When I say it's more art than science and then say it would be kind of nice to have guidelines down, part of that is basically trying to ensure a transfer of knowledge from veterans and a documentation of precedents in what is here. Parliament, understandably enough, is very often an oral culture. You know it's been done like this, but it's not ever written down anywhere.
At the same time I wouldn't like to see something written down that became a kind of commandment that you couldn't deviate from even though it meant that it would be a more successful event—it would answer the needs of the participants, and the circumstances of the moment in a given situation.
It's more a question, I think, of perhaps providing a framework that people can operate within, to say these are the principles you need to take into consideration. Now once they're taken into consideration—so long as you're sure those principles are being respected and this is the usual framework that things operate on so you know you're deviating from it—there's a consensus that you will deviate from it, or you can under the circumstances.
I don't want to throw cold water on a noble endeavour, but I would think it would be very difficult to come up with a national framework for something like this, partly because people are very jealous of their territory, and partly because they know their territory very well and they tend to consider their way of doing things within that territory as sacrosanct. As soon as you get involved in a kind of negotiation, you necessarily water it down—everybody has to put a little water in their wine—and I would just wonder by the time you did that if you would have anything really very meaningful in terms of guidelines.
I see Eric.... Eric is always responsible for keeping me from, like Wile E. Coyote, going off the cliff so I better turn this over to Eric.