The chair will give you a brief summation.
At the last meeting, we set out the order of witnesses and the witnesses that would be received, and it was duly passed at committee. The day before, yesterday, the chair was advised that one of the witnesses in this particular case insisted that they would appear only if they were alone and not in the company of another panellist or panellists, and as such, would have questions directed at them only.
The chair of course had no sense of direction that this was of course either passed in a motion and/or would be accepted by the committee, but I talked to the individuals at that particular point through the clerk and suggested that if I had unanimous consent to approve that request, they would be speaking only, alone, and subject only to 20 minutes only, only them, and that if there were a precedent for that, we would discuss it.
We checked with the clerk. The precedent was such that we've had.... Their argument was they were ombudsmen, of course, so therefore they felt they needed the independence, whereas in reality our minutes have shown that we've had a number of ombudsmen appear before the committee in the company of other witnesses at the particular times.
Knowing that I would need to have unanimous consent to do this, the chair asked for unanimous consent from the committee, from representatives of the various parties, to see if we had unanimous consent to proceed in that manner. Unanimous consent was not there to approve, and it was requested that they appear as had been ordered during the last meeting for our order of business. As such, they have declined to appear today, I understand, but of course they did present a brief. As you've suggested, this brief, of course, presented duly to this committee, is considered to be the full body of evidence in the committee and is accepted as such.