Thank you very much.
If Ms. Dzerowicz does come in, out of generosity and the spirit of goodwill, I'm more than happy to have her interrupt me and put some excellent comments on the record here.
I did want to go over the importance of the legislative process and thoroughly examining legislation. I guess I'd start by thanking the 48 officials who are here today.
I had a private member's bill. That's why I missed some time at foreign affairs and certainly missed my time here with one of the best committees, I think, in all of Parliament. My private member's bill was small. I think it was fewer than 10 pages, and we had four meetings with extensive consultations and discussions, and many amendments from all parties. That was just one small private member's bill.
When we look at an omnibus budget like this, which has tens if not hundreds of pages in it, I think it's important—in fact, it's critical—that legislators are able to do their jobs. We're talking about billions and billions of dollars that are being spent. It's critical that as legislators we have the time to review and understand that.
Quite frankly we all missed, at least in the opposition anyway, what was in the budget when it came to the deferred prosecution agreement with respect to SNC-Lavalin. We, like all legislators, need to make sure that never happens again. We need to make sure that we have the appropriate consultations.
Just for my private member's bill, which, as I said, is just a couple of mere pages, we had officials testify for probably hours when you combine them on just this relatively small provision. When we're looking at a budget of this size, hundreds of billions of dollars, to me, as a I believe one of the members already said.... I think it was Gabriel who said that we really require hundreds of hours on this. I think that's a fair comment when you look at the billions of dollars that would be spent.
Let me just go through and discuss a little bit this notice of motion, as my colleague did. I, of course, respect and like my colleague, but I think he was a little too brief in discussing some of this.
We're inviting witnesses to appear during regular meetings on May 1, May 8 and May 15. Those are our three regular meetings, where we sit from 11 to one o'clock. I would have expected maybe the parliamentary secretary to work with the chair and set out additional hours so we could get the maximum amount of time possible to discuss this. Honestly, it seems a little odd that we're struggling so much for resources.
It was very surprising to me that we weren't able to get an emergency debate with respect to The Globe and Mail's story respecting the member from Wellington—Halton Hills, Michael Chong, and the acts by a diplomat in the consular office in Toronto. We weren't able to get parliamentary resources for that.
It would seem that this government is bent on burning resources, as we had a relatively reasonable request to move forward with this and have the minister speak for two hours on this, but the finance minister evidently doesn't have time for the Canadian people, which we see, as she would not spend two hours on a budget that's spending hundreds of billions of dollars.
The finance committee is fine—I understand. I may be of no particular significance, but I do represent 100,000 people from Northumberland—Peterborough South. I would have thought that the finance minister would be willing to give two hours of her day. I know she's extremely busy. She works extremely hard, but two hours in the scope of a year to discuss hundreds of billions of dollars in expenditures that will guide the government financially for the next year seems like a relatively modest request.
If we look at the rounds of questions, at six minutes—