Thank you, Chair.
If I could speak on the amendment, I was just thinking this through, and I guess there are a couple of thoughts.
I think it is valuable to begin this work as soon as possible. I'm not proposing a study completed by the end of June. I agree that there are studies happening now on bills like Bill C-5 with a breakneck pace that's done sometimes. I think in this case that we can find a middle path that recognizes the urgency of it but doesn't say that we're going to do it all this week.
Thinking about what would need to unfold if we give ourselves a week to 10 days to identify witnesses, and then there's a period of a week to 10 days to invite and to schedule those witnesses, we would still be able to do these hearings, I think, fairly easily before the end of July.
I don't think that our having a hearing is, on its own, going to get all of these students back to work. However, I do think that we can, through a process of these hearings, hear ideas and magnify concepts that could be implemented by the government.
The numbers are pretty significant. I know that the minister and others have talked about the federally funded summer jobs program within that. We have over two million post-secondary students in this country. One in five returning students is struggling to find a job. This is clearly orders of magnitude beyond what has been proposed so far.
The other issue with the September 30 date is that I don't think it would be realistic to pack all these hearings into the last two weeks of September, if that was the idea. We're probably still with that, talking about some summer hearings anyway. Maybe we could say there could be five hearings before August 30, with the understanding that we're going to space them out. I would like to start early and think about how we can space them out. Maybe there are some witnesses who are ready to present to us right away and some who are ready to present later on. We can talk about whether the number of meetings is right as well.
I do think that doing some work on this, starting earlier in the summer and continuing, would make the most sense. I want to see if we can meet in the middle on a timeline.