Thank you, sir. Perhaps I can respond to the issues you've raised.
First, the issue of the Prime Minister appearing on the Wednesday of every week. The major problem now is that every minister uses four hours of his time every day to prepare for question period. However, only eight or 10 ministers answer questions during every question period. In other words, after using up four hours of their time every time, 30 ministers of the Crown attend oral questions every day but to do nothing. That's a major problem for their ministers.
For the vast majority of backbench members it's the same thing. I've been going to question period for six years, and it's a two-hour part of time out of my day, and I often wonder how effective it is for the 260 members who are there in the House. We are all very busy with committee work and answering the concerns of our constituents, and we often don't have enough hours in the day to keep up, and yet we have to sit through question period and not play any meaningful role at all.
The other thing I've noticed is that I think it's very important for the Bloc to have the same amount of time in the House to ask questions as they do now.
You're an elected member. We live in a democracy, and it is therefore very important for the members of the Bloc Québécois, including yourself, to have the same time to answer questions as is currently the case.
So I'm in favour of making sure they have the same amount of time they have now. This is not to diminish the amount of time given to the opposition parties to ask questions.
The problem of oral questions in the House of Commons is not a matter of decorum. The fundamental problem is the rules. If we change the rules, we'll change decorum.
So I think previous attempts to change decorum in the House have focused on the symptoms of the problem rather than the underlying problem, which is the format. The format drives the behaviour, so I think we need to change the format in order to address decorum.