I'm very happy that the clerk also has it in front of him, and I'm sure that he will point out if and when I am wrong, but I think I'm pretty accurate about what's going on.
I was saying that we started the Islamophobia study on June 3, keeping in mind that the private member's bill, Bill C-270, had been with us for almost a month by then already. I'm just setting the framework to come to an understanding as to why, after six months, it is now becoming a crisis that we need to deal with this private member's bill.
On June 3, we had witnesses appear before us on the Islamophobia study. Later that week, on Thursday, June 6, again we had witnesses appear before us on the Islamophobia study, and then again the following week, on Monday, June 10, we had witnesses come here on the Islamophobia study. I remember those meetings well, and I was impressed with the testimony and the courage with which the witnesses came to us to give testimony and the heartfelt stories that we were receiving. I knew there were going to be good reports coming out of these two studies.
June 13, I believe, was the last day that we had witnesses come to us on the anti-Semitism study, so we were sort of going back and forth. I believe on June 13 we also gave instructions. I don't know if we had witnesses, but we took time to give instructions to the analysts as to what we thought was important to put into the report on anti-Semitism. Then, on June 17, the next week, it was the same thing with the Islamophobia study. We had all gone through the witness testimony, or at least I did, over the weekend. I read the testimony and highlighted what I thought was important to be put into the report. I remember at the time that we told the analysts, “You are very good at what you do, as highly educated people and great drafters. Please go ahead and go through all the testimony and put the report together as best you can, including the recommendations.”
I've been on committees where the members of the committee actually spent time writing the recommendations themselves and then submitted them to the analysts. I have seen the analysts have a hard time, on the one hand, paying respect to the drafter of the recommendations and, on the other hand, trying to make the report coherent as though it was written by one person, so I was very happy that the other committee members agreed that we would just give free rein to our analysts to work on the two reports, including writing the recommendations, over the summer and present them to us in September. Indeed, that is what happened.
Of course, those meetings are in camera when we're reviewing the reports, so there's only so much I can say about what happened at those meetings. I would just say this: As I expected, the reports came back very well written and very thorough. I remember going through them sitting in the airplane on the way here with my highlighter and my pen. I thought, “I might have said this one slightly differently, or I might have done it that way, or I might have put the paragraphs in a slightly different order,” but in the end, you know, we had delegated this task to our analysts. They did a good job, and I wanted to respect them.
Madam Chair, at that time, I could have accepted at least the narrative part of each of those reports as they were written and then, with my committee colleagues, gone into the recommendations to see if I thought there was probably going to be room there for some disagreement, for some debate and for some refining. In my opinion, that would have been one two-hour meeting on each report, but that's not what happened.
On September 23, we had set aside an in camera meeting for the Islamophobia study. Later that week, on Thursday, September 26, we had a two-hour meeting in camera to review the first draft of the anti-Semitism report. On Thursday, October 10, we had a second two-hour in camera meeting to review another draft of the Islamophobia report.
On Monday, October 21, we had a third meeting, a two-hour in camera meeting, debating the drafting of the report. On Thursday, October 24, we had—let me count here—