Just as an overview, all legislation goes to a committee once it's passed its second reading in the House of Commons. This allows members to review the legislation, regardless of whether it's a justice committee, a finance committee, a natural resources committee, an environment committee. The committees are structured by the function that the legislation relates to.
The other important function of all committees is—and we were doing it earlier today, actually—to review the budget aspects of the department that reports to this committee. Today we had the Minister of Justice come in to defend his spending for the next year.
I would say that the committees only meet four hours a week, two hours at a time, but there's lots of preparation time prior to each meeting, and many members have more than one committee to go to.
Blaine.