I don't want to belabour this issue, but I sat in the last Parliament, and I was pleased with the way we constructed things in the last Parliament. I understand Mr. Martin's concern with regard to getting the answers out of government, but my experience, having sat in this committee, is that more often than not the witnesses were not from government. They weren't ministers. We were looking for information about how we could prepare reports from often the private sector, oftentimes unions, oftentimes people with very specific desires and thoughts on what the government should employ. It was important that we had representations from every party.
I take Mr. Martin's point that in certain circumstances there are going to be times when we may know a little bit more information than he does. I respect that, and I'm not going to deny that. What I am going to suggest is that more often than not there are situations where we are all at the same position. We all have no clue as to who is coming forward in terms of the background information.
So I would suggest that giving every opportunity for each member of the committee to get up and to question is important. The way it worked in the last go-round--hopefully this is the most contentious debate we have in this committee--is that, as Diane mentioned, oftentimes we would give our questioning time to another party if in fact there was a member of another party who had a real desire to get some information from the witnesses.
I'm comfortable with the way it worked in the past, and I'm hopeful that we can continue to move in that direction. If we're going to go by seats, I guess we could have the Liberals giving up one of their spots to the New Democrats on this, but I don't sense that this is the case, so....
Well, when you look at the number of members around the table, that's what we'd have to do if in fact we were going to give another spot to the New Democrats. I guess you guys can work that out amongst yourselves, and possibly you could just be generous down the road and offer that speaking spot to Mr. Martin from time to time.