Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. We'll call to order the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics. This is meeting number three.
We're convened today to continue the work of our last meeting, which was putting in place the routine motions, the orders, the bylaws under which we'll conduct ourselves as a committee.
When we adjourned last Thursday, we were still debating not a routine motion but a motion put forward by the government members of the committee, which dealt with how independent members or members of smaller parties will be treated at the committee and the status they will have should they seek to move amendments to legislation.
We were in the middle of the debate on this motion. When we left off, Mr. Mathieu Ravignat had the floor. I'll be giving the floor to Mr. Ravignat and pointing out that the next speaker on the speaking list, as it was left last Thursday, is Mr. Scott Andrews.
Scott, you'll be up after Mathieu. After that will be Charmaine Borg and then Mr. Charlie Angus.
I should observe that this has become a matter of perhaps a disproportionate amount of interest with the country watching. Some of us have had e-mails coming in to our offices. I don't know about my colleagues, but I received over 16,000 e-mails in an eight-hour period from people who are paying attention to what's going on with these proceedings. We may want to discuss as a committee how we're going to deal with that sort of inundation of correspondence in the future. It ends up having a material effect on our ability to serve our constituents if our MP e-mail accounts are rendered virtually useless and inoperable by virtue of the sheer preponderance of e-mails coming in. I think that's a discussion we should have as a committee, perhaps when we go in camera, and we should refer the matter to the Speaker for the Speaker's consideration on how we deal with that particular tactic.
That being said, Mr. Ravignat, you have the floor.