Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I appreciate Mr. Barsalou-Duval's comments. As the mover of the original motion, I understand that I probably can't amend his amendment; however, I will speak to his amendment, and perhaps another member can formalize some of my remarks.
Having a Standing Order 106(4) meeting means that we've agreed. Certainly the signatories of the letter, including all of the Conservative members, the Bloc member and the NDP member on this committee have agreed that this was a matter that deserved an emergency meeting outside of our normal meeting time.
In keeping with that, I can agree with Mr. Barsalou-Duval that we can remove the Minister of Finance and the CEO of the Infrastructure Bank and other witnesses. We can drop that second half of the motion and keep it to the Minister of Environment and Climate Change, the Minister of Housing, Infrastructure and Communities and the Minister of Transport. These three ministers, I think, would have the most relevant testimony to give to us.
I do, however, think that a 30-day period no longer considers it an emergent issue. We're going to have provincial budgets, etc. coming forward very soon, and it's the same with the federal budget. We have only one sitting week in March. I suspect that we would all have that as a target date for a potential budget. I think that 30 days is too long to allow for this to be scheduled. Two weeks, 14 days, would be much more reasonable for something that the majority of us agree is an emergent issue.
I also think that we should give each of these ministers some time on their own to answer. Perhaps it would be a three-hour meeting with the ministers each appearing for one hour.
That would be my suggestion in response to Mr. Barsalou-Duval. We want to work together here to come up with this.
Again, this is not designed to take the place of our regular Tuesday and Thursday meetings, which occur between 11:00 and 1:00. Those will continue. We should be able to find a three-hour time slot to at least discuss this matter in the next two weeks. I think that's a reasonable compromise that allows us to continue with our current work, which I know Mr. Barsalou-Duval and Mr. Bachrach have indicated is a priority. It shouldn't be that hard to find another time slot to have a meeting with those ministers.
I know that I can't amend his amendment to my motion, but those are my comments on his amendment.