Senator Woo: I’m hesitant to share private correspondence, but you are inviting me to, so by all means. I believe what I said to you was that we are pleased for you to have the seat, and it would be subject to whatever decisions the Senate makes as a whole on the portability or non-portability of seats.

To me, that would imply that if this report is passed, then seats would stay with the group, should you choose to leave.

I’m certain I also said in my email to you, and I don’t want to say it would be extraordinary, but we should not expect that we would take seats away willy-nilly. In fact, I have an expectation that, should you choose to do something different, and the question of your seat came up, we would talk to you about it and we would try to find you another seat. But that is only if perhaps by a new member joining the Senate maybe we’ll get somebody with extraordinary fisheries experience, even better than Senator Manning’s, joining our group, and that person really wants to join fisheries. In that circumstance, we may say to you, “Senator McPhedran, can we work something out?”

But this is not about punishment or vengeance. It’s not about some kind of a power trip. It’s about finding solutions. We are all about finding solutions, but we need tools to find solutions, and I believe this Selection Committee report gives us one of those tools.