As parliamentary tradition would dictate, we of course support the ministers appearing in front of the committee. It's an important and integral part of the accountability mechanisms of Parliament. Our challenge is that we have about 20 meetings before we rise for the summer. In splitting out the estimates, splitting out the one-hour meetings and splitting out the mandate letters—plus, officials usually follow on after ministers are here so that we can ask more detailed questions about issues that arise—my worry would be that we would take up all the time talking to ministers and no time in doing the studies and the work we need to process legislation and get our reports done.
I was wondering if it would be possible to have a typical process of doing this, which would be to combine the ministers' mandate letters and the estimates—because they're related—and have two at a time appear, with the staff to follow for the subsequent hour. Then we'd go to the next two at the next meeting and have the staff appear. We would get all four here. It's hard to get four ministers to line up. Their schedules, even in a minority Parliament, are really tough, especially when we meet on Tuesday afternoons and that's when cabinet is.
We can try to get it in such a way that we have two ministers with estimates and mandate letters, then follow that hour with the senior staff so we can drill down deeper into the departments, and then repeat that same format for the other two ministers. I'll leave it to the committee to decide how we pair them, but that's more likely to be driven by the ministers' schedules than our capacity to tell them when to show up.
We of course support the ministers coming here for that exploration. We just think it's more efficient to link them and to have staff follow up as well.