Procedure and House Affairs committee  Mr. Chair, I had looked into the matter for the all-party women's caucus a couple of years back. It's not necessarily fresh to me, but Ontario has made some changes. They now sit earlier. British Columbia has made some changes. I think you might be correct about Quebec, but I don't necessarily recall.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I'll put it in a briefing note.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  To get the research done and translated, I'd have to do it today, so it would be a very scant report. A preferable deadline for it would be next Thursday, if the committee can accept that.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Okay, that's Thursday as opposed to next Tuesday.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. Committee members will have received a series of documents in the past several weeks that deal with different aspects of family-friendly practices in other jurisdictions. It depends on how the committee would like to proceed. I could begin by going over the document that's called “Family-Friendly Practices In Other Jurisdictions”, because that's the one that covers the most practices abroad.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  In fact, it's less, because it's 13 out of 34.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Exactly. New Zealand and Australia also sit considerably less than Canada's House of Commons. In 2015 New Zealand's House sat for 90 days over 25 sitting weeks, and Australia's House sat for 68 days over 28 sitting weeks. The reason these jurisdictions sit less than us is that they sit three and four days a week.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  The changes in the U.K. appear to have been made piecemeal over time. It started in 1997 and they finally made some changes in 2005, when it was recommended that the House study sitting times. The changes were finally made in 2012. They eliminated Friday sittings between 2012 and 2015 I emailed them to find out more about it, because it must have happened so recently that I couldn't find any information on it.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I've found in the provincial jurisdictions that there have been increases. When you decrease, if you remove time from one time.... For example, I think it was British Columbia; it got rid of night sittings and extended the length of the day on the other days to compensate for it.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  This is what I've found. Also, perhaps interesting to the committee is that in Scotland when they were designing a parliament in 1999, they decided to make family-friendly sittings—and family-friendly for everyone, for staff and for members—to be one of their principles and priorities.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  From what I could gather from reading their manual, from around the 1900s, when that jurisdiction began, it was four days a week. Then they went down to three days a week from 1950 to 1984, and then from 1984 to present they went back up to four days a week. I don't know about the amount.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Yes. Meanwhile New Zealand appears to have sat for three days for a long time. In comparison with the territorial and provincial jurisdictions, 10 of 13 provincial and territorial jurisdictions do not sit on either Monday or Friday. Quebec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia do not sit on Mondays.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  The tricky part and difficulty of researching the different jurisdictions just by going on what's online is that they don't tend to have a manual like we do with the O'Brien and Bosc, so you really have to dig around. I did find that Quebec, British Columbia, and Ontario had made changes recently.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  There are late sittings in a lot of jurisdictions. Australia goes until 9:30 p.m. New Zealand's House of Representatives on Tuesdays and Wednesdays sits from 7:30 p.m. until 10 p.m. The U.K. sits from 2:30 p.m. until 10:30 p.m. on Mondays. So, night sittings still exist in a number of jurisdictions, although all the provinces appear to more or less adjourn by 6 p.m.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I did not dig into the possibility of extended sittings. The Standing Orders in the House do provide for extended sittings; on the calendar, there's a little star beside the last two weeks in June, and then around the holidays. I'm not sure if those jurisdictions have that. I can come back to the committee with that.