On the issue, then, of meeting three times a week, one thing that concerns me a bit is that we have the subcommittee meetings, they come back with a recommendation, the committee adopts the recommendation.... We have a large workload. It's the same workload as we had last week. The bills are there; there are even more bills now. Why we would back down, when three...?
I haven't been around forever, but I've been around two years. I know that three days is not uncommon or unreasonable when you have a heavy workload. We still have the same workload. I don't see why we would back down from three days to two, because we have a lot of bills on the agenda, a lot of studying to do as a committee. Committee members have said we need to take appropriate time to deal with witnesses, and so on. If we're going to do justice to some of these bills, we need to meet three times a week; otherwise we're not going to be able, in my opinion, to do them justice.
On my first point, Mr. Chair, I think as members we come out of these meetings and we vote.... I have it right in front of me: it was agreed that we would meet Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, from 3:30 to 5:30, so we all schedule accordingly. Then we have members saying we need to meet less often.
Why would we change these things midstream? What has changed?