Thank you, Mr. Chair. I appreciate that.
I just wanted to confirm something. I know that you are going to get back to Mr. Desjarlais, but you said there has been no witness confirmed. You're going to have the meeting on this constituency week regardless. You're saying there's no witness confirmed.
Mr. Nater is saying there is a witness confirmed and he was trying to be more efficient by calling in this motion to schedule in meetings when the rest of the committee members, other than the Conservatives, did not know anything about this at all. Am I right? I just want to clarify that this is exactly what I heard. That is what committee members are trying to get to you.
I want to add to that, Chair. This agenda for today's meeting has had so many changes. In fact, the last-minute changes are unreal. The original notice of meeting for today's meeting actually had witnesses on it. We went to committee business. Then we went to draft reports. Now we're in a public committee business setting. The draft reports we were supposed to review today are dated February. We received them yesterday. There are over 50 pages here that members have reviewed over the past evening.
I'm just really perplexed here as to what exactly is going on. Do you have a witness for Thursday or do you not? Are you just trying to have a meeting for the sake of having a meeting? That calls into question what Mr. Desjarlais was saying: Are you just spending taxpayer dollars for the sake of it? Why can't we be more efficient in how we're scheduling these meetings? We keep moving things around. Quite honestly, the way it seems, with the 15 ArriveCAN meetings and all of these others that we've had, with seven during constituency weeks, I'm trying to understand this.
You know, Chair, I thought in a public accounts committee we were trying to do the non-partisan thing and really make sure we were being fiscally responsible in how the government spends money, working with the Auditor General and working with all members of this committee, so what exactly is happening? Why is it that certain members of the committee have information before other members of the committee? Why are we waiting constantly? Why are we continuing to have to change our plans at the very last minute in terms of how things are going to progress?
I'm not sure if it's at your whim or the whim of your whip or what's happening here, but I really would prefer some clarification here, Chair.