As the chair, let me just.... I can't help it. We're lawyers here, right?
On the sponsor appearing first, page 764 of House of Commons Procedure and Practice, third edition, reads:
Ordinarily the first witness to appear before the committee is either the sponsor of the bill, the Minister responsible for it or the Minister's Parliamentary Secretary.
Quite clearly, we cannot compel.... I have no intention of compelling anybody in this place to do what they don't want to do, but that is the norm. On your list of witnesses, as long as I've been here, even when I was a member on other committees or even this one, I never went to the chair to give them their witnesses. Everything always flows through the clerk. In fact, the chair doesn't see them until everybody else sees them.
That is just to clarify, because you wouldn't want to say anything about me that I'm not going to clarify.