Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you, Minister.
I think it's important to underline where the debate on this bill is in this Parliament. Nobody in any of the opposition parties, I think, disputes the urgency of the humanitarian crisis or the need for legislative action. In fact, the issue has been the significant delays from the government side in moving this forward, with concerns about whether the regime will work effectively for the organizations that need to use it.
At the time Kabul was falling, your government, instead of attending to the situation, was calling an election. We had an Afghanistan committee that called for these changes a year ago. We haven't seen anything on it until now. We had a motion at the foreign affairs committee, which I moved in the fall, and a second motion at the foreign affairs committee earlier in the spring.
You're going to have strong agreement that action is required and, I think, in principle with the legislation moving forward. I wish the government had acted earlier, and I remain concerned about the effectiveness and the efficiency of the regime in helping organizations get the aid to where it needs to go.
I want to ask specifically how long you expect it to take to approve these kinds of applications. Can we expect that all of the enabling regulations and processes will be in place to allow humanitarian organizations to rapidly deliver the aid that's needed once this legislation passes? In particular, by the time we come near another winter in Afghanistan, will the legislation not only be passed but have its exceptions granted so that it can be used?