I agree with my honourable colleague. An official may claim to be unavailable to appear before the committee, or provide some other excuse. In these types of cases, under this motion, you will have the power to require the witness to appear before the committee.
I agree with my colleague. In your time as chair, Mr. Chair, there have been witnesses who have indicated that they were not available to appear or that they didn't want to appear. This empowers you to use the power that you have, when so authorized by the committee, to issue a summons for a witness.
If we don't adopt this summons in the motion, if we don't adopt this language in the motion, we are going to have to have another meeting to move a motion to empower you to summons a witness. As you said at the outset of this meeting, we're here discussing the procedure and the mechanics of how this study will unfold. This gives you the option of issuing a summons so that we don't have to go through this process again at some future date because the witness has decided they don't want to appear.
Often departmental officials will say that the DSO is not going to appear but the president of PHAC is going to appear in their place. We don't want that. We have enumerated a list of seven departmental witnesses whom we would like to hear from. We want to hear from each and every one of those witnesses, and we don't want to hear from another witness in lieu of one of those witnesses, so this motion makes it clear that you are empowered to invite those witnesses. If they don't want to appear, you are empowered by the committee to issue a summons.