Mr. Chair, my primary concern about this motion is that it proposes a fundamental change in the role and nature of a parliamentary committee, thereby creating a precedent before we've even considered or studied the implications of such a precedent.
I can think of a long list of shortcomings in this proposal. There is no effective way of screening a barrage of repetitive questions from a small number of individuals using different accounts, for example, and, moreover, this is a parliamentary committee. We are elected by our constituents to do our job as legislators, to deliberate with all of the resources at our disposal, both parliamentary researchers and the Library of Parliament, and our own party research resources, and to bring to bear our own professional life experience to these issues. We are not here to be conduits for Twitter or other platforms of social media, which are all very interesting and in which there's a robust and sometimes vulgar public debate.
If Mr. Cullen feels strongly about this proposal, then I would suggest he could very simply put questions that are emailed to him or his office or proposed to him on social media platforms. There's nothing preventing members from doing that. That, in fact, would not be unprecedented. I recall that the former leader of the third party in the 1993 Parliament, Mr. Manning, frequently posed questions in question period that had been submitted to his office by members of the general public via something prehistoric called the fax machine. Members of the public were encouraged to submit questions for question period by fax machine, and Mr. Manning and members of his party periodically chose to read those questions in question period as opposed to asking their own.
There is nothing barring any member of the committee from doing that, but I think to set aside time from members, who are elected to do this job as deliberative legislators, would be a fairly radical change in the character of a parliamentary committee. I'm not opposed to innovation or to considering it, but it seems to me the right place to do so would be at the procedure and House affairs committee or at some other body that has the luxury of considering procedural questions closely, rather than imposing such an innovation on this committee, which should be doing its job deliberatively.