Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I just wanted to come back to the calendar issue. I just wanted to start with something here. I think with the electronic voting and the proxy voting it was unfortunate that they were put together.
Speaking for myself, the idea of having electronic voting so we can get through votes more quickly would alleviate a range of problems, and we would be unlikely to have very many of these multi-hour voting sessions that Christine Moore was complaining about, quite correctly. We could all cast our ballots, or press our buttons, or whatever, all at once from our desks in the House of Commons. I think there's a lot to be said for that and we should look at that in our report.
Proxy voting is a different story. That's where you give your vote to somebody else. Most frequently this is exercised when dealing with masses of shares for corporate boards of directors and so on. It's fine for shareholder meetings under certain circumstances but we are not shareholders, we are representatives.
I think the idea of one member of Parliament assigning their vote to their party whip so they cast it on their behalf, or whatever arrangement it is that deprives that MP of the individual decision-making on that point, is, first, I'd argue probably unconstitutional, and second, completely antithetical to what we are here for. That's just an editorial.
I'll now go back to the actual matters that you raised. I struggled with the issue of calendar syncing. I've been here for 16 years; the system has never worked. We keep working on improving it. My goodness, technology can handle these things, but given the firewalls we've put in place here, I think my sense is that we're either never going to get there or it'll be so slow and painful that....
In the end, what my wife and I do is we're on Google Calendar. We have a Reid family calendar and we have a team Reid office calendar. She can see and make changes to the team Reid one. The office can't see the private calendar that let's us put up things that aren't necessarily for sharing. That is the only way we've figured out doing it.
The other thing that we do, which I'd actually recommend anybody to do, is that we have a meeting once a week. In our case it's Thursday mornings, right before this committee, where we sit down with the staff, we get Robyn on the phone out in the riding, and we go through my calendar for the upcoming week and any invitations. That helps a lot. For anybody who wants to not drive their spouse insane, some version of that system really works well. This is actually for you guys, and not for the spouses here. It took me 15 years to figure that out. But now that I have, I want to share my new religion.
Actually I did have a question relating to the travel point thing. It's simply this, and Michelle this goes to you because you are from far away, whereas Regina, you're like me. You're from very close to Ottawa. Is the problem that we have a one-size-fits-all spousal travel points system, where actually we need something that's different to deal with the people who are further away and therefore essentially have greater needs when it comes to travel?