Thank you, Mr. Chair.
My sympathies to the translator who has a bad cold, it sounds like. I have been grappling with it for a couple of weeks. Hopefully you will deal with yours more quickly.
On the amendment, on the number of hours, I was trying to provide the committee with a couple of different options. Either we do separate meetings, or we just tag them on. The six meetings I was proposing were six meetings of an additional hour added to each of the existing Bill C-27 meetings. It's about six hours, which is not far off of what I think Mr. Lemire is proposing.
MP Turnbull, in response to the issue of delay, it's not a delay if it's an hour on the end of the existing meetings that we're already having on Bill C-27. I haven't proposed that we stop anything at all on Bill C-27. I agree with you, and I think we're all in agreement, that there's a need to do a thorough examination of what's been, so far, very fascinating testimony from witnesses on that important bill.
In terms of what's not clear to me, first of all, I don't think it's the same work as the ethics committee is doing. I attended just out of general interest. I wasn't invited to go. I just showed up to listen and see what the minister had to say. The line of questioning that I want to ask the minister about is very different from what the members of our side did on the ethics committee. Our work and our responsibility with regard to the estimates and the public accounting of the industry department and all of the billions of dollars it expends each year are different from the ethics committee's, so I think our look at it is a little different.
With regard to the amendment that's here, the only thing that I'm really concerned about is that I'm not clear on when we would start. I believe that we need to have the minister. I believe we need to have the chair. I believe we need to have the president of the SDTC, and I'm not sure that we can hold off to figure out what ethics is doing with the whistle-blowers. I don't even know if the whistle-blowers will agree to attend any committee, because the nature of whistle-blowing is that it's quiet and behind the scenes.
I think we can start our own work, which probably, given this timing since we're coming up to a constituency week next week, would probably not start until we return from the constituency break. I'm not suggesting that it would start this Thursday, and then we're on a riding break. It would probably be two weeks today, I guess, before we would start—at the end of that meeting.
Initially, my thought is that I would probably vote against this amendment if it means that we have to wait until the ethics committee has gone through a number of its witnesses before we do anything. I don't think we can wait. I think we need to get at it, start making the decisions and invite the minister and officials to come to the first meeting when we return from the constituency break, obviously pending his availability. He has a busy travel schedule.
I would think that we could do that, and we would do it over, let's say, six hours in six meetings for now. I think we can get what we need to get done. If there's a way to mash Mr. Lemire's motion together with ours to make sure that's clear, I just provided two options. We can do separate meetings, or we could do it at the end. I understand why it might have been a little confusing about which way to go. My personal preference is not to schedule more meetings. It's to add an hour on to each of the existing meetings we have and certainly not to substitute it for the work that we're already doing on Bill C-27.