I appreciate that, Chair.
I just want to respond to Ms. Yelich, because this is exactly why we need this information. This is not new. This bill was introduced in the last Parliament. The government has had ample time, all kinds of time to come forward with information so they could bring it to this committee and say what the costing is according to them. We can then do our own work.
Mr. Godin did some research when he put the bill together. The government has access to all kinds of resources we don't have. It's not reasonable, in my view, that we come to clause-by-clause and are told that the cost is $1.5 billion. It was leaked out last week, so I asked for the information so I could determine what we should be doing on this bill. Well, it may not have been leaked out, but Mr. Lake mentioned it last week, and I immediately asked for the information on that because we want to try to get at what the cost of this bill is.
If it's so unreasonable, then the government should have done some work on this before, said what their costing of the bill was, and talked about it before we got to the clause-by-clause, so that we don't get into this kind of mess on the back-and-forth.
We have more information on Madame Deschamps' Bill C-269 where they reference back to 2004. We're using older information. If there's newer information, we should have it. It's not reasonable to come five minutes before we vote on the bill to be told what the costs are. That's too late, and that doesn't make for good committee business, in my view.