First of all, I would just like to say thank you to all my colleagues, particularly to Mr. Lake and my Conservative colleagues. I appreciate the compromise they've made and that everybody has made.
At this point, with that clarification, I'm prepared to just trust in the process and to trust in Mr. Chair and Mr. Clerk. Nobody is going to be—at least speaking for myself I'm not going to be—looking for mathematical certainty to the second decimal point. This is a rough approximation and as long as everybody is working in good faith toward that number, I'm not going to sweat a witness here and there.
We're talking about a first study. I think maybe the first two are probably going to have six meetings; this is what I'm anticipating. If you're looking at 24 witnesses—four witnesses per meeting, that's 24—it's going to work out very well. One-third is eight so it will be eight witnesses for the Conservatives and eight for the Liberals, and the remainder will be split four and four for the Bloc and the NDP.
It will work for three meetings when there are 12. It will be four, four, two and two. There's a problem if we only have two meetings, but I think you've clarified that very generously, Mike. I appreciate that.
If there's one meeting that we have on something and it turns out that it's two Liberal witnesses and two Conservatives, if that's how it is, I'm okay with that. As long as we do our best to roughly approximate this number, for my part, again, I'm not going to be sweating supreme accuracy for this.