If I could, I would like to go with the motion I proposed first. I don't think this is controversial, but I could be proved wrong. So perhaps I'll move it now.
The motion is:
That the Chairperson and federal members of the Independent Advisory Board for Senate Appointments be invited to appear before the Committee before the end of May 2016, to answer all questions relating to: their mandate and responsibilities, the Report of the Independent Advisory Board for Senate Appointments Transitional Process (January - March 2016) that was submitted to the Prime Minister on March 31, 2016, expenses incurred during the period of the report, and anticipated future expenses.
Mr. Chair, I'll be very brief in summarizing the rationale for this. In the past, there was resistence to inviting the members of the advisory board. Yes, it was from the Liberals. The arguments presented against doing so included the fact that they would be submitting a report and that we ought to wait for that and ought not to put them in a position of having to report to us prior to doing their report to the Prime Minister. That's no longer an issue. We now have that report.
We also have some other information. We have information that their costs were a good deal higher that I would have thought would be reasonable, although it may be that they are reasonable and I'm just not seeing what the reasons are. But you can project that, if it costs this much to appoint seven, it's going to cost about three times as much to appoint the remaining 22 vacancies, and obviously that is a concern. Thus there's a desire to find out more.
As well, there is one oddity. The advisory board indicated that it had misplaced the list of organizations it contacted. I'm having some trouble, in the age of endless electronic copies of things, understanding how that could have occurred. The advisory board thought it was important enough that it wanted to present this information, but was unable to get a complete list. So getting that from it as well would be part of what we'd want to hear, or I would certainly want to hear.
Anyway the proposal is to get the advisory board here before the end of May, and I'm reluctant to raise this issue if we wind up having another meeting where we've got six witnesses and I'd be crowding them out through discussion of this motion. So that's why I raised it today, Mr. Chair.