I think there were two different schools of thought on the rushed nature of this. This potentially satisfies one of those schools of thought. I might suggest a bit of a change, and maybe it's just a flexibility thing or whatever it might be. I like the way our clerk has laid out what the effects of this would be.
The idea is that we would get the rest of June essentially to finish with witnesses or whatever else we need to hear. Then, perhaps, rather than prescribing an exact date, we could simply say that following the blackout—I forget the period of time that we're blacked out for—based on the advice of our clerk and our analyst based on where they are at with things, we would pick up to write it in either a report or an interim report, whatever the case might be.
I would assume that's only going to take a couple of meetings, but if it takes three or four meetings or whatever, then so be it. I don't think there's a huge panic over July 10 rather than July 15 or something, or that some major catastrophic occurrence would happen if it was an extra few days.
Maybe rather than extending to a specific date, we could simply say that we will continue to hear from witnesses until June 25 or whatever it was, and then, following the blackout period, the committee would recommence to finalize the report, essentially. That way we wouldn't be.... It would basically have the same effect, other than not putting ourselves under the gun where we end up with a 12-hour-long meeting again or something, if it's required. One would hope not, of course, but....
That's one thing.
The second would be that I still don't think it addresses the concern that was raised by Mr. Duncan. I don't believe he is here now, but I certainly sympathize with that school of thought, which is essentially that what we're doing is making recommendations in June, or, in this case, maybe early July, for something that is then two and a half months off. With the way the situation evolves, we may find that we want to consider an interim report and then come back and revisit it for some discussion late in August or the first week of September to address where we are at that point and potentially make new recommendations, change existing ones, drop some of them or whatever the case may be. It really doesn't address that.
I don't know that we have to have a motion to do that. I don't know how that needs to be done, but those would be my two thoughts. We can do the first part of it in that manner. Then for the second part, I don't know what to suggest in terms of how to address that, but we probably should have a provision. Probably the easiest thing to do is to indicate that this would be an interim report and we would have a chance to revisit it when the time is appropriate, whether that is in late August or early September, whatever it might be.
