Mr. Chair, I'm going to start by saying that I don't think it's in the spirit of what the government proposed initially that parliamentary secretaries, who are not supposed to be members of committees and not have votes on committees, are nevertheless taking up question and answer time on committees. I'll be raising that with the House leaders when we have our meeting later today. That seems to me to be a violation of that intent, and I'm disappointed to see it happening here.
Turning to Mr. Bosc, thank you for being here. It's always a pleasure to have you at our committee; you are so well informed.
We've had a lot of interest in the subject of this parallel chamber, as it's being described. As a former resident of Australia who used to spend time in Canberra, I get the impression that they actually had quite a large purpose-built room for this, which was where this kind of debate would go on. Some kind of consideration was given to things like ease of access from that chamber to the chamber of the House of Representatives so that one could go back and forth.
In other words, if we were to do something like this here, I think having it at One Wellington Street would be less than ideal. Once all the renovations are done, having it over in the room that the Commons is going to be shifted into might be very much ideal, or in some other space that people can get to without having to brave the Ottawa winter. That's a thought I throw out.
In the absence of such, because all of this isn't going to happen until after a few years have gone by, had you thought at all about the issue of where we would put a room like this? I think it has to be a purpose-built dedicated room, with all the permanent simultaneous translation booths and so on, and assigned staff as well, I guess.