Well, let's just set that aside for the moment. That would then have us.... I may return to that. I reserve the right to return.
However, that would have had us meeting today and Thursday as our regular meetings. There was nothing special about this. This is our usual time. The House is sitting. It's in order.
There are some people who had it in their minds that they were going to be out of here early, and that's up to them and their minds, but the fact is that as long as the House is sitting, we meet. So I'm a little unclear as to why we wouldn't be proceeding with the agenda today that we had set last week, such as dealing with witnesses for the private member's bill. We were going to have two witnesses, and we were going to do the Bezan report, as we wanted to clean that up before we rose for the summer.
Yet all of a sudden, a letter signed by five members of the committee has you suggesting that “we're here because of this”, yet it seems to me that this is a regular meeting, in its regular place, and we already had an agenda that we set up at a previous regular meeting. I don't understand how we went from what we had planned to be done at a regularly scheduled meeting, how it's all set aside, and suddenly the business of five members is now the order of the day.
I raise that for this reason, Chair. If this stands as it is right now, then what it says is that any time five members or more don't like the agenda of a meeting that's coming up, all they have to do is sign this and make what is a regular meeting a special meeting. Then the agenda of the special meeting supersedes the agenda of the regularly scheduled meeting, which I don't think is your intention, because that just creates all kinds of chaos and havoc.
Maybe at this point, Chair, you could just help me understand how it is that we're where we are today and why we're not doing the regularly scheduled business of the committee.