Hon. Denise Batters: Senator Tannas, I’ve just looked at this briefly myself. Is it correct that if the sort of urgent matter the government is potentially going to say some of these bills are, then it’s your paragraph 3 that states to determine whether it actually is an urgent matter, there could be a debate, but that debate could last only 20 minutes with 5-minute speeches, and with four senators maximum having the ability to speak for 5 minutes? I’m not sure if that would get to the crux of the matter. Certainly, I can understand the need to not have a lengthy, protracted debate. However, that seems to be an extremely short debate, especially for a place like the Senate.

Senator Tannas: I agree. We put something that was as short as we thought possible, with the view that we would look closely at it. It might make sense to have an hour-long debate. It might make sense to have a five-hour debate. We’re wide open to ideas, but we picked 20 minutes, so if it’s truly an emergency, it should be obvious to us. Maybe it won’t be. Maybe sometimes we’ll need more time to flesh it out. Maybe we should increase the time frame.