While they're transitioning the mike over to committee business I'll give a few updates to the committee.
Our research has been very busy. We have four more documents coming probably tomorrow, and I assume we will let these be public as we did the other research. The first one is a follow-up to questions that came up during our discussions that we asked the researcher to follow up on. The second one is a bit of a study on day care and on child care centres in other jurisdictions. A third one is on electronic voting. Then there's a fourth paper that was done for the House of Commons by the procedures clerks who offered their services to us. We asked them what might hypothetically go before an alternate chamber if we had two chambers. You will get a paper tomorrow on that.
Over the last week I was in Sweden for another reason. The Parliament there only sat three days most of the time, they had all their votes on Tuesday or Wednesday, and the voting was by electronics. They have the same number of MPs we do or a few more. They only gave them about five seconds, so everyone was glued to their seats. They did about four votes all within 60 seconds. They push their button, and then there's a whole board of green and red lights, and the totals come up. It took a lot less time than we take. When you get maternity leave, you get 80% of your pay and get a replacement to fill in for you. The ministers are not allowed to sit in the House because they're too busy, so they get a replacement. Only 50% of their ministers are elected, but of those who are elected they get someone to replace them to do their House duties and to do their MP duties. They're elected, but I don't know who the replacement is. That would be a good question, who they get for a replacement. Someone replaces them so they can do their ministerial work. They have to go to the House to answer questions, but they're not allowed to partake in the House. All of that was very interesting.
The Chief Electoral Officer was dumped because of our scheduled stuff. He suggested May 3 or May 5 because he's available. We might want to pick one of those dates and suggest it to him just to give him some certainty.
There are two other things as I mentioned while the Speaker was here. One is that we have the main estimates sometime to do in the next couple of months for the House. The other thing is that I got a letter yesterday from the Speaker on a different topic, which you'll get shortly. He was asking in the last House when they were doing the standing orders...he had made the point, and I'm sure it's in some documentation we got earlier, that it's not clear enough what authority he has to set the times of the sitting, etc. after an emergency like we had in the House. He had suggested in our review of the upcoming standing orders that we make sure we address that. When you see that letter, and don't answer now, I'd like it if you'd come to the next meeting to answer two questions. One is whether you would like to do that separately and get it over with, or save it for the big review of standing orders. The second question is that he suggests in the letter they could propose some wording of the standing order that would work. For me that would be great, but once again it's up to the committee if you would like them to proceed that way. We could discuss all that at the next meeting once you've seen the letter from him.
Mr. Chan.