It may be longer, and that's okay. We're all paid a fairly good salary to do the job of parliamentarian, and I'm certainly committed to staying here in order to carry on and do that.
As I was saying, the committee does have wide-ranging business that it could be addressing during this time, and I do not believe we can allow a private member's bill to subsume the work of the committee in totality, which is basically what this would do. Actually, we had an agreement with the government to carry on with the study on temporary resident visas, which I know I've already mentioned, but I will go on to say that was for the very reason that we as a committee were not convened for a number of meetings and there was nothing for us to do, because everybody was waiting for this concurrence motion to take place.
That's why we kept waiting, but because the concurrence motion never actually got moved in the House, we were actually able to study. If we would allow this bill to go through its natural timelines, then I think we could actually get on with some pretty serious work that lies ahead of us, and allow the private member's bill to go to the House to be debated and to be voted upon, which is what private members would want. They would want their bill to be in the House, in the limelight of the world in the House of Commons, televised—everybody gets to hear their debate from both the opposition and from the government. Then we carry on.
I believe that this particular bill has gone through the cycle with the committee and is getting very close to missing those timelines. Of course, we do sit until Friday—I believe it's Friday at the end of the day—and if we are here until then, we are certainly prepared to carry on to argue that the committee should really be able to do the work of the committee now and move on to some other issues.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.