It's unfortunate that we're coming to that. Obviously there's going to be an attempt here to have a vote on it. It was fairly clear what we had asked for. It was what the committee had voted in favour of on the first day. People on both sides of the table wanted the minister for a separate meeting to talk about his mandate letter. Now we have the minister coming for just one meeting instead of two.
Certainly that is not the spirit in which the invitation was extended, and it's regrettable that this is what is being proposed by the government side. I would have thought the minister would be eager to appear more than once to talk to this committee about his estimates and about his mandate letter. We talked in the last meeting about having the minister for an hour and officials for an hour on the estimates, and now that's being abbreviated to one hour. We talked about having the minister on his mandate letter in a separate meeting, and it is now being proposed to take that away.
I can count and I can understand what the government side is trying to do here, but it certainly violates the spirit of the original motion and the intent to have the minister here to deal with both of those issues in separate meetings, so obviously I will be opposing that motion.