Beginning with the testing of witnesses and the use of headsets and whatnot, our current practice is that all witnesses are tested before appearing at committee. We make every effort to make sure that every witness is provided with a headset. It's not always possible to get a witness a headset in time. We do have express delivery of those headsets and the House makes every effort to get them to witnesses. If they're in a major metropolitan area, we can get them to the witnesses the next morning. On that issue, when dealing with testing of witnesses, if the committee would like to codify it as a practice, that is great, but I will point out that we're already doing it, just to reassure all members this is indeed the case.
With regard to the other motions, Mr. Bachrach raised an issue of when it comes to amendments from the floor. My concern just administratively here in trying to support the committee is who would be doing this translation service. It's not actually a function of the interpreters in the room. Some motions, particularly when you start to deal with bills and whatnot, cannot just be done via straight translation. There actually are specialized translators who work on those documents.
Certainly it's not the role of the clerk to do that. The clerk could not be translating documents at committee. We are not certified translators. That said, those are just some administrative concerns.
On motions, the committee does have a routine motion that all documents, of course, are to be distributed only by the clerk and only when they're available in both official languages. One would expect that does occur pretty much in a hundred per cent of the cases that I can think of here in committee.
I am trying to think of any other pertinent information.
There's an issue with the Translation Bureau as well. Sometimes we have stakeholder groups or whatnot who provide us with pre-translated briefs. Maybe they're already posted on their websites. These could be publications that the stakeholder group has already put out in both languages. Sometimes these are copyrighted, and so to have those then sent to the Translation Bureau might be a little bit problematic, but, of course, if the committee wants us to do that, we can do that.