Thank you very much, Madam Clerk, for conducting the elections.
Thank you to my mover and to everyone else for the support.
I want to welcome everyone to the Standing Committee on Public Accounts. We do have with us nine returning members, including me, but we have three new members.
To the new members--Josée, Stéphane, Earl--I want to welcome you. I think you will find it a rewarding committee. It is different from any other committee in the House of Commons. We concentrate on the expenditure of public money rather than on policy issues. Of course, most other committees spend all their time dealing with government policy--in other words, why things are being done. We concentrate on how things are being done.
There are a couple of items I would like to deal with. As the clerk has indicated, under the motion that was passed in the House, the routine procedures of the committee were deemed to have been enacted as they were prior to prorogation. You've likely seen that on Wednesday, March 3, 2010, the House of Commons made the following order:
That, for all standing committees, routine motions in effect at the time of prorogation of the previous session be deemed to have been adopted in the current session, provided that committees be empowered to alter or rescind such motions as they deem appropriate.
Accordingly, the routine motions that were in effect at the time of prorogation are reinstated. The clerk will reflect the House order in the minutes of the meeting. The committee can, if it chooses, amend any of these motions.
Finally, for information purposes, the clerk has distributed a copy of the motions to you. I believe the clerk has already done so.
Is that correct, Madam Clerk?