Procedure and House Affairs Committee on March 31st, 2014

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

If we're going to meet with the vice-chairs and the Scottish delegation, it would be at 10 a.m. and we'll make it in Centre Block.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

That's going to be your second choice.

Your first choice was—

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

It's for me to meet with liaison in the next hour instead and for you to just have your chair go. It's your call.

Vice-Chair?

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

I'm quite open to that, unless the other vice-chair is—

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Well, it's not a liaison committee meeting, but they want to meet with the chair of liaison, right? I was just going to bully in on Mr. Allison's meeting and say, “Hi, I'm here from procedure and House affairs and I'm here to help.”

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

So if it's good for one committee chair just to have the chair there, I suspect it could be good for both.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Right. We certainly have done that in the past, where just your chair has met with a visiting delegation. Usually—

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

You can let them know that if they would like to meet me in the lobby, I'm more than happy to do that as a vice-chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Okay. Great. I will schedule to meet....

It is all right with you if I meet with Mr. Allison and the Scottish delegation?

[An hon. member]

Yes.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Okay. Great. That's done.

Now, Mr. Christopherson's motion—

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Wait a minute, Chair. Sorry.

For scheduling, can we just review the finalized schedule next week? I don't want to keep you here any longer than necessary, but—

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

I don't even know if there's a Thursday in next...no, I'll go through it.

We have certainly laid out, under the schedule you now know as Monday night, Tuesday day, Tuesday night, Wednesday night, and Thursday day, the time slots. Your clerk has been absolutely amazing on the telephone in calling people to try and get them to fill those time slots.

As we suspected for the great plan of putting groups together that are like each other...and as you saw again tonight, we've had to add to a group someone who doesn't absolutely fit. We're finding that same thing. We're filling those time slots basically with what you saw and at the times that we said they would come, but I'm not going to have a meeting with one person at the end of the table, so if two cancel, I'll try to double that back and then add some more of our experts.... We have every witness who's on our list who we can possibly get here, who says yes to coming, in those time slots for the rest of this week and next week.

Are you looking for more than that? My first-born is really old and—

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Here's where I am. Unfortunately this process is adversarial, so we do have to nail everything down; it's not a cooperative effort.

I know what we're doing this week. It has been approved and supported and signed off on. But for the week after, I still don't have anything. Could we maybe have at least an update on where we are for our next meeting?

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

I could give you a list, but the vast majority of people either have not been contacted or have not said yes. So it will not look the way it looks.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Here I sit not knowing what it will look like, just like everyone else. Come on, help me; when could we look at it, just to be sure? I'd rather, if it's going to be a problem....

I don't know if we can do anything about it, but let's address it prior to the week coming rather than that day.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Right.

We're Monday night of this week. Let's give our clerk through tomorrow's meeting, and maybe on Wednesday night we'll have a fuller—

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Sure.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Okay?

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Yup. That works.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

We'll share the schedule, then we'll all...[Inaudible--Editor]...our problems.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

We're going to be reasonable. We're not looking for the sun and the moon. But you saw that we had some legitimate concerns last time, and by having a discussion we resolved them. That's all we're looking to do again.

I just want to make sure that we have had an opportunity to sign off prior to it going to print, to—

[Tom Lukiwski, Conservative, Regina—Lumsden—Lake Centre, SK]

We haven't seen anything either, David, so if we do it by Wednesday, great.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Yes.

I think we can give you a far more fulsome invite list by Wednesday—