It's to extend witnesses to Monday if there are any of those who we can re-ask, I guess. If we so choose, we can instruct the clerk to canvass those same witnesses again and let them know that there's another slot available. That gives them four more days and a weekend to prepare and come before committee.
Most of the witnesses, with the exception of maybe the chicken farmers...I'm not sure if they have a good grasp on this type of material about elections.
What my colleague, Filomena, has said it that we've been through a lot of this material with the Chief Electoral Officer's report because 80% of what the Chief Electoral Officer's recommendations were are in Bill C-76. We have thoroughly gone through it. We had the Chief Electoral Officer sit here meeting after meeting with us and also explain to us every time we had any question on any issues.
So we had the foremost expert on elections law here throughout that whole time. I can't even recall how many meetings that was at this point. I would have to go back to take a look. There were 25 meetings. That's over 50 hours there of meetings at that point. There's 50 hours plus the 30 hours of witnesses, now.
I'm just saying that it's not on this legislation but a huge chunk of it really was discussing whether these recommendations were good or not and what they entailed. We have a good understanding, I believe.
Let's put it out there to see if any of those witnesses want to come forward with another time slot. There's at least another six hours of options for them. Then we would have to naturally progress after that. That's the only way I see it. That's what we do as a committee, right?
Once we've had the witnesses, we have to go on to the next stage of the study.