Oh, yes. This is it:
e) The Committee meet outside the regular meeting hours as necessary to complete the study pursuant to paragraph (d).
Wow. Even if you didn't have any competing agenda items for this committee, you'd have a lot of difficulty, as I've suggested, with that deadline. In fact I'll state baldly that the deadline is simply incompatible. I'm not so sure the deadline would have been incompatible if we'd started on the first day Parliament came back and said that we were going to produce a report on the last day before Parliament rose, with a series of recommendations to be given to the next Parliament, because the subject matter is so vast. It is an omnibus rewriting of everything.
It is like creating a new law code. It is the code of Justinian for the Parliament of Canada. Justinian, the Roman emperor, sent out four great scholars, whose names I can't remember—I think one was Trebonius—to different parts of the empire to gather up the best of the laws they could find so that they could produce a single code. They went off and did their work, and the stuff survives. Their reports and his code were produced, but it took decades. It was a long, slow process to codify everything in one single place.
The Criminal Code is a similar sort of thing. It's a codex, a single place where all the criminal laws are connected. We developed that. It was a project of the Canadian Parliament to collect all of the different criminal sanctions and various laws and put them in one spot, the logic being—the sound logic, I think—that it was better to have one place where all the criminal laws were codified. Then nothing outside of that could be subject to criminal sanction. It was for greater certainty and the greater liberty of individuals. That theme has been a consistent part of our parliamentary heritage and our history.
That took place, if I am not mistaken, in the 1890s, but it was not the work of a year, or even of a single Parliament. It was a vast undertaking. I submit that if we approach this as an omnibus measure, then the same problems arise. That's assuming, as I say, that we don't have alternative draws on our attention. But that is not the case.
The Minister of Democratic Institutions met with us just last week. In fact I believe she met with us on March 9, the day before the discussion paper came out and the day before Mr. Simms submitted his motion.
I believe, Scott, you were there at that meeting.