This is confusing to me. We passed a motion one week earlier that said we wanted to call these five witnesses to a meeting on or before the 7th, and you're saying that witnesses got back to you and said, “I can come on the 16th.” It's funny. We've had Ms. Tam come before this committee 10 times in the past three years, I would say, and she has never been unavailable.
I have to also say that we gave these witnesses one week's notice, a full week's notice for all five of these people. I understand about the ministers, by the way. For ministers, I understand that their schedules are much tighter, although I am a bit troubled by the fact that only one minister got back to us and said she couldn't make it. Did Ms. Hajdu get back and say that she could or couldn't make it? When we have bureaucrats like Mr. Stewart and Dr. Tam, my experience has been that if we ask them to appear before this committee on one week's notice, they can generally do that.
Anyway, this is water under the bridge, but I do think that this committee does need to understand what the proper protocol is going forward. I for one would have appreciated having the meeting anyway and having a report back from the chair and the clerk about what happened, because you have to remember that the motion did say that we would have this meeting or on before the seventh.
To respond to Ms. O'Connell, if we're going to get extremely denotative and literal about motions, there is nothing in that motion that says the meeting can happen after the seventh, so how the chair is taking it upon himself to unilaterally schedule the meeting for this Friday coming up when the motion clearly said that couldn't happen is also beyond me.
We need to figure out how we're going to do this. I for one would rather that we say we'd have the meeting. Then we could have determined what the best way forward would have been. It may have been to proceed with one of the witnesses or two, or to maybe pick another time to schedule.
That's my only point about this, but I think it's better if we move as a committee with these situations. I understand that these things do happen and I understand that the clerk and the chair were doing their best to carry out the point of the motion, but my suggestion is that moving forward, we have a better approach to involve the committee in this decision.