Thanks, Madam Chair. I guess I have a few comments I want to make with my remaining three minutes. I want to commend the Minister and my colleagues in Cabinet for bringing this forward. I know, early on during the pandemic, I actually sent an email to the Minister saying, "Geez, we're going to be sitting soon. Is there any legislative changes that we should look at making in terms of COVID response and planning and recovery and so on?" This, eventually, ended up on our desks.

This is something that other jurisdictions have done, so this is not something terribly unusual. Other jurisdictions in southern Canada have, perhaps, done it in different ways and so on. I am prepared to support this. I want to commend the Minister and her staff for working with us as Regular MLAs to make some important improvements to this bill and changes. There's a purpose section in here now that sort of better explains and maybe restricts the ways in which the authority can be exercised.

Certainly, the Regular MLAs, we worked hard to make sure that some specific pieces of legislation were exempted or outside the scope of this including access to information, the Health Information Act, and the Legislative Assembly and Executive Council Act itself, and that the act itself cannot be used in a way that would allow Cabinet to unilaterally extend things.

I'm happy to have worked with Cabinet on this, and it is a collective effort. It is very unusual times, and we don't want to inconvenience our residents with deadlines running out. We want to provide for business continuity. I am prepared to support this with the important improvements that Regular MLAs made.

The process that we're going through with this bill is quite extraordinary as well. Normally, bills go off to standing committee where they can be studied. We take public input, and Regular MLAs can then propose changes, try to work with our Cabinet colleagues to improve bills based on public comment and our own advice, and so on. That is not the process that is being used for this bill, but I think it's a reflection of the extraordinary times that we are in and the compressed time frame of this sitting and so on. It is not the usual process that we are going through, but I want to assure Members of the public that it is time limited, that we have worked with Cabinet to put some reasonable limitations in here. Based on that, I am prepared to support the bill. Thanks, Madam Chair.