Thank you, Mr. Chair.
First of all, I echo what a number of my colleagues already said. Ms. Atwin talked about the fact that we really do need the time. We have not had a subcommittee meeting to set the agenda. We trust the chair to make sure that he uses judgment.
Sending notices out with less than 48 hours resulted in the situation we are facing. Of our five full-time members, two of them cannot attend, and now we have to go back and brief them to prepare for the next meeting that we are going to have on indigenous procurement. That is neither fair to us nor to them. Also, such a short notice does not allow us to properly prepare to ask the questions that we should be asking to ensure that the government gets the feedback it should get. If this meeting were planned way before, we didn't know about it, so that is an issue—not following the guideline in the form. We've always worked very collaboratively. We had a meeting last Thursday that got cancelled with less than 20 minutes' notice and was given to another Conservative chair to run an impromptu meeting, which caused another issue.
We are here to work—there's no question about it—with all our documents. As I said many times, we scrambled and changed our schedule to make sure that we could participate in this meeting, but not everyone in the committee can do that because there are commitments. Two of our members cannot be here today. Most of us changed...and we gladly change, given the signal. We are not asking for you to cancel the meeting. We are not saying to not have a meeting during the constituency week. All we are saying is that, if you're going to have this meeting during the constituency week, give us 48 hours.
Had we had that conversation in less than two minutes, we would be back into the vote, respecting the committee, getting the 48 hours' notice, making sure that we can get all our members here, making sure that we are properly prepared and benefiting from the testimony of the two witnesses we have—and I look forward to going back to them very quickly.
I'm not sure why our Conservative colleagues, with all due respect, are filibustering rather than sticking to the point. Let's vote. Let's make sure we get 48 hours' notice, even during the constituency week. Let's make sure we can get permanent team members here and that we really give ourselves good time to prepare so we can ask the questions that are going to help us, because their recommendations are going to go into the report.