Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I haven't been a parliamentarian as long as my colleague, but I was on this committee before, and that was the allocation. We did it by seats in Parliament. By my math, the number of Conservative witnesses that we call should be roughly about 80% of the ones the Liberals have called. We have some fluidity around that. If we've all called the same witnesses, we don't count them as anybody's witness, because they're obviously much in demand from everybody on this committee.
I would like to see that continue. This is the voice of Parliament. This a committee of Parliament. With all due respect for the representation of Parliament, if the Liberals have 16 witnesses, then the Conservatives will expect 80% of 16 to be Conservative witnesses. About one-quarter of the Conservative witnesses will be Bloc witnesses and about one-fifth will be NDP witnesses, who are brought forward from their lists. That is the representation in Parliament, and that is our democratic institution that we're representing here. I know we've all put a whole bunch of names on this list.
Mr. Chair, perhaps what we needed prior to finalization of the list of witnesses was a meeting of the subcommittee to say which of our witnesses were imperative to get on this list. We weren't involved in who of the witnesses we put on the list were selected to be heard at this committee. I think that some of those witnesses would be very important.
I'll also raise a point that a lot of witnesses appearing for a short time in these committees leave very little time for us to question the witnesses. Having six witnesses at one meeting doesn't really give us that full analysis of what they've been able to provide to us. I would suggest that we have to trim down the number of witnesses we have at these meetings. You have a good list, and hopefully you can trim from that list those who will be most important and will give us the broadest perspective. However, they do have to represent the weight of Parliament here.
If I could suggest a path forward, it would be to extend the number of witnesses we see here one more meeting or so, until we have that ratio, and in the subcommittee after this meeting, you meet with the parties to say how many can be fit into that last meeting. That will have your ratio relatively straight forward, and we can make sure that the ones each party feels are most important to be on that last list of witnesses are heard by this committee. Then, we proceed with the report.