Perhaps I should just intervene for a second and tell the rest of the committee members that I have been approached in the past couple of weeks by members of the committee—by Mr. Trost, by Mr. McGuinty, by Mr. Tonks—about possible suggestions and about the modus operandi of the committee. Let me just share that with you--if that's all right with you, Mr. McGuinty, so that I'm not telling stories out of school.
Basically, because of the timing, here we are into May. We have a new committee with new members. There are various levels of expertise and background with regard to the subject matters. It has been suggested by members from the opposition and from the government that we might just take these six weeks—perhaps even less than that, four weeks—to get up to speed on a broad area of subjects with regard to natural resources.
That might include, say, a briefing from the department, an overview of what the department does, what their position is. For example, as Mr. Cullen suggested, could we have an idea of what the department's agenda might be in the next year, or the proposals, that type of thing? We might also invite witnesses to really not do anything more than educate us, bring us up to date, tell us about their industry, tell us about the oil and gas industry, about mining, about forestry industries, just broadly. I've had this suggestion from a couple of members.
In the course of that discussion, I got a book that was produced by a non-profit energy group, sort of a cross-industry group. The book is used as a primer in some of the schools across the country. It just gives a general idea of what natural resources are in the country and what issues might come up. I ordered a bunch of them, and I would be happy to distribute them today, in that vein. I just mention that as a tangent to this discussion.
I wasn't able to locate copies of this little book in French, but I do have a CD in French for those who would like that as well.
So that gives you a general sense in terms of opening the discussion about where this committee wants to go. With regard to the agenda and what we were just dealing with, we had opened the discussion by asking if we wanted to have a steering committee to set the agenda. Or maybe that's premature.
Let's open it back up to discussion. What do members see as our committee's role? Where do we want to take this thing, and what do we want to do as a committee over the next year, particularly until, say, the summer break?
We have an invitation from Energy Dialogue Group, which apparently is a consensus of electrical, oil and gas, and other industries across the country. They have what they call “summer school”. This was done last summer, and it involved two days of bringing people up to speed, in a non-partisan way, on natural resources in Canada. That's something else I'd like the committee to think about, and we can discuss it.
Mr. Trost, maybe you want to explain. You did it last year for a group of members of Parliament. What went on?