Thank you, Mr. Chair, and welcome, folks.
As you know, Mr. Walsh, we are having considerable difficulty as parliamentarians getting at least three witnesses before this committee. We believe it's very serious. In order to do our duty to Canadians and gather information on the actions of certain people within the government--who do indeed work for ministers, and in one case the Prime Minister--we need to hear from those witnesses to do a proper inquiry and make some decisions.
As you're also aware, I believe the ministers in the government are using the excuse of ministerial responsibility to prevent the witnesses from getting here. These individuals now seem to be in a Conservative witness protection program to prevent us from getting access to them.
In any event, I have a couple of questions. You touched on this in your remarks, but what are the penalties for failing to appear before a House of Commons committee when issued a summons? I guess the irony here is that we haven't been able to serve a summons to one of the people, even though he shows up most nights in the media as the key spokesman for the government. That is Mr. Dmitri Soudas. He's out there in the media, but we can't access him to serve the summons. So that's a very difficult situation.
What are the penalties for not appearing when we issue a summons?