Mr. Chair, with respect, it becomes a hard and fast rule. Mr. Cannis has been an excellent chair, and you've been an excellent chair, but I have Mr. Harris, who's very shrewd—I won't use the word “scheming” that he used against me—a very shrewd parliamentarian. Mr. Harris will point to that and say, well, Mr. Chair, we adopted as a committee a routine motion at the beginning of this Parliament that stated that the chair is authorized to put forward consideration until 15 minutes prior to the adjournment time. That means that in the case of any motion coming forward, you're authorized to bring it up there, and that becomes a rule.
Then, if I were a shrewd member of the government—and Mr. Harris certainly is—15 minutes is easy to talk out. This means essentially that we will not have sufficient time to debate any opposition motion, and I would even say any government motion, because it will be easy to talk out the clock.
That's my problem with this. Not only do I not believe we need this; I think it'll be harmful to our work as a committee, because it becomes a hard and fast rule that any shrewd parliamentarian will point to. If today we've adopted this routine motion, it becomes a hard and fast fixed motion through the entire 40th Parliament. It will be detrimental to our work.