The second round would go Liberal, Conservative, Bloc, Conservative, Liberal, Conservative, Conservative. That way everybody would get an opportunity to speak once.
Mr. Atamanenko's motion or amendment wasn't to put the NDP at the back of the line; his amendment was to guarantee that the NDP got an opportunity to speak in the second round. I don't know how you could possibly do that without putting the NDP at the beginning, in which case a Liberal member would potentially have to give up their opportunity to speak.
I propose that we stick with what we had in the past, which seems to have worked. We were guided by the principle of proportionality. Any time I've been in an election, the NDP has always talked about proportional representation. Committees are structured under proportional representation. It allows every member of this committee to have the opportunity to speak. It gives the NDP member more time than four of the other Conservative members, because we only get five minutes to your seven, so already you're getting more time.
I think it's very important that everybody gets the opportunity to speak once and ask questions once, should that opportunity arise. Sometimes we have so many witnesses, and that's what Mr. Bellavance was talking about before. Maybe we need more time; maybe that's how to handle this. But I think it's important that every member of this committee gets the opportunity to speak.
If you recall, in the last Parliament--and I don't want to beat up on somebody who's not here--the chair often took a round of questioning every once in a while as well, which set things back even more. So I think it's important we throw all our cards on the table and are honest about this. The idea of proportionality is there and we should stick to it. That's what we went with in the past, and that's what we should move forward with in the future.
