Thank you, Mr. Chair. I can give you a quick rundown of our process right now.
Right now, when we contact the witnesses, we indicate to them what equipment they will need for the meeting. The committee is also authorized to reimburse up to $75 Canadian per witness for the required headsets. Obviously, it's not possible for some of the witnesses, depending on where they are, to get those headsets. If they're in Canada, we send the headsets to them directly. Unfortunately, we don't have the ability to courier things worldwide in a timely fashion right now, partly because of COVID and partly because of unreliable mail services in certain countries.
We do a test with the witnesses. They tune in with our multimedia team. The multimedia team makes sure they have the most recent version of Zoom so that they have access to the interpretation. They also make sure their audio quality is sufficient. If it's not sufficient, they tell them how to improve it. Witnesses sometimes will improve it, and sometimes they won't. There's nothing we can do from our end to force them to do this. The problem we have is that, as the clerk, I'm not empowered to tell them that their audio quality is not good enough and that they cannot appear. That is not a decision that I, multimedia or the interpreters can make.
We have that process in place. We have a very fulsome discussion with the witnesses before they come before the committee, but unfortunately it sometimes seems to happen all in one meeting that witnesses don't have sufficient quality.
The whips are very aware. We're working on our communications. We're trying to streamline everything. We have a project now where if witnesses don't test we'll call them and ask them very nicely to please test or it could affect their testimony, but all of these things are dependent on the witnesses doing what is required of them.