Thank you, Madam Chair.
I appreciate the motion on the floor, and I will be supporting it. We're being put in a situation where this committee has an unreasonably rushed timeline to look at legislation. If we agree to study the legislation—meaning the sections from CUSMA that have been sent to our committee—realistically speaking, from today onwards we have two business days to prepare questions, get witnesses from across the country potentially, and then have only two hours for deliberation on the Tuesday. I think this motion giving more time on the Monday is reasonable, although it is still an extremely unrealistic timeline for us to meet.
It's our duty as parliamentarians to examine legislation, and this timeline—even with the proposed motion—makes it really challenging for us to properly fulfill our duties and to fulfill our obligations in the House as defined. I say this especially when we look back at the tone set by the government in the throne speech, where there was a lot of conversation about the spirit of collaboration and working together. One of the things the Prime Minister stated in the House of Commons was the about the need for collaboration in the House and to work together, and mandate letters also mention the need for meaningful engagement with the government caucus and opposition members of Parliament. I'm not trying to delay things here and I know that we need to move forward, but again, recognizing that it's our duty to think deeply and look at legislation closely, the calls of this government to hurry this up and move it along by giving us two business days with a two-hour meeting are unrealistic.
This does allow more opportunity for us to hear from witnesses, but still, it's a very unreasonable deadline. We have to go back to why we're in this situation, where our trading partners have had more time on this. The government here did not bring CUSMA to first reading until January 29, so now we're in this position of having to hurry it up. It's important for us to do our due diligence, in particular since the government has not provided economic impact analysis. This puts us in a really difficult position, with a very tight timeline. This is not good governance; it's flawed and I don't believe we're properly fulfilling our duties, but we're doing the best we can, based on the timeline that has been imposed on us.
That's where we are.
Thank you.