We'll obviously be hearing from them and we obviously have no ability as a committee to influence what is going to be going on here.
We have future business. I'm not sure why we actually bother putting future business on an agenda, since you just really decide on the spur of the moment who you're going to put on as witnesses. We have nothing from the Library of Parliament with respect to who they are and what they stand for, other than a letter they sent to the Prime Minister.
As a member of the committee, I have no understanding of whether these people can effectively speak to what we're talking about, which is departmental budget freezes. I'm not really interested in their policy perspectives. I'm interested in whether, as part of this study, we can narrow down the focus to departmental budget freezes. We have a draft report, which I thought we were going to start talking about in this hour.
It strikes me that this is just a continuation of the absolutely positive lack of respect that you have for this committee. It's either yourself or the clerk.... Somebody is continuously throwing in witnesses, not allowing us to prepare. If the committee is going to continue to simply proceed on the basis of what the Liberal Party thinks might score a cheap political point, then by all means they can continue in this way, but it would certainly be nice to have the ability in advance, out of respect for the committee, to know who's coming—not at 2:30 in the afternoon the day before—and to have information from the Library of Parliament concerning who the witnesses are, why we need to sit down and hear from them, and to know in the future whether they actually can bring a perspective on the budget freeze.
I'll leave it with—