Well, I understand the comments that this has worked reasonably well, but Parliament has changed; its composition changes. And when that happens, we ought to take a look at whether the rotation and speaking times make sense.
What's currently proposed is that the Liberals would have three members—let's assume there are just those two rounds, as we've specified—and two out of the three Liberal members would have a chance to question. If they split their time, it would be three out of three. And they get 15 minutes in total in those two rounds.
For the Bloc, two out of two would get a chance to question the witnesses, for a total of 12 minutes.
For the Conservatives, they'd have two out of five questioners. If we split, we can go to three out of five, and we get 15 minutes.
None of this is reflecting the proportion, certainly, in Parliament. I hope we're clear on that. I can give you the percentage if you'd like.
For the NDP, not only is it not one out of one, but this one member would speak twice. Nobody else gets that opportunity.
If we go along with this proposal to increase his first round to seven minutes, then he gets 12 minutes, the same as the Bloc, and it would certainly be well out of proportion with their standing in the House and this committee.
So we're going to get at least two members who don't get a chance to speak in those two rounds, no matter what we do. To me, I'm having a hard time understanding why that makes sense to you and why we don't need to rejig this in some way.
In fact, I thought the better approach would be to give every party seven minutes in the first round, and then we would alternate government and opposition members in the subsequent rounds, with the length of questioning at the discretion of the chair—perhaps five minutes, perhaps four minutes—and go Liberal, Conservative, Bloc, Conservative. And if there's time, we'd finish off with the Conservative members who haven't had a chance to ask a question or two. That seemed to me to be fair. It's proportional.
But the status quo, to me, doesn't seem fair.