Thank you very much, Mr. Chair/Mr. Speaker.
I am confused about which title to use.
I have a couple of things. First, thank you for the work done to date. This is a project that I think is near and dear to the hearts of all parliamentarians, but really Canadians. It is the symbol of our democracy in this country and it's not only an enormous expenditure of money, but this building represents a critical piece of heritage that I think all Canadians are invested in.
On that basis the consultation that is going to take place is exceptionally important, not only for the stakeholders who are going to be using the building—members of Parliament, staff, House officials, media and the public—but also, I think, because that heritage represents something important to people who never step foot in the building. We shouldn't lose sight of that.
When we're trying to think about how it functions for the purposes of our work, what that heritage means to the nation, I think, is incredibly important and, therefore, I have particular opinions. I won't go into them for long, but my viewpoint is that not a lot should be changed, and we have to try to work within the existing heritage.
I think a body does need to be created. A couple of things concern me on that. One is that we don't want to have two parallel processes with PROC and BOIE where we have two decision-making bodies where there is confusion.
I think the solution to that...and I am not suggesting we do it today, but I think we are probably going to need to do it very soon, is to have have a meeting of the Board of Internal Economy in the week that we're back to make sure that we get this issue done.
When you start working back in those timelines, I'm hearing that we have to have a decision on the size of the chamber before we leave for the summer. If you think about our setting up the committee and that committee having its meetings and hearing from people, then it has to take that decision to BOIE. We don't have a very long timeline, even if you triage those decisions on the basis that they need to be made on a prioritized basis.
I think one of the answers could be to have a committee that's populated with members of PROC and if there are people from BOIE who want to be on it, fine. We'll have to talk about its size and composition, but it would report back to this body, as the decision-making body. There would have to be a body that makes recommendations as opposed to just hearing input, because my fear would be that they would have all of these consultations and then we'd just get data dumped back at BOIE and we'd be left trying to thrash out all of this and we simply don't have the time or enough meetings to be able to do that work.
It would be my hope that the body would make recommendations to BOIE. It could be composed of members of PROC; therefore we'd have one decision-making channel. But given the timelines involved—and maybe we could flesh those out—am I correct in stating that without incurring costs and significant delays, we need to make a decision on the size of the chamber before we leave in June?