Thank you for being here today. We had the chance in the last Parliament to have you before our committee, and we always appreciate the thoughtful and considered advice that you provide to us in our deliberations here.
In your opening remarks, you certainly laid out very well some of the things that could be considered in making changes to the Standing Orders and also some of the things that have to be really thought through with regard to, as you mentioned, ensuring that we don't come out with any unintended consequences. I'd like to explore a couple of those areas a little further in the time we have.
The first is that one of the areas you mentioned was looking at consideration of the days and times of sittings. You mentioned specifically the impact of not sitting on Fridays and what that would mean for parliamentary business in some of the areas that you identified. You talked about the number of sitting hours per day, the start and end times of sitting days, and a number of other factors.
What I'd like to focus on first is that question period is a very important part of the day in Parliament. It provides the opposition with a very important opportunity to hold the government to account on behalf of Canadians; so question period and the impacts on it are key parts of anything we would want to consider. If we were to talk about eliminating Friday sittings, that certainly would or could have some impact on the amount of time in question period that the opposition would have to hold the government to account on behalf of Canadians.
I'm wondering if you could give us a bit more information on how that would be affected if Friday sittings were eliminated, and whether you have suggestions on how we could ensure that there wouldn't be less time provided for that very important function in Parliament.