You will not be surprised to hear me say that I am loath to turn over the responsibilities of our committee and the House of Commons to the other unelected chamber of this Parliament.
That said, I think Ms. Bendayan made a point we should take into consideration nonetheless, and that is the fact that work is already being done on the issue of sanctions and the fact that, in the motion we just adopted a few minutes ago, we included a few words about sanctions. The last thing I want to do is to duplicate our work, given the fact that we have already made a commitment in the previous motion to look at the issue of sanctions. We are adding four meetings on the sanctions. I don't want to rain on anyone's parade, but we don't have any more meetings available between now and Christmas. Therefore, the more we add, the less time we will have to discuss all the other issues that we find extremely worrisome, with Ukraine being at the top of the list.
I would not want us to lose sight of key aspects of considerations that I will refrain from labelling. The main thing is to talk about how we can concretely help Ukrainians deal with the situation they face. Of course, sanctions are part of the arsenal, no pun intended, that we can deploy to help Ukrainians. Ms. McPherson, I and others have concerns about the effectiveness of our sanctions regime, which we have let ourselves weaken through the turbine license. Again, I don't want us to lose sight of what is important by getting bogged down for a long time in what may seem like a side issue, especially since I feel that we would almost be doubling our work in this case, since we have already instructed our analysts to write something about sanctions.
So if we want to be minimally consistent, we will not instruct our analysts to start drafting something for us on sanctions, while proposing to have four meetings on the most specific issue of sanctions. Let's be minimally consistent. Are we asking our analysts to write something on sanctions, or do we want to hear from witnesses over four meetings on sanctions, and then instruct our analysts to work on the issue? I would like us to be somewhat consistent.
Speaking of consistency, I also want us to be consistent about the fact that we have a limited number of meetings between now and Christmas, and there are many topics we are all interested in, but we will not manage to address them. We are in the process of doing a post mortem on all these motions that we adopted and all these topics that we wanted to address, which we were not able to address because we ran out of time last spring. I feel like we are going in exactly the same direction: we will be very enthusiastic about a lot of things, but we won't get the job done because we are just not going to have enough time. We saw what happened to us last spring.
Let's not repeat that mistake and then tell ourselves next spring that we didn't get everything done that we planned to do this fall. Let's be consistent, please.