Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I would like to thank my colleagues, Mrs. Groenewegen and Mr. Miltenberger, for bringing forward this motion. They were the mover and seconder of this motion, but we did discuss this topic in Caucus several times and it has been done with heavy heart and consideration of a whole bunch of different issues.
I will not be supporting the motion because I feel that it's not something we should be doing. I went home, talked to my constituents and a bunch of them had concerns and issues with it. The other thing is that as a member of the Board of Management here in the Legislative Assembly, we often look at agents and committees to look at what we do as an Assembly, as MLAs, and we typically take those recommendations and put them to the future Legislative Assembly. That's what the federal government is going to do with Bill 15, changing our mandate to be able to change it to five years if we want, but that's for future consideration.
I think the current Legislative Assembly should stay the course, status quo, keep that date. There are probably 50 different options. We can go early, we can go a month early, we can go three months early, we can go two months later if this motion passes. But my concept is we just stay the course, set those dates.
Mr. Miltenberger has said, since we've started this session, give us the time that we have, the hours and the days we have left in this Assembly. We should stay on that course. We have time to plan. I've heard from returning officers in my community that have concerns with those three elections happening at the same time, but I think over the next 18 months we're able to alleviate a lot of the issues that are going to happen with that, so at this time I cannot support the motion. Thank you.