If I may, I would like to make a couple of comments on the Friday, family friendly, etc., as well.
I had some thoughts as I listened to both my colleagues. I appreciate their perspectives. Some parts of what they said I agree with and other parts maybe I disagree with.
I'll start by saying that I have a bit of a challenge believing the motivation behind the Friday sittings, because there have been a couple of attempts to remove them. The first time we were going to study family friendly and maybe getting rid of Friday sittings was supposed to be family friendly. That was the argument the government was making at that time. There were many people who made the argument that maybe it wouldn't be so family friendly, and I'll get back to that in a second. Now it's in this context of modernizing Parliament and we will just change how the hours and the structure work. It seems there is this constant, “Well, that one didn't work, so we'll try it this way.” There's always some other argument for why we need to get rid of them.
A lot of people believe, and I would put myself in this camp, that it really seems the idea is more of this attempt. I don't want to make the characterization that someone wouldn't work on Friday just because Parliament is not sitting or anything like that. What it does mean is that there's one less question period that week. I know the idea is to add 10 minutes to the other days and we'll do all these things, but at the end of the day, we all know that question period is kind of that one hour of the day—we know how much work happens in committees and these other things—that is picked up by the media. Constituents watch it. They don't watch anything else that goes on, generally, but there are more who watch question period.
Let's be honest. We know there are probably not too many people watching this feed right now, but with question period there are more watching. I know they aren't huge numbers, but there are a lot more who do watch it. That's the news people get about what happens in Parliament, rightly or wrongly, but those are the facts. When we talk about all these opportunities that exist for these things to be raised so Canadians can become aware of issues, question period is the best opportunity that is provided to opposition members and government backbench members to do that. To take 20% of those opportunities away.... We all know that adding 10 minutes is not the same thing. If an issue popped up tonight, tomorrow there wouldn't be a question period, so it would have to wait until Monday. By then it's old news, and it's forgotten. I get that there are weeks when we don't sit, but during those weeks that we are sitting, having the extra question period is important to the opposition, and it's important to Canadians.
To me, the idea that by doing that we can lengthen the other days doesn't really solve that problem. The idea that we can have more weeks may solve that problem to some degree, but I think it creates a new problem.
Mr. Johns has alluded to the idea of travel, the cost involved, and the cost to the environment as well. These are all things that should be considered.
Mr. Simms, you talked about flexibility, that it is good to have different types of families and the different ways people structure things depending on where they live or what their family situation is. When I start to think about the different ways we can change things, the way we have it set up now does provide the most flexibility for people. I would certainly be more inclined to be persuaded by the argument to make Fridays a regular day than I would be to get rid of it.