At the end of the day, they break their promises in embarrassing kinds of ways. Well, no, hold on. Actually, even breaking their promises in embarrassing kinds of ways isn't enough, because then we'd still have to get rid of the Prime Minister. I don't know. I guess I just don't understand it. At any rate, they have to keep getting rid of these people and replacing them with new people.
It's just that I don't get, Mr. Chair, how in 2016 we can say as a committee, very clearly, that we don't believe there's a consensus, that we should not be eliminating the Friday sittings, and that we're not going to make any recommendation about that. Now we get this direction out of this discussion paper, or whatever you want to call it, from the House leader of the government saying that we should get rid of them.
Then we get this motion from Mr. Simms: let's ram this stuff through, let's do it quickly, let's not give the opposition any chance to have any say on it.
I mean, they're going to claim, of course, that they are. You've already heard some of the arguments. They're claiming, oh, you know, there was this take-note debate one day in October last year; that was it; everyone got a chance to have their say.
It was one day. It was done when the critics for the official opposition and the other opposition parties were not able to be here, because they were with the electoral reform committee. I'm sure it was just a coincidence—not—that this was the date chosen. At the end of the day, is that enough to say that MPs got input?
They also said, oh, by the way, we'll give you some committee meetings, and let's get this done by June 2.
How many weeks is Parliament sitting between now and June 2? We're March 21 today. We'll take this week out of it, I guess, because I think we'll be in this discussion for some time. Even if we weren't, we wouldn't have been able to get really started, I don't think. We were seven days for witnesses.
Next week, Parliament is not sitting. There are two weeks in April and probably three weeks in May. We're talking about five weeks of parliamentary time. During that time we have a lot of work before this committee—a lot of work. We have Elections Canada and the report from the Chief Electoral Officer, which we've gone a long way through, and which, I will point out, not that long ago Liberal MPs on this committee were arguing vociferously was a huge priority and we needed to deal with it really quickly. I think even the minister had indicated to us that she wanted this done by the 19th of May or something like that.
Is that about right, Mr. Chair?