That's great. Thank you.
Mr. Chair, I want to use a couple of minutes to bring up an issue. I know that we're going to run out of time.
It was mentioned that the committee would get to discuss Bill S-203 in early February. It didn't happen, for whatever reason. We went on our riding weeks, and it's now February 20. Because of votes this evening, it seems that we won't get to discuss Bill S-203 in committee business—if that was possibly what was going to happen—which means that, again, we're not going to be able to discuss this topic this week. The earliest we can get to it now is the end of February.
Colleagues, we are running out of time on this bill. This comes from the Senate. I will remind you that first reading was on December 8, 2015. Second reading and referral to the Senate fisheries committee was on November 23, 2016. They held 17 committee meetings and heard from 40 witnesses. The committee report was adopted on April 26, 2018. It passed third reading on October 23, 2018. Here we are in 2019, and it looks like we're moving into March before we can even discuss it.
As you know, we're running out of time to get this in front of Parliament, hopefully to be voted on before we rise in June. I would implore us to consider this and to make some time—which won't be this week—for it next week. We have a lot of awesome witnesses, and this is a very important topic, but we also have to look at how we deal with this proposed legislation.
I've probably just used the five seconds I had left to encourage my colleagues to consider this for next week.