That in itself means that we are asked to come up with amendments, potentially, on this very important piece of legislation without having all of the submissions from stakeholders across the country: from individual people, from organizations or from anyone who wants to speak on this.
Normally when we're dealing with this type of situation, we would wait until we have all of those submissions in. We've just heard that we don't know when we'll be getting all of those, so to bump up the timeline even sooner for potential amendments.... Those take time. We have to send them in. They have to be properly worded. That work takes time. We do have a timeline here that we're working towards.
This is a little bit of of déjà vu, like when we had Bill C-22. We had all of those people who were sending in submissions, and we didn't even have all of them by the time we were working on it. We didn't get all of them by the deadline for when we had to come up with potential amendments, and then we were working on the clause-by-clause. That was really unreasonable.
Here we are again. It's déjà vu. We're in a situation where we're being asked to rush things along. We don't want to delay this at all, but out of respect for all of the people who have sent in submissions, it's not appropriate and it's not respectful to them to not even have all of their information to us before we can come up with potential amendments here. That's just a really unreasonable request. I question why we're here.
We have a timeline that we're working towards. If anything, we should be bumping ahead on the clause-by-clause, because even the timeline itself is really tight for when we need to have the amendments in and then we're doing the clause-by-clause. It's really only a couple of days. Right now, we have to have the amendments in, and then the clerks have to do their work, get to us and then look at clause-by-clause. It's just really unreasonable that we don't even have all of the testimony in, and we're being asked to start making those decisions that do take time.
That just seems really unreasonable, and the clerk doesn't even have an idea, as we just heard. A few days so we can properly do this, so we can properly have all the information, would be appropriate. As well, we have to remember that the agreements with the provinces are signed, so it's not like there's a delay in anything. The agreements are already signed. It's not like they're waiting for this legislation to then have the government go and start negotiating agreements with the provinces. Here we are solidifying things, and we have our due diligence to do.
I'll leave it there. I might come back, but I'll leave it there, Mr. Chair.