Thank you.
From the comments you made, I mostly heard that even if the instrument is different, what we are doing is not much different, if at all, directly and indirectly. In fact we have been doing lots of things of a sort indirectly for a long time. This is another way of doing it; I'm just not sure it ends up being any different.
Certainly if the point is disruption of the House, I don't think so. I don't see how it further disrupts the House, especially in the context of all the things that do disrupt the House. I think it is looking at something that is very, very minor in the context of something that is very, very major.
It goes to the point the clerk was making earlier and that Massimo brought up a bit. We are all used to being in situations where somebody is reading a newspaper or writing a letter or looking at their BlackBerry. We're used to that.
I remember the first couple of weeks I was here being so stunned by that—in our caucus meetings and so on—and then it became very normal and very explainable. We live 24-hour days that have 36 hours worth of things to do, so we do things at the same time.
I can explain it, but it's very difficult to explain to somebody whose experience is different. Somebody who arrives at a committee hearing or is sitting up in the gallery is somebody for whom coming to Ottawa is a big deal. Testifying before a committee is a big deal. They have prepared for it. They are here. They have taken it seriously. They feel the seriousness of the surroundings, and all of a sudden they experience something where their understanding is that they're not being taken seriously.
We have our own perspective on it and our own sets of experiences, but we're also dealing with a much larger audience who react in a very different way because their experiences are very different. It doesn't do us any good in terms of our reputation. It really does considerable harm.
This is slightly beyond the technology part, but I would like to use the opportunity to say it. It goes to that sense of disruption in the House. We do not do ourselves any favours by what we look and sound like in the House and in question period. It's all normal to us; it's explicable. But anybody watching at home may only have an impression, a visual experience, with an MP on the 10 o'clock news. In the course of a year it's not likely that you're going to knock on their door. It's not likely that you're going to be at an event. Their experience of you, or anybody like you, is going to be the clip from question period on the news.
We do not do ourselves any favours. We may have all kinds of explanations of why it is that way—and there are sound explanations—but the end result is that we are much more disrespected.
I would say two things in terms of the context of all that. One is that what we are used to in terms of dealing with ourselves is one thing. In terms of dealing with the public, it's quite different, and we don't do ourselves any favours in that way. Second, in terms of the extent to which what we're talking about today has an impact on the House, to me, it's extremely minor in the context of something that is a lot more major than that.
