Let's soften this down. I do want to stay with the idea of themes. I've been a bit disappointed at times with having presentations on longer topics, as they seem to be a bit meandering. You hear one presentation from one person, and then three weeks later you hear a counterpoint to it. I would like to get consolidation around the themes if possible.
So if we're saying “that the Chair be empowered to coordinate the witnesses”—we're adding an extra day, so it's now September 15, and we're adding another 18 witnesses—and we could say “scheduling necessary generally in compliance with the following guidelines” rather than “in accordance”.
“Witnesses are to be organized to speak to the following...”, and I'm going to suggest we do two- or four-hour blocks. If it's easier for you to break the topic down into two-hour blocks, then it would be four people, and if it's the four-hour block, we can get nine in.
We have a fairly substantive list now. We've added municipalities. We've added labelling and packaging. We've added edibles, and we've added medical marijuana usage. If you want to have a stand-alone one on international considerations, we could have a stand-alone for that as well, because we can do these in two-hour or four-hour blocks.
I would suggest, “That witnesses for each topic generally be proportional to committee membership”. I know you always do a very good job of balancing the witnesses according to who has presented them. Perhaps you could continue to follow those general guidelines, but as Mr. Davies said, he might have two or three around one topic, but then none on others, so let's be respectful of where one of the committee members has an interest in a topic. I think that's it.
For “That the Minister of Health...be invited to appear before the Committee...”, let's just say “in the following week”, so that we can hear from the ministers after that intensive week. It mandates it, and it gets it going, but it does organize it in a structured way.
I'd be happy to move the motion with those amendments.