An assumption has been made here. I won't deal with all the questions, but the motion puts this responsibility for booking us onto the chair and the clerk. I know there are a number of different issues, a number of different things, and that's why I thought giving more specific direction to them was.... If we don't have one in there, then we're all going to submit a whole bunch of witnesses, and we're going to have a sort of potpourri of witnesses during that week, and it's going to be harder for us to process what they're speaking to and what the issues are.
An alternative would be that the steering committee meet, and instead of putting the mandate to the.... First of all, if we are going to have 72 witnesses in a four-day period and then the ministers coming in on the fifth day if we run that day, I do think we need to organize the witnesses in a way that gives us sort of pros and cons around a topic. I just wasn't sure that that would happen without us giving clear direction to the clerk in advance. That's why I proposed this. It wasn't meant to be restrictive; it was meant to be guidance on how we want to do our work as a committee.
We have have a steering committee that has often met to set who the witnesses will be, the timing of them, and how to organize the blocks. We could do that sometime in that first week of August. I did check and we have to sit together. It means coming back. We have to come together, then, as a subcommittee in that first week of August to meet with the clerk and the chair and to set our committee list. I'm quite prepared. I can't speak for my counterpart, but I think it's a really important topic. I'm prepared to put my time into it during the time when we're in the constituency.
The reason I did four-hour blocks is that it allows us to have nine witnesses. If we go back to our traditional two-hour blocks, which is what Ms. Harder had asked about, then we lose that extra witness. We'd have to go back to our normal four and four and four and four, so we'd lose eight witnesses if we stayed with eight-hour days. That's why I'm suggesting the four-hour block. It puts more on us to take on that additional witness time, but it gets more witnesses in front of us.
I think workplace safety and indigenous communities are both important topics. The indigenous communities, I'm sure, will have some views and perspectives on this, but perhaps not for four hours. Maybe we would do a two-hour block on workplace safety and a two-hour block on labelling and packaging, and we would do a two-hour block on indigenous communities and a two-hour block on another topic. We could do edibles, or—