We may want to ask that other officials be brought with the Clerk. These are some of the folks we were thinking of: The law clerk might be advisable, and the assistants to the clerk for committees and legislative services, and for House proceedings, might both be valuable sources of information for us as well. It might be good to clarify who would be coming with them and make sure there isn't anyone left out who might be helpful to the committee. I will mention that.
Extending the number of meetings or the hours of meetings has been mentioned a couple of times. I'm certainly not opposed to that if it's necessary. Maybe it's putting the cart before the horse. We probably should establish the witnesses we want to see, how many there might be, and what areas they would be in. I guess then we could make decisions based on how much work we think we have ahead of us.
As far as the time of the meeting is concerned, being out west I guess there would be one time zone beyond mine. If it's 9 a.m for us here, it would be 8 a.m. in British Columbia. I don't see a problem with the time we're sitting at, other than, I suppose, that we all miss the daily updates from the Prime Minister, but I'm sure we have people who can brief us on what was said.
As far as the witnesses themselves are concerned, we may want to try to group them into a number of categories, because I think there are some very obvious areas that we will want to explore when we're looking at ways the House could sit differently.
I think the first one would be looking at procedural, legal and constitutional questions around that. There would be some fairly obvious witnesses who could be brought forward beyond the current officials, such as experts from days gone by, I suppose, who would have a considerable amount of expertise but are not in the game now. They would have opinions, I'm sure, about what could be possible. I'm thinking about former clerks, former speakers, people like that.
Another good grouping would be, obviously, around the very idea of feasibility. There are probably a number of experts to suggest there, who would be able to give us some thoughts about the feasibility of different things we might be considering. Another area we would want to explore would be security and whether there are any security questions around any of the possible ideas.
I think the idea that was raised a couple of times already about looking at other legislatures' experiences is a good one. I would suggest that we either seek senior officials from those jurisdictions, or if we are going to have representatives, elected officials.... The U.K. example was mentioned already. Obviously, there are some differences of opinion among their officials about what should happen there. I think government members want the idea of a virtual question period. I think there's some opposition to that from the opposition parties, or at least the main opposition party. If we're going to seek elected officials, we should probably make sure we have both perspectives represented.
There has been a lot of focus on the idea of virtual sittings. We should also have some people talk to us about other alternatives to virtual sittings. Obviously, we would look at the Public Health Agency and emergency preparedness experts. Things like that would be good there.
I have some suggestions we have put together in all these different areas, but I think those would be appropriate considerations we should be looking at. We should probably try to make sure we have witnesses to give us some thoughts and advice from all those different perspectives before we move forward with anything.