Let me, first of all, say that your contributions to democracy in this place, Scott, are much appreciated by me personally. I love working with you. You are one of the people who have their eye on the ball and have a historical framework for understanding what we need to do to protect parliamentary democracy, and I appreciate that.
I love the fact that Scott's idea around S.O. 31s is that, as you mulled it over, there is a solution—we make it a lottery, they all come in order and then everyone gets their own S.O. 31. I just wanted to say that was great.
I did propose changes to the Standing Orders in response to those put forward by the government House leader back at the beginning of this session of Parliament. It was frustrating for me that, having put a ton of work into something....
I happened to be travelling to the U.K. for another reason. I spent some time in their Parliament, met with my colleague, the only member of the Green Party in the Parliament of Westminster, and found out how they did things there. It was fascinating, really fascinating, not just reading the book but asking what it's like.
I would have loved to have had some response from anyone to the work I put into my 26 pages of suggestions for how we could improve our Standing Orders.
How do we actually do it? I think it would be best to have real consensus, which is very hard to get to. To stop the parties from having the control to stop us from reducing the power of the parties is the problem. So where is the consensus? Where does it really lie? Is the consent with the individual member? Or is the consent with the party brass that really does not want to relinquish control over how much they're able to dictate the way bills go through the House? It's more than just when we get to speak. The ultimate thing is the control, a lack of productivity in the effort to create kabuki theatre—and that's a credit to Michael Chong for this particular phrase about what we do in Parliament.
I would love to see, maybe, an anonymous ballot, some really good workshops at the beginning of Parliament. As I said, we have newly elected people. They have no idea what these issues mean day to day. The reason we're all here is that Frank came in and said, “This isn't good. I don't like this. I'd like to see it changed.” So maybe workshopping it through with individual MPs, and then testing for consensus, which is.... The Green Party makes decisions by consensus. We wouldn't usually put it to a secret ballot, but given the role of political parties overseeing everything the other—