When I asked the question at the briefing the other night, the officials told me that the banks have algorithms to make this happen. I think the use of a blunt tool such as a blanket algorithm to freeze Canadians' bank accounts will have significant effects on our Canadian financial system, including the drifting of deposits from banks to other financial instruments that are not Canadian deposits.
There's a lot that is going on here, and I recognize that. I think this committee is well equipped to deal with the effects of what might happen with this, and we should examine that very clearly and very quickly.
If you'd like me to read the motion, I could, but it is in front of everybody. I think it would be respecting everybody's time if we were to just talk about the nature of what we need to accomplish here and let everybody read the motion itself. It stands on its own. We're open to some amendments to it. As a matter of fact, we ourselves would like to make some amendments.
Because of the timing of this committee and what we know we need to get done, part of the reason we bring this forward is to manage all the studies we have in front of this committee. We think this one should probably bounce to the top because of how urgent this actually is, and we should be dealing with this quickly.
Expeditiously, we could say that we're all expecting to have our amendments to Bill C-8 in by next Friday, and then on Monday, February 28, go clause by clause on it. I think we're all okay with that.
Perhaps we've seen enough witnesses for that and we can allocate two meetings next week for the first part of this study, including the witnesses we're calling here. That would be very instructive for the Canadian people and for the Canadian financial system.
I'll leave it at that. I'm open to any questions that people might have in terms of what I think this committee needs to accomplish on behalf of the Canadian people and to ensure that we're not overstepping and causing some significant harm to the Canadian financial system.