Thank you.
I wanted to respond, I guess, to Ms. Vandenbeld.
I know you had sort of indicated your feeling that it would shortchange one of your members. I would like to point out that if you look at the proposal I'm making in terms of an amendment compared to the original proposal, they're actually the same in terms of the number of slots that each party gets. It's only the order.
As to the reason the order is important, I think Mr. Reid actually did a fairly good job of explaining it. I also had the experience of chairing a couple of parliamentary committees in the past. Having sat on a number of others, I can say with quite a degree of certainty—I think it would be hard for anyone who's been in Parliament to disagree with this—that when we talk about a total order here, there are 50 minutes of questions and answers. As Mr. Reid explained quite well, we know it's very rare that six minutes will be exactly adhered to and that we will jump right from one to the other.
I know that every chair does things a little bit differently, but I know that when I was a chair, I tried to be very strict on the members in terms of keeping them to time. But with witnesses, when they're trying to answer a question and they've only been given maybe the last 15 seconds or something of the member's time, you do try to give the witness a little bit of a chance to actually answer the question. As well, there's always a little bit of a transition when the chair transitions from one questioner to the next.
The reality that exists here is that very rarely, probably almost never, would those last couple of slots actually be utilized. Therefore, what this does is weight the questions very heavily in favour of the government. Frankly, that's not a fairness.
If you were to flip the order so that the Liberal is not first in the second round, it actually would create a fair situation. If the government's intention here is to be fair, they would certainly accept this proposal. If not, it seems like it's another one of those smoke-and-mirrors situations, where they're trying to put something out that looks like fairness but we all know isn't.
The number of speaking minutes that each party would receive does not change here, only the order, so that in the event we don't get through the whole order, the opposition will not be shortchanged.