Of course. Thank you.
I am not going to belabour the point. I am just saying that we were undertaking two very important studies at the time, so we could not get into the study on Bill C-270 immediately. I get that. I appreciate that. I understand that.
The first six meetings on these two studies went very well, when we listened to witnesses. That brought us to the end of the sitting before the summer break. We had an opportunity to have a meeting with the analysts to give drafting instructions. We told them to go ahead, prepare both reports and have them available to us when the session began again in September. They indeed did that and gave us very well-written reports.
But then it became frustrating, Madam Chair. I know that all of these meetings were in camera—reading through the reports, analyzing them, drafting them—so I will not give any particulars at at all about what happened there. Suffice it to say that there were five meetings on each one, and this was after our very professional analysts drafted excellent reports. Why did it take that long? I've been thinking about that a lot. This committee is mostly made up of lawyers, although not all of us are. Some of us had the advantage of never having gone to law school, but most of us are lawyers, and I suppose we like the sound of our own voice and testing out our ability to argue our points of view. Those meetings dragged on and on and on.
I think there was a second reason those meetings went so long. On the Liberal side of this table, it was a different bench depending on which topic we were discussing. When we were discussing the anti-Semitism report, we had one group of Liberals. When we were discussing the Islamophobia report, there was a different bench of Liberals. We were more or less alternating back and forth, first anti-Semitism and then Islamophobia. It became abundantly clear to us on this side of the table—