Thank you, Mr. Chair. There are a couple of things I would suggest here.
My experience in our prior year here was that there seemed to be some confusion in the minds of the witnesses regarding how much time they had. We started with 10 minutes, and then at some of our meetings we limited the presentation time to five minutes. I'm not sure that was well communicated to the witnesses. They prepared 10 minutes of remarks and then we were cutting them off at five minutes. I think whichever way we go, we need to make sure that this is clearly communicated to the witnesses so that they know what time frame they're working with.
To your comment, Mr. Chair, about the witnesses providing us with their remarks in writing, that happened at times but it sure wasn't consistent. Again, if that's the expectation, we need to make sure those people have communicated to them very clearly that their remarks are expected to be in our hands.
As a final comment, I think the five minutes for some of the witnesses we had at our committee is very limiting. I think five minutes is a really short time for some of these people, who come a long way and have very important things to say. Personally, I would be in favour of 10 minutes, but I could compromise at seven and a half or something like that and be happy with that. Again, it's not a hill to die on, but I think there's a respect factor for the witnesses we have at our committee, who have some very good things to say.