The reason I mentioned “time” was that it also gave me a nice segue to do part of what Mr. Reid did, which was to take us back to how this was done in the past.
This is not an exhaustive list, but these are some of the examples of committees and the time they took to do exactly what the government is proposing—namely, review our rules.
The first example is the Special Committee on Procedure. It was established on September 24, 1968. It's in the formal Journals on pages 67 and 68. The fourth and fifth reports were concurred in on December 20, 1968. The Journals pages are 574 to 579. They took four months.
There was a Special Committee on the Reform of the House of Commons, and that was the McGrath report that Mr. Simms likes to refer to a lot. I have at least a few hours' worth of comment on that report, and I will continue to go through it with a fine-tooth comb to make sure I can find every bit of relevancy between that report and what's going on here. But that's maybe a couple of weeks down the road, as we settle into this.
With regard to the McGrath report, the committee was established on December 5, 1984. By the by, 1984 was the first year I ran publicly. Sheila Copps beat me. I just thought I'd throw that out there.
That was also in Journals, pages 153 and 154. Amendments to the Standing Orders were adopted on June 27, 1985. That's in Journals on page 903 and then pages 910 to 919.
Mr. Simms likes to point to the McGrath report. He's referred to it a number of times, probably not in a repetitive way or the chair would have caught him. I'm sure it was just echoing. That report, which the government and Mr. Simms specifically are so proud of and point to in terms of the wonderful work they did, took seven months.. Again, the report that the government is so proud of, the McGrath report...or “McGraw”, sorry.