If you're interrupted by some other proceeding, the Speaker will tell you, “Mr. Reid, when the house returns...”. He won't address you by name, but he'll say, “The honourable member for Lanark-Carleton will have five minutes when the House returns to the subject.” As it turned out, there was a two-week break commencing. When I came back, I made the point to the Speaker that when I was making the first half of my remarks it was two weeks ago, and there is nothing like a two-week break in the middle of a 10-minute speech to let you organize your thoughts.
The same thing applies here. It's been a three-week break. I was the first participant in this discussion. Indeed, the motion we are currently discussing is an amendment I proposed to Mr. Simms' motion. I return now to those comments. In so doing, a number of things have transpired, one of which, although it was to some degree evident three weeks ago, is that much more evident today, and that is the fact that our agenda.... We had a busy agenda three weeks ago; it is still busier today with the number of things that this committee needs to get done. I have a little list. I want to go through them to indicate how substantial these items actually are.
Certainly, the items we had on our plate when we began this discussion included, first, the review of the Canada Elections Act. We have a cyclical review in every Parliament of the Canada Elections Act. The rhythm is like this: you hold an election, in this case the 42nd general election. That is followed by a report from the Chief Electoral Officer, who makes his, or theoretically her, recommendations—it's “his” in this case; it was Mr. Mayrand—on things that could be done to make the 43rd general election an improvement on the 42nd.
The nature of these reports, as everybody on this committee well knows, is highly technical. They go step by step through different provisions of the elections act, detailing how the act could be changed to make improvements in areas as disparate as access to the polls by disabled voters—itself a long, complex, and vexed question, or series of questions, because each disability provides its own problems. Mobility issues are different from visual impairments, which are different from any of the other issues that affect what we would broadly label as the disabled community. We see issues as broad as that, down to issues of the problems that are involved in trying to get personnel to staff the polling places, down to issues with voter identification, and so on—literally hundreds of different topic areas in what is a very large and very technical piece of legislation.
We then review the recommendations made by Elections Canada and write, typically, a series of reports. This has been the approach this committee has taken. We started working through topic areas—topics A, B, and C were the groupings—and went through A first, choosing just what we call the low-hanging fruit, the things that were easiest to achieve a consensus on, a model that bears some resemblance to what, of course, the opposition parties are recommending to deal with changes to the Standing Orders, namely, to look at what is easiest to agree upon first. A lot of the stuff we're dealing with in the Elections Act....
Forgive me, I just have to ask what you're doing.