Mr. Chairman, I'm in favour of the motion for 10 minutes. I agree with you completely. It has been my experience that 10 minutes is a good amount of time for people to have a good opening statement and preserve the ability of the committee to ask questions.
Some of this, I think, requires us to think a bit further about the structure of the committee. In regard to the two-hour meetings we've had, there are generally two kinds of meetings, in my experience. There is one single two-hour meeting, or very often in fact, I think the more common practice has been to split the two hours into two separate panels.
When we split it into two separate panels of one hour each, sometimes what I find is that if you have more than two witnesses speaking for 10 minutes, it cuts into the questions too much. Let's say you have three witnesses scheduled. That would be 30 minutes. What I would like the committee to think about is that if we are going to go to two panels per meeting—I have language drafted for this—and if we do have a third witness or organization, we restrict their testimony to eight minutes.
I'll read what I have—you don't have to take this down—just so you know where I'm coming from: Where a meeting is divided into two one-hour panels, when two or fewer witnesses or organizations appear before the committee, each shall be allotted 10 minutes to make their opening statement, and when three witnesses or organizations appear before the committee, each shall be allowed eight minutes to make their opening statement.
It's only by getting 24 minutes that you can actually get that first round of questions completed in the hour.