Thank you.
The two issues I see as being fundamentally problematic, not necessarily fatal, but being a problem that we would want to wrestle with are, number one, the issue of parties or factions in the House, and number two, the problem of having more than one mandate.
With regard to the problem of members of parties or factions in the House, if you have a system that we had simply set this up within and have no regard of the rules, no reflection of the rules, of the reality that a number of parties have their own discipline and are patrolling themselves as blocs, then the danger you have is that all positions will wind up being held by the party with the largest faction, particularly when that party has a majority—more than 50% of the seats. I'm certain that's the reason why the rules now talk about opposition-shared committees, the need to have opposition members present on committees before you can conduct business, and so on.
Once you reflect those factions, you then have the unintended consequence—I think it's unintended—of freezing out independent MPs, something that occurs in committees right now. I think that's potentially a problem, one that you may or may not have thought of ways of dealing with.
The second issue relates to having more than one mandate. By that I mean that you get elected by the House, you get dismissed by members of the committee, who had no confidence in you, and then under your suggestion, as I understand it, you could run again and be re-elected by the House. At first I thought this seems crazy, and then I thought maybe it's not so crazy. Maybe effectively it should be thought of this way. The committee submits an advisory opinion to the House that it doesn't have confidence in our chair. Then the House could say that it has confidence in the chair, so that the committee should conform. They may not say that, but if they override the committee's opinion, then, effectively, members of the committee ought to accept the chair's style of chairing things, or perhaps retire from the committee and let themselves be replaced.
I appreciate your thoughts on both of those two topics in the remaining time we have.