Okay, this will be very interesting. I guess we can buckle up then.
We somehow always seem to find ourselves in the same spot. There's a low-trust environment. We have some new folks here, and that's okay, but the government is continuing to manage its parliamentary calendar in a way that seems to show it thinks it holds a complete majority. It forces the NDP to vote for some things that I don't think the NDP generally wishes to support, but it also doesn't always leave a lot of room for negotiation. There's the refrain, “We're going to do this and we don't need you”. That's okay, as we can stay here all night. I guess we should get some more speakers on the speaking list.
Phil's back on? Okay, that's good.
I think we owe it to Canadians to do thorough reviews of the legislation. We have agreed to prestudies previously, we agreed to a prestudy of the budget, although we were in a similar position as we are now, but we did agree to a prestudy of the budget. I can't recall what we did last year, but we did make some concessions on getting an audit for the CERB, which is coming in early December.
People should mark their calendars for that, because the Auditor General is going to review the process that CRA used to give out CERB and other payments. It's notable because it's the same process the government is planning to use for the dental benefit. One wonders why the government was so hastily moving the dental benefit through the parliamentary process. I think it's because they wanted to do so before the audit came out, because there are some challenges—as the Parliamentary Budget Officer has noted—with the self-attestation process. The government wanted to make it about, “If you vote against the dental plan, you're voting against kids' healthy smile”—and it's all about process and procedure and not about substance.
You could have taken the same amount of money, and by the way, saved $100 million in administrative costs, and given that money to provinces to increase the eligibility criteria for all of their existing programming using their infrastructure. That was my primary objection to the dental care bill, but I'm looking forward to the Auditor General's report on that front. I think we should also have time as a committee to have the Auditor General come back to talk about that, but we won't get to do that if we're going to continue talking about these kinds of things.
I would encourage some kind of subcommittee meeting, having some kind of calendar until the end of the year to get there. I don't even know when the last subcommittee meeting was. I can't recall it. Now, I'm not invited to those. I would wear my socks to them.