Mr. Chair, I can appreciate that there have been a lot of moving parts, certainly, with a change in membership on this committee, a change in chair and trying to make sure that we have a calendar with meaningful work to do.
Having been a member of Parliament for 14 years, and after sitting on many different committees and undertaking many studies, I find it passing strange that we would expect any public servants to come here with all of the documentation to speak to a study, which we suggested we would like to undertake, without knowing which direction we want to go in.
In my experience, when a committee determines that they want to undertake a study, they start with the public officials. They start with the departmental officials to get an understanding of the issue, to get the background and to understand what has transpired to date. We won't even know who all of the public officials are that we would want to hear from until we have that background.
I think that is truly the spirit in which we recommended that we start with public officials: to get that background to start the study. We will know from there which direction we need to go in and who else we would like to hear from, and then we can zero in on which other officials we may need to call.
I truly believe that is the spirit in which we believed we were inviting the departmental officials to appear first.