SDIR Committee Meeting
Notices of Meeting include information about the subject matter to be examined by the committee and date, time and place of the meeting, as well as a list of any witnesses scheduled to appear. The Evidence is the edited and revised transcript of what is said before a committee. The Minutes of Proceedings are the official record of the business conducted by the committee at a sitting.
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CANADA
Subcommittee on International Human Rights of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development
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EVIDENCE
Tuesday, October 3, 2006
[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]
[Translation]
Honorable members, I see a quorum. We will begin.
[English]
I'm ready to receive motions for the nomination of the chair of the subcommittee. The chair has to be a member of the government.
Ms. Minna.
There is a motion to nominate Kevin Sorenson as the chair.
Are there any other nominations?
The committee has heard the motion. Is it the pleasure of the committee to adopt the motion?
(Motion agreed to)
Would the committee like to proceed to the election of the vice-chair at this time?
I'm ready to receive nominations for the vice-chair.
That's up to the committee. The subcommittee has seven members, and we can have two, as we do in the main committee.
Okay. We have two nominations.
An hon. member: Can we not just have two vice-chairs and that would be it?
The Clerk: Yes, we can.
Let's deal with the motion for Mr. Silva's nomination. Is it the pleasure of the committee to adopt the motion?
(Motion agreed to)
Mr. Silva will be the vice-chair for the opposition.
The nomination is for Madame St-Hilaire to be the other vice-chair for the opposition.
(Motion agreed to)
Thank you, colleagues.
We do have some routine motions. Do you want to deal with them tonight, or do you want to wait until our next meeting?
Mr. Menzies.
Mr. Chair, do we need to deal with some of the structure of the committee as far as putting motions forward with 48 hours' notice?
First of all, I'll just go through them.
There is a motion that the subcommittee retain the services of one or more analysts from the Parliamentary Information and Research Service of the Library of Parliament, as needed, to assist the committee in its work, at the discretion of the chair.
All in favour?
(Motion agreed to)
All right.
Are we all in favour of the second motion, that the chair be authorized to hold meetings to receive...?
(Motion agreed to [See Minutes of Proceedings])
The next motion is to hear witnesses for ten minutes and then the allocation of party questions after, that they be allocated for seven minutes for the first round.
Is there any discussion on that? I know in other committees you do this a little differently. In some it's five minutes and more people get a chance, but seven minutes should be....
(Motion agreed to [See Minutes of Proceedings])
That the clerk of the subcommittee be authorized to distribute to members of the subcommittee...in both official languages.
(Motion agreed to [See Minutes of Proceedings])
That one copy of the transcript of all in camera meetings be kept.
(Motion agreed to [See Minutes of Proceedings])
All right, we have consensus on that.
I'm going to ask our clerk...because we just got this going and the meeting tonight was really only to elect the chair and the vice-chairs.
What time allocation do we have or can we get?
The subcommittee normally meets once a week and can meet only when the main committee isn't meeting. The time set aside is 5:30 to 7:30, but you can meet at other times if all members can find a time when everybody is available.
An hon. member: Please.
I've looked just generally at the membership, and it seems that Thursday morning most people don't have a committee meeting.
I have the trade committee from nine until eleven, usually on Thursday also. Are you nine to eleven?
Now that we know the membership of this committee, it might be worthwhile to submit to our clerk which committees you serve on and the times when you meet, and we'll take a look to see what options are there.
They can work out those details. If not, we may be looking at Tuesday from 5:30 to 7:30—and I know that's a terrible time.
So get those to the clerk. Probably at the next meeting we will talk about putting forward a steering.... We would have a mandate from the committee, but as far as witness lists and specific topics of study are concerned, I know I've had a couple of letters already about human rights violations in the Philippines and other places that somebody should be looking at, according to them.
Would the proper process be to have a steering committee sit down, or no? Do we do it at committee business, future business? All right, let's do that. There's no use for a steering committee in a small group. So at a future meeting, then, we could deal with future business. Do you want to deal with that tonight?
It gives you time to think about it a little bit.
I wasn't even certain who all was on this committee until tonight, so welcome here. I think it's a great committee. Not just for your people back home, but I think when you leave Parliament, you want to be able to say you tried to make a difference in some area. This is a great area that we can be involved in to better not just human rights problems here but around the world. So I commend you all for either signing up for this committee or for being drafted.
I'm jumping aside on protocol. Do we have a bit of a summation of what the previous committee looked at, so that we don't re-plough the same ground?
On this point, there's also an unfinished business section about some of the pending possibilities, from where the last subcommittee left off. But that doesn't preclude the new subcommittee from going in another direction altogether.
My office has received requests from groups to appear before the subcommittee on human rights as well. I'm having those requests translated so that I can distribute them to all the committee members.
Maybe we could have that at our offices and think about them, and at the next meeting we can have a proper discussion about the future business. We haven't had a chance to think about things.