The standard practice for SAC would be to meet at least on a quarterly basis, but we meet more frequently when required. During the financial crisis, as Diane said, sometimes there was a meeting a couple of times a day. We have a very flexible agenda. We have some long-standing projects that we at SAC are looking at, and we have subcommittees of officials who are looking at various medium- to longer-term issues that are reported to SAC at our regular meetings.
But there are issues of more immediate importance that we may have to consider more quickly. For example, there are the changes the Minister of Finance recently announced with respect to mortgages. The SAC met a couple of times and talked about the issues surrounding the housing market. We invited the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation to sit in and provide us their assessment of where the housing market was, and we took some decisions about what our advice would be to the minister. Ultimately, it's the minister who makes the decision, but we worked over several meetings to provide advice to the minister on what we thought should be done.
Our agenda is very flexible. The members are free to add items to the agenda that they think are of importance to the committee, and we have a thorough thrashing out. I'll be honest. We all come with our different points of view. We all have something different that we bring to the table, because of our different perspectives. But I think the committee works well, and generally speaking, we can work it out and come to a consensus on what the advice to the minister should be. I'm not saying the minister always takes the advice. That's his prerogative, obviously.