Great. Thank you, Madam Chair. I appreciate the opportunity to clarify a little bit. Some Members have already asked me, what was the intent of the Standing Committee on Priorities and Planning to read this report into the House? What merit will it perform? I think it says it and summarizes it best: the process itself, the reviewing process and the implementation of these 10 devolution bills was very unusual. To accept mirror legislation typically isn't something of a norm. A lot of the processes that normally go into bill legislations - consultation, line-by-line, clause-by-clause - were somewhat triturated for ease of providing these acts in a timely fashion for a deadline date.
Committee felt that because there were some constraints by the committee and we also knew there were some constraints by the government that were beyond our control, as was indicated inside the report. So it was important for Members to make sure that that was clear and concise and transparent for the public to understand that we were under a little bit of a different constraint than normal, and that we had very challenging limits to work towards and trying to get April 1st as the agenda deadline for the devolution implementation.
So we did our best to scrutinize the bills and to seek as much public input to, what we said, the greatest extent possible, and we did get a number of submissions. A number of Members were able to gather, collect. All this information was meant as setting the expectation of what is to move on a forward basis. It was important for Members to make sure that point was valid and brought forward, and hopefully by this whole exercise that we actually are creating a baseline of information so that whether we review this within the life of the 17th Assembly or we're doing this for ease and operation of Members for the 18th Assembly, we felt it was our due diligence to provide that type of information, that type of feedback at the moment, the moment when these bills came into our being that these bills came into, I guess, our jurisdiction for review, and we felt that this was the best course of action to undertake, given the very unique circumstances of the House. Thank you, Madam Chair.