Thanks, Chair.
There have been incidents--two types I can think of. One occurs when there is something going on and there are a whole lot of people rushing out and we don't want to just dismiss the meeting. Let's say everybody is having an emergency caucus meeting, but we have all these witnesses we've brought in from who knows where.
This is a fail-safe, that's all. It's a last-ditch effort to prevent the money and the time spent to arrange the meeting from being lost. The reason it's one member of the opposition is, again, just to prevent government members from a situation where all the opposition is gone and the meeting is happening without anyone knowing it. As we do in all places, it's a check and balance, just to make sure we don't have that.
As for the only other time it's happened, there was a caucus in a meeting, the largest caucus at that meeting, that had reasons to boycott the meeting. It happened at the last minute. It's only happened once that I can recall, but that left us with half the committee. If we'd had a few people away for any reason, we'd have lost the day again. This allows a caucus to make the political statement they want by not being here and protesting something of substance or procedure, but again, it still allows the committee to not lose all that time and money. That's what it's really all about.
As you know, the public watches people coming here. People spend a lot of time making their presentations. They bring staff and support people. They come here, and then, through no fault of their own, the whole bloody committee dissolves in front of them all of a sudden and it's over. At best, they get to redo the whole thing, often on the taxpayer's dime.
This just allows the committee, in those circumstances.... No decisions can be made. It doesn't matter whether we're here or not, because everything that happens will then be on the Hansard, available to everyone. It lets us save face, quite frankly, as a committee and as a Parliament, when we spend money and time to bring people in as witnesses. It's pretty innocuous.