Madame Bourgeois, we are passing out a little brief--I guess it's almost like the minutes--that we went through on the steering committee. We just want to make sure you have that and everyone gets a look at it before we go into the study on Haiti.
Before we get to the study on Haiti, there's some housekeeping we want to take care of. We don't want to cut out a lot of time on the Haiti draft report. If you have any questions on what the steering committee discussed last week, you have the minutes before you. We also need a motion to pass the budget. It gives us the opportunity to bring in witnesses and proceed with our study this fall.
So you see the steering committee report in front of you. We're still trying to make some changes to our meetings. The committee will meet on Tuesdays rather than Mondays commencing October 17, 2006. That's one of the issues. We will continue our study on democratic development. We will move forward with the plan to travel to the Nordic countries from October 7 to 14.
We can come back to any of these points. I want to encourage all members of this committee to speak to their whips.
The purpose of this afternoon's meeting is to discuss the draft report on Haiti; that the Hon. Gordon O'Connor, Minister of National Defence, be invited before the committee on September 27, 2006, in regard to Afghanistan; that the committee set aside some time immediately after the break in October--that's after our travel week in October--to look at the situation in Afghanistan; that the clerk investigate the possibility of holding periodic joint meetings with the Standing Committee on National Defence to receive updates from the department concerning ongoing activities in Afghanistan; and that the committee invite witnesses to appear on the study of democratic development, beginning with the Minister of Foreign Affairs on September 27.
Point seven is that a proposed budget--that's what we've already talked about--of $35,000 be adopted so we can send it forward to the Liaison Committee; and that the committee invite the Minister of Foreign Affairs and the Minister of International Cooperation to appear on its study of the estimates in the first week of November. That timeline is pretty well confined to the end of October, the first part of November. It has to be reported back to the House.
Mr. Van Loan.