It's always useful to allow a little bit of venting, and I think members have had an opportunity to express themselves. All honourable members are accountable for their actions, and whether there's any remediation to be done as a consequence of those, they'll have to make those decisions and be judged by and accountable to others.
We're going to adjourn shortly, but about tomorrow, so members can properly prepare, I want to confirm to you that we will have Madame Chantal Proulx and Mr. Beardall. Madame Proulx is the deputy public prosecutor, and Mr. Beardall is the senior legal counsel for the public prosecutor. They will be the first two witnesses. I've forgotten who proposed them. Once the members have discharged all the questions to the public prosecutor's personnel, they will be excused.
Mr. Marc Mayrand, the Chief Electoral Officer, will be appearing immediately afterwards. He assured me he will be here by 10:30, so if tomorrow's first session is short he will be available right away. So we're forgetting about the arbitrary timing of appearance.
He has advised me that he has no statements to make. He'll be here to answer any questions that may have arisen as a consequence of all the other witnesses or matters and that members would like to pursue with him. He'll be available for the balance of questioning.
Then we'll suspend. We'll reconvene at an appropriate time to have a discussion on the last matter of future meetings and witnesses. I encourage members to give some careful thought to that. We will wait to hear about circumstances where it was determined that a summons, for instance, was served in adequate time for them to appear but was ignored. The chair will need some direction on whether or not the committee would like to do anything further.
It is my personal opinion that there was a great rush. With 79 proposed witnesses, there was a flurry of activity going on, and I fully expected there would be some glitches. I apologize for that. I'm going to ask for a lot more time to prepare to make sure there's proper notice and contact, etc. We did have some problems. I learned a lot from this and will undertake to make sure we have sufficient time so that proposed witnesses have the opportunity to appear when it is most convenient to them.
I don't think anyone here is interested in doing anything but bringing witnesses to help us with our work--certainly not intimidating or doing anything other than operating a healthy, informed committee on a serious matter.
There is a speakers list.