Colleagues, I'm offering this given my experience as a veteran parliamentarian at the table. Normally when motions like this go forward and requests are made of departments, it takes several weeks for these documents to be received. The committee does have the power to compel the documents if the documents aren't received in the order, or manner, or to the completion level that we want. That is a different matter. This is a request. We're not compelling; we're requesting information from Treasury Board. We are just asking. The motion seeks to ask the President of the Treasury Board to come. We cannot compel the President of the Treasury Board to come. He is also a parliamentarian, and we cannot compel a parliamentarian to come. We can compel other witnesses to come through things like subpoenas and so on if we choose to go down that path. I've been a parliamentarian for 10 years and I have never seen a committee subpoena anybody, because normally we get co-operation.
That being said, Mr. Blaikie has the motion on the floor. There doesn't appear to be a desire to withdraw the motion at this time. I just want to clarify a couple of different things here and the I'll move to Mr. Lightbound. I will not do anything until everybody has had a chance to speak to this.
There are friendly amendments, and then there are actual amendments. Sometimes committees adopt a policy of having friendly amendments. With a friendly amendment, we just kind of ask the mover of the motion if they would consider a friendly amendment and then we kind of massage, in an amoeba-like fashion, the wording of the motion and get to something that looks different from the motion that's currently before us. Or you can actually move an amendment, which is the proper way to do things.
I'm of the opinion that as parliamentarians we're all adults around this table. If we want to do it either way I'm good with that unless we get into an unwieldy situation, in which case, I would prefer to follow the rules of how we actually make amendments, and amendments to those amendments, and then vote on those amendments. If we're going to get unwieldy, then we'll go down that road.
Mr. Massé.