Madam Chairman, it is somewhat informal, so I do not mind that the question took a bit longer. That is all right with me. At any rate, it does not seem that dozens of members are ready to make speeches.
As the hon. member knows, there is an ongoing survey of members in this regard. I think it is a good idea. I suspect all House leaders are looking forward to its conclusion.
What the member said about the three hours is not quite correct. It is a maximum of three hours. For instance, we had a votable private member's bill last week. I am trying to remember what was the subject. We adopted it and sent it to committee after one hour, even if it were votable.
That is the maximum. If we are amending the criminal code, it is not a bad idea if we knew it was votable to have a longer speech. Perhaps we do not need that long at second reading, or we might want to have that long at second reading and once a committee goes at it we would not need that long at third reading.
If I go back to the British example, they tend to have very short, if any, speeches at all at third reading on anything, even government bills. It is quite common to have a government bill debate of five minutes at third reading. Second reading, I would argue in this case, would probably be a little longer than that.
In any case, as I said, I am not against per se some of these ideas about all of them being votable. I was very lucky as an opposition member in terms of getting my name drawn. For whatever reason, I always seemed to have something that was on the floor of the House of Commons. Probably one of the greatest satisfactions I had was the motion I sponsored which was passed to erect a statue in honour of the Right Hon. Lester B. Pearson.
That statue beside the west block, Mr. Pearson sitting in a chair, if members have noticed, actually includes a design of the chair of the House of Commons. That was my idea, everything, including that he should be sitting in a chair and so on. That was my motion. I was there when we unveiled it. The then prime minister, Prime Minister Mulroney, did the unveiling. I think it was a tremendous exercise by an individual member. Had I not done that, like other members who took similar actions, these things probably would not have happened. We just cannot get things to move sometimes without prodding from members of parliament.
Probably another good example of this is the bill on competition. It will be before the House this Thursday with reference before second reading. The bill on competition bears great similarity to two private members' bills, one in the name of the member from Kitchener and the other in the name of the member for Pickering—Ajax—Uxbridge.
One involves gasoline pricing and competition in that regard. The other one involves issues regarding the misuse of Canada Post to send out phony things where people are alleged to have won something. To claim their prize they phone a 1-900 number, which gives them a huge telephone bill and usually a prize of exactly nothing. That bill largely covers those items. They are private members' ideas.
As a minister I think this is great. I support that entirely. As I said, though, in my opinion the price to be paid for it is a dramatic reduction in the number of private members' bills debated. Perhaps that is not bad. As my colleague said, it means that the more important ones will be debated, and because we know they will be votable, they will always be of that importance because otherwise we would not put them. We would not want something to be put to the House to have it defeated by everybody because it was a very bad idea. Of course if it is not votable anyway, one does not really care. So arguably there is a benefit in that regard.
Finally, I think all of us should think of the effect of what the hon. member just asked and hopefully the committee doing the work will think of it, namely, should people have two or three tries at it before everyone has had at least one?
Perhaps one way of doing it would be this: at the beginning one would draw from the list of everyone who has at least one item for private members' business in the kitty. We would draw, and as we go through the process, three or six months later we would draw a name and if that name has already been drawn it would be thrown out and we would take the next one, until we find one that has not been drawn. At the beginning of a session that would not be a problem, but as we go along it would be.
If we reach the end and everybody who had an item in the kitty has had their name drawn and other members just do not want a private member's item, we could start again. We would assume the list is complete because we would have zero names left in the kitty, or at least zero names that have items in the pot.
For instance, ministers such as myself are ineligible. Secretaries of state are ministers at a different rank but similarly are ineligible. Parliamentary secretaries while they are parliamentary secretaries are also ineligible, but because they are generally on a rotational basis serving a term of two years, someone could be ineligible and then a year and a half or two years later become eligible for the draw.
Whatever mechanism we develop should bear all these things in mind to ensure that it is fair for everybody. Those are some ideas on how to handle that one, but I am not married to those I am suggesting. I am giving them as examples of how to reform this. I would like other colleagues to add to them the good ideas that they might have as well, and by the way, not just on private members' items, I hope, but on everything else we do around here.