I don't think it's any surprise. I think everybody knows I wasn't on the committee in the last Parliament, but I have it on good authority from my colleague Peter Julian, who was on the committee; he seems to recall that there was a serious and successful effort by the chair to try to keep the answers to a question roughly proportionate to the length of time it takes to pose the question.
I don't think that Mr. Baker has to worry too much in terms of whether this works or doesn't work. It works, and was a normal practice in committee of the whole in the examination of the estimates. We did it last week, I think it was. This has been a week when a lot of things have blended together. If it wasn't last week, it was the week before, right around December 9, I think.
I don't think anybody would say things kind of fell apart there, and I also recognize in Mr. Poilievre's motion that there is the possibility for members of Parliament to cede more of their time. It doesn't mean the witness gets another six minutes on top of the six minutes allocated. Just as in the committee of the whole, when you have 15 minutes and you decide to use it all for questions and answers, it doesn't magically become a 30-minute period. It just means that your 15 minutes are divided more proportionately between the MP and, in that case, the minister, but here it would be the witness.
This is reasonable. It would be a good practice. I have sat on a lot of committees where sometimes the most heated and conflictual moments come when there is a feeling that a witness is using all the time but maybe not speaking directly to the issue that the member is interested in. Of course, we have only so much time, so you will see members trying to intervene in order to get the witness back on track, as it were, or to speak directly to the issues that are of interest to the member and that they want to use their time to discuss.
One of the potential virtues of enshrining a rule like this more formally would be to avoid those situations where things are getting a little more heated and a little more intense. It could help bring the temperature down a bit by giving MPs more of a clear sense of how they can manage their own time at committee instead of having to jockey with the witnesses in order to try to get that time management down.
It could have a salutary effect on the proceedings of the committee to eliminate that kind of requirement for members who want to see their time used in a particular way to have to compete with a witness. Of course, it's not always like that, but there are cases when it is like that. I believe we've already seen some of that at this committee in this Parliament, so I think it is a good way to try to avoid the worst instances of that.
I'm happy to speak to the main motion, too. There is a bit of awkwardness where we are clearly talking about two separate kinds of issues, so I would have been happy to just see them presented separately. In any event, if we want to dispose with this relatively quickly, I'm okay to put the two together. If we're pretty confident that both are going to pass, then we may as well pass them together and be efficient, because efficiency is a virtue for all members of the committee. We're probably going to talk a lot about efficiency. We may as well lead by example.