I will call the meeting to order.
This part of committee business was to discuss the work plan that was prepared by the analyst. Thank you very much to the analyst for doing this.
By way of a little explanation, we had given until April 7 for members to submit any suggestions for witnesses. Every witness suggestion that was submitted by any member of the committee is included in this work plan.
We have received correspondence from the Canadian Union of Public Employees requesting to come before the committee. Each of you received that previous to this meeting. I will put that in, in case the committee wishes to take that into consideration when looking at the work plan.
One of the things we looked at was the number of meetings. The library analysts worked backward from the date of June 10, which is when we have to report back to the House and looked at how long it takes for translation, and how long it will take to draft the report, and that left us, after this meeting, with only four meetings when we could hear from witnesses.
You will see there are bullets, and three sections for each of the dates. That's because we were putting them into three hours as opposed to two hours, which would mean the committee would sit from 5:30 to 8:30 on those four days. That's what's proposed in the work plan. That could be changed, of course, if it's the will of the committee.
The other additional piece was that we had invited the three relevant ministers to the committee. We had correspondence back and forth through the clerk and the only time and date that all three ministers are available is on May 3.
That's not a day the committee would normally sit. That's a Tuesday, from 5:30 to 7:30. We had tried to get the ministers, but the earliest would have been May 11, which is after we would give the drafting instructions to the clerk, so it wouldn't have been particularly useful.
That's why we're proposing for your consideration in this work plan one additional meeting on May 3.
Finally, the clerk has suggested that the normal practice in cases where we have multiple witnesses is that if there is the possibility of three or more witnesses on a single panel, instead of 10 minutes, we would just agree now that we would go to seven minutes per witness. We would do that because the clerk could inform the witnesses ahead of time how many minutes they would have. If it's fewer than three witnesses, they would have the 10 minutes. That's another thing that's being proposed, and I would invite a motion with respect to that while we're discussing the work plan.
That's it. I will put it out to the committee. I'll keep a speaker's list for whoever wants to comment.
Mr. Sheehan.