I'm sorry, I always forget where you have to click to raise your hand.
Madam Chair, I am a little unhappy with the way we are doing this. I consider this bill to be very important. I feel all members of the committee have worked very hard on this bill over the last few days. Certainly, several of us in my office worked on it, and I'm sure the same is true for the other members. Similarly, I am sure that the people who submitted briefs or came to testify also spent many hours preparing and sending them to us. As we all know, most of these briefs were sent to us yesterday and today. We were still receiving some this morning. My assistant has counted 246 briefs. We have not been able to read all of them. We have read about 50 of them and we are still working on them. Does that mean that, even though we have invited hundreds of people to submit their views on this bill, we will not even hear them all?
I know it's not bad faith on the part of anyone on this committee, but it still shows a lack of respect for those individuals. No one has disrespected the witnesses directly, but if we do a clause-by-clause study of the bill and vote on it this morning before we have even read all the briefs, that will be a form of disrespect. Unless someone has an exceptional gift, which I would love for them to pass on to me, I'm sure none of us has read all of the 246 briefs we received.
That was a long preamble on my part, Madam Chair. In a word, I propose that we give ourselves time to look at all of these briefs. We may find other proposals for amendments, because that's actually what this process is all about. When people write to us and tell us what they think, sometimes we respectfully tell them that we disagree and that we will not be acting on their proposals, but sometimes—