There were three resources approved, two for the new Standing Committee on Science and Research, and one technical resource to support additional committee time, meetings, witnesses, etc. So no, these resources....
In really concrete terms, what we see is that we have an ongoing.... It's not just the special committee that was created yesterday in the House. If you look at the trend in one of the tables we provided in appendix B, you'll see that we've had an ongoing number of special committees going back to the last decade. There's almost always one that exists. We've always readjusted internally to be able to support those, but we're finding that, as the activity levels go up and as the service standards go up with the modernization of tools and stuff, it puts a great deal of extra pressure on us and we're having a more challenging time finding the resources to be able to support another committee that's been added. In concrete terms, if these two resources are granted on a temporary basis, as is being recommended—and we'll come back with an evaluation of that in a year's time—those resources would essentially be focused on supporting a special committee.
The other element is that there are three resources that are more focused on video conference. We used to only be able to offer a certain number of video conferences. In the typical committee schedule, there are six meetings in a block, as you know. We used to be able to support only a limited number of committees that had video conference. That was okay because we used to have fewer video conferences. We used to have fewer rooms that were capable of video conferencing, but, as we've tried to demonstrate, that has kept growing over the years, and committees now expect to be able to have witnesses by video conference, not just during the pandemic but before the pandemic. During the pandemic, certainly, it's even more complicated and absolutely more true, but even before the pandemic that's what was happening.
These three other resources are more focused on being able to set up video conferences. We did a Lean process review to look at how long it takes to set up a video conference. It's very extensive. We've tried to streamline that as much as possible, but it still involves a lot of calls. You mentioned PROC earlier. When PROC wants to hear witnesses from Westminster, there are all the emails and calls to set that up, and the testing that's required in advance. More and more committees are taking advantage of that. That was, again, pre-pandemic, and it's certainly more so during the pandemic.
That's why having some additional resources and being able to handle all the meetings that are going on throughout the day, and a little bit of wiggle room, is what we are looking for.