Thank you.
Let me take a moment, before I turn to the witnesses, to simply thank everyone for their tremendous support, given my recent announcement. I guess I face the same challenges that parents face, as someone who potentially may be on long-term disability. I'm pleased to be here and I intend to be here as long as I can be.
I want to thank both organizations, the Parliamentary Spouses Association and the Vanier Institute of the Family, for coming here. I think we've had a very productive day in terms of getting a sense of each of your organizations' and your memberships' perspectives with respect to how we can make this a more accommodating place, not only for the members but for the entire support system that goes around all of us. Whether it's a matter of the spouses or of the staff, we want to create an environment that is ultimately inclusive, yet at the same time maintain the spirit of the purpose of Parliament, which of course is to deal with the nation's business.
I'm going to turn my first set of questions to the Parliamentary Spouses Association.
My spouse has actually joined your organization for their activities today. Jean has joined you. She waded in quite strongly in advance, so I already had a precursor of many of the comments that you've raised. I think it was very instructive to have a sense of the collective will of the spouses. I note that, even as Ms. Spinks has noted, the nature of family is changing. It is no longer, as traditionally, just the women; many of the spouses are now men. I congratulate you on the fact that one of the vice-chairs within your association, in fact, is a man.
The challenge has always, certainly for my family, been the issue of coordination. I take to heart all of the comments you have made. My spouse is an incredibly active participant in the work I do. In fact, yesterday she actually did an interview on OMNI television in Cantonese—her Cantonese level is better than mine, but believe me, not much better—and it was quite a challenge for her to do that. I really appreciated her doing so, basically to give people an update on my current health situation.
The question I really wanted to pose to you was the whole nature of supporting spouses and making sure they can integrate more effectively the demands of family and our demands as parliamentarians.
My spouse, for example, spends probably two or three hours a week talking to my staff to figure out where the heck I am, what I'm going to be doing, when I'm going to be doing it, and whether she has to cover me, especially in my current health condition. She finds it very challenging. I know Mr. Graham, who is not here today—one of our other committee members—does everything on Google Calendar, which of course takes things off our parliamentary calendar.
Would it be helpful to have access to a parliamentary spousal email, a parliamentary Blackberry, an integration of access to our parliamentary calendar? That's my first question to you. Would you find it useful? I know my spouse certainly would find it highly useful. It might reduce the stress on my staff, as she tends to talk to them somewhere between 10 and two in the morning, in order to get an update on what I'm up to. I know it should be my responsibility to do it, but I'm usually at some event when she's trying to figure out where I am.