Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I was trying to pick up on what Mr. Bigras was saying. If the minister appears for an hour, nobody has less time, because an hour is still an hour. What we're really talking about is how we divvy up the pie in that first hour.
If you take a look at the first round, if it's seven minutes, those seven minutes times four are 28 minutes. So we spend the first half hour basically on the first round. The likelihood of getting all the way through the second round in a one-hour session is that it's not going to happen. The likelihood is that we'll have 10 minutes of presentation by the minister, followed by a half an hour for the first round; so that eats up the first 40 minutes.
Then you're going to have an opportunity for one Liberal, one Bloc, and two Conservatives to ask questions for five minutes. And that will take up the last 20 minutes, given the current structure of that. So the likelihood is that in a one-hour session, we're not even going to get to every member of the committee for them to have an opportunity to ask questions.
But the question that I think most committee members have is what does that do for our particular party in terms of the time that we have in that first particular hour? And if you look at it from that perspective, I think if any party were to be short-changed, it would be the governing party, because we would have two members who wouldn't even have an opportunity to ask questions.
So when you look at it from that perspective, there's no other way we can divvy this up to make it 100% or completely fair for everybody at the table, but we can get to a reasonable semblance of what's fair and give most members an opportunity to ask a question.