Evidence of meeting #1 for Health in the 44th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was chair.
A recording is available from Parliament.
The Clerk
I would seek guidance on whether the committee would like a recorded division or to have it on division.
The Clerk
A recorded division has been requested by Mr. Davies.
(Amendment negatived: nays 6; yeas 5)
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Sean Casey
Mr. Thériault would like to move a second amendment.
Mr. Thériault, do you want to move it now? I gather that you want to extend the witnesses' presentations to seven minutes. Is that right?
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Sean Casey
Colleagues, we have a second suggested amendment to allow seven minutes for opening remarks by witnesses. Is there any discussion on this amendment?
NDP
Don Davies NDP Vancouver Kingsway, BC
I'd like to thank my colleague for the amendment. I have considerable sympathy for this. Our routine motions in the last Parliament allowed for up to 10 minutes per witness. It's kind of complicated. Then we adopted a special motion of the House that was moved by Ms. Rempel Garner that sent some special rules governing how we handled COVID, which was basically in force for most of the last Parliament. In that motion we had four witnesses per hour, so it made 10 minutes unworkable, because that would have been 40 minutes of the 60. We were routinely cutting that down.
I think the normal course of events or normal situation is usually to have two witnesses per hour. I think that's better, because when you have two witnesses—of course each witnessing organization can have two representatives, which could be four people sitting here—it allows you to pay proper tribute to those witnesses and give every member a chance to question them.
The other thing I'm going to mention is that sometimes this committee can have some pretty high-powered people who are highly skilled. We have epidemiologists, immunologists and experts. I've had sympathy with asking them, as Mr. Thériault said, to come here, sometimes in person, and give us the benefit of their wisdom for five minutes. It takes me five minutes to clear my throat sometimes.
Usually I think having more time makes sense; however, in this case, I'm not going to support this for the following reason. If you look at the way the time has been allocated, it's pretty elegantly done. If we have five minutes per witness, and there are two witnesses, 10 minutes is gone. Then the first round of questioning is four rounds of six minutes each, so that's 24 minutes. That takes us to 34 minutes. Then in the second round, the Conservatives have five minutes and the Liberals five, and then there's two and a half minutes and another two and a half, for another five minutes; then it's the Conservative for five minutes, the Liberals five, for a further 25 minutes to finish the second round. If you add that up, it's 59 minutes.
It rarely goes as smoothly as that, but in theory, if we start on time and we hold everybody to their time, then with the two five-minute periods, we have a chance for everybody to get through the first and second rounds. I think we should aspire to that.
I would say to Mr. Thériault that, per the previous routine motion that we just debated, if we find that five minutes is not sufficient, then I think we can always revisit our routine motions in March or April, if we want, to see how they are working.
The final thing I'll say is, as much as I want to hear from the witnesses for their five minutes, I do think that a good witness can get to the nub of the matter in five minutes. The real benefit of this committee is in our questioning. I think to maximize members' ability on this committee to ask questions that their constituents want asked; the more so the better.
Thank you.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Sean Casey
Thank you, Mr. Davies.
Are there any further interventions on the amendment?
Liberal
Marcus Powlowski Liberal Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON
I'm somewhat agnostic on most of these motions, but on this particular one, I feel inclined to support it because we have some excellent witnesses.
What we're dealing with in this committee is often fairly technical subject matter, and sometimes it takes people time to explain the issues and make their arguments. Although I greatly appreciate that we want to have the opportunity to ask questions that our constituents might be interested in, at times those may not be, at least according to the witness, the most important topics that he or she may want to talk about.
Giving people an opportunity to fully explain their perception of a problem and how they should deal with it is important and we ought to give them the time, so I feel inclined to support the motion.
Liberal
Bloc
Luc Thériault Bloc Montcalm, QC
I wanted to add that we often invite an organization. It seems that we could give that organization seven minutes rather than having all the people with the organization speak.
Sometimes, we think that we're saving time. However, when a witness doesn't cover the whole topic in their presentation, we have to ask them questions to clarify what they could have said in their presentation. This prevents us from asking them further questions.
In the Standing Committee on Health, we've been through the first, second, third and fourth waves. The people who have tracked this whole process have taken courses. Everyone may have a PhD in public health and, in a way, epidemiology at times. Of course, there are computer tools such as Zoom, but sometimes it's hard to get witnesses to leave work to come talk to us for five minutes.
When we have four people at the table, they don't all need to speak when they're from the same organization. I think that it would be good to consider seven minutes per organization or per specialist. That's why I would make some adjustments to my colleague Mr. Davies' comments on this matter.
I invite the committee members to vote, since the discretion of the chair is guaranteed in any case. We can make adjustments afterwards.
Conservative
Shelby Kramp-Neuman Conservative Hastings—Lennox and Addington, ON
I understand looking for longer than five minutes. That being said, recognizing that this committee is very technical, but also very compassionate, if there is a situation where people want or need more than five minutes, it is the will of the chair to ask for the consent of the committee. There is some flexibility that could be granted.
As a baseline, five to seven minutes is a window, but five is fine in this case.
Liberal
Adam van Koeverden Liberal Milton, ON
Thank you.
I tend to agree with the previous statement. I'd also just say that if we truly want more time for our witnesses, and we can all agree to that, we also all mutually agree to try to keep our questions short, because we've all been in meetings before where the question takes up more than half of the allotted time.
If we truly do want to hear from our witnesses, that's an accommodation that we can all agree to in good faith. I agree that five minutes is enough and that our chair is compassionate and will not necessarily cut people off, but it's almost never the case that we get through that 59-minute period in a 60-minute stretch.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Sean Casey
Yes. That's been my experience as well.
Are there any further interventions on the amendment?
Conservative
Stephen Ellis Conservative Cumberland—Colchester, NS
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
One of the other things to keep in mind, of course, is that subject matter experts often like to wax on about their particular expertise. Given that, I think that what we really want to get at here is the questions that we want answered, and not necessarily to hear what their expertise is in their minds. I would caution about just willy-nilly adding time to their speaking time.
Thank you.