Mr. Chair, I appreciate the latitude to speak to this a little more.
Just to step back, in the past—and I don't mean the dim recesses of time, such as 1937, but the times I remember—parliamentary committees did not force-march witnesses through the process as quickly as possible, and not every witness was put on a panel.
To make sure my memory wasn't false on this point, I tried to figure out who I could phone. I called a former member of Parliament, Karen Kraft Sloan, with whom I worked when she was on the environment committee long ago. I asked, “In the old days, didn't witnesses get half an hour or 20 minutes?” She said yes, that it was at least 20 minutes, depending on the witness.
I think latitude is needed. For instance, the person who's at the top of my proposed list of witnesses, which we haven't gotten to, is Professor Arend Lijphart, and those who've studied electoral reform for a long time.... I know Scott Reid would know this witness. This man has spent his life studying empirical evidence of the effect of voting systems on how governments and parliaments perform and whether there is a statistical alignment between how people vote and how well their country does economically. These are very interesting questions, but complex, with a lot of data from the 36 countries that were studied.
It would be a huge loss of our opportunity to learn if we held a witness like that to a 10-minute presentation. On the other hand, we could have a lot of witnesses who want to come to us when we do public hearings across the country. I take the point made by Nathan and others that 10 minutes may be more than enough when we dive in with questions later.
I would support this going to the subcommittee to figure out if there's a way to say that the chair, with latitude, can have longer presentations from the witnesses we've sought out when we agree by consensus that it's someone we really need a lot of time with. Restricting them to a 10-minute presentation on a lifetime of work is both a loss to us and an insult to the witness.