I think a shorter budget does make sense.
If you look at the provincial budgets, you'll see documents that are much closer to what I described. They're businesslike documents. The key numbers are up front. There is not a lot of commentary—an uncharitable person would say “political spin”—and an MP, somebody who is not a financial expert, can readily find key numbers and make sense of them.
Federal budgets are uniquely bad. This goes back a number of years. It's not a partisan comment. We now, though, have this situation where the actual summary statement of transactions, which is the key fiscal statement in the budget, is not even in the main document. It's in an annex.
I think that simply reorganizing budgets and committing to putting the fiscal information front and centre would be a good start.
Omnibus bills are frequently decried, and we have seen election platform commitments not to do them. I think those impulses are well founded. It's tempting to resort to them once in power, but there are too many examples of legislation passed in haste where elected representatives simply did not have the bandwidth to examine them properly. There is no reason why individual pieces of legislation that deal with different things could not be sliced up.
Bill C-19 is not uniquely bad in this regard, but if you look at the range of topics covered in it, there is no way that even as committed and as able a committee as this one can really be expert on everything that is in front of you.