I hear Blake's concerns in terms of the public message or rhetoric matching the actions. Governments always say they want to work with you as they invoke time allocation. Some of my blue team colleagues down the row would know that, too.
I'm just looking for what would work. I hear the offer from Chris with respect to the minister up front and then the minister at the back. It gets to the two hours, except that it may be a middle ground. It seems possible to me that, in some ways, it could be more effective, just in that, by the second time, we will have heard criticisms of the bill, where the holes are, and then we could call the minister back and ask, “Did you think about this? Did you think about that?”
We had early confusion, if you remember, Mr. Chair. It was Scott who was asked to introduce it as the interim minister, so you can forgive it a bit, but even through the technical briefings that some of us —not many—went to, from the public servant side of things, there were major questions that they either didn't have the answers to or gave us incorrect information.
Parties issuing receipts and needing to issue receipts before they could get reimbursed from Elections Canada was a major part of the bill that we asked Scott about. He said, “You can amend it.” A few days went by, and then he said, “It's actually in the bill”. That type of stuff does not give me as a parliamentarian a huge amount of confidence that this is locked, has been well considered, and is totally airtight. I think we're going to find either by intention or by not paying attention that there are problems with the bill.
I'm still pushing for travel. I understand the tight timelines, but again, my grandmother used to say that a lack of planning on my part did not make for a crisis on her part. As a little kid, I wasn't a great planner.
This is what I was going to propose. We hit the thing hard starting next week. I look at our totals as a way to think about these committee studies. How many hours can you fit in to start to satisfy what would seem like a worthwhile...? Frankly, this has been so late. It's not even going to meet the standard that we took with Bill C-23, the Fair Elections Act. It's not going to meet the same number of hours of study, which, as I have said, is unfortunate, because I think it's a bigger bill than Bill C-23 was. We could argue whether it's as good, more damaging, or whatnot.
We've lost two hours of committee time for next week through other things. If we were to do two hours on the Monday, get an hour on Tuesday, do another two hours either Tuesday or Wednesday, and then get another hour on Thursday, that would give us six, maybe. That would be my proposal for next week. That's the “get the ball rolling” week.
The next week I'm going to propose we travel.