In March 2024, a provincial ministry in Ontario convened a 24-person advisory committee in Peterborough, Ontario, tasked with providing recommendations on service delivery across 6 regional offices. The committee's structure allocated 4 representatives per office, divided evenly between 2 junior members per office and 2 senior members per office, with the intention that this balanced composition would ensure both operational perspective and institutional memory informed the committee's work. Within 3 months of the committee's first meeting, the committee's chair observed a troubling pattern: senior members were disengaging from substantive deliberations, attendance at working group sessions had become dominated by junior members who lacked the contextual knowledge to evaluate legacy policy implications, and the committee's output increasingly reflected proposals that had been tried and abandoned in previous iterations without acknowledgment of those prior efforts. The provincial ministry, as the sponsoring body, had designed the committee structure in accordance with its standard governance templates, yet those templates had inadvertently created conditions that would systematically suppress the very expertise the ministry sought to capture. Understanding how Ontario's regulatory framework for committee structures intersects with volunteer engagement dynamics requires examination of the legal architecture that governs such bodies and the oversight obligations that flow from provincial ministry sponsorship.