Yes, it's three hours for some. For me, it's two, but for a B.C. MP, it's three hours. That's correct, so it's even more of an opportunity for them.... Also, it does speak to that morning thing too. Because we are going back and forth, it can be difficult for some from out west. With a two- or three-hour time change when you have a 7 a.m. or 8 a.m. start, it could be like 4 a.m. for someone, because when they go back to their ridings, of course, that's the time they're on.
That can be difficult for some people. For me, it is. I find that a bit difficult. I'm not really a morning person per se, so I find getting up at what is equivalent to 3:30 or 4 o'clock my time a little difficult, I'll be honest. I am a night owl, and I like to work into the evening. If Parliament is to sit—and this is the point I want to make about that—until 8 o'clock or 8:30 in the evening, some of the opportunity you get to catch up on things in your riding gets lost for those people from out west as well, because what happens is.... It's even worse for those in the east because then it's almost too late to even make any calls to anyone, even if they're at home.
Often the House will wrap up with still a bit of the workday left, so what I'll do is that for the people who I have to try to catch at work or those kinds of places, I can still make a few of those calls. Maybe I can have a little dinner or get in a little exercise or something and come back to the office, and then I'm able to catch the people after they've had dinner at home. If we start to sit longer in the House, it eliminates some of that opportunity as well. It starts to become more difficult. I know people say that if they could just get to their ridings on Fridays more often, they could do more for their constituents. I want to argue that it actually might do the opposite. I know that sounds funny to begin with, but when you think about it, you lose those opportunities with constituents before or after the House sits if you lengthen those days.
Another way you might get more time, if that is what you are seeking to do, would be to actually sit on the Fridays. I would say that if you want to make them a longer day, well, that's fine, and I could see the merits in that, but I don't see the merits in getting rid of them. I'm going to get back to the question period thing in a second, but if you want to lengthen them out, say, even if they went.... Some people said that to be able to get home to their ridings on a Friday night, they would still need to.... But let's say that Parliament wraps up at 5:30 or something. You could still do that. That's adding a few hours to the day.
As for what would happen then, if you were to add up those hours for 26 weeks, there probably would be a couple of weeks of time that you'd be making up on those Fridays, so maybe, as an example, you could give people an extra couple of weeks in their ridings each year. I'm just throwing this out. I'm not saying that this is a proposal, necessarily, but it's an example of what could be done. I would be willing to argue that if you had that time at the beginning and the end of the day, like you do now in Parliament, to catch up on constituency things, and then you had another couple of weeks when you could spend a block of a week in your riding, you'd get a lot more done that way than you would by just being home for a Friday, when you're a little bit tired because you didn't get home until 2 a.m. or something and you've been flying. You'd probably get more done that way.
I think those arguments that somehow this is better for your constituents are disingenuous.
At the end of the day, what it really does is take away one question period each week: 20% of the question periods. It's a pretty significant number. Taking away 20% of the question periods is really taking away 20% of the accountability. That's what it really means. It means taking away 20% of the accountability that the government has to provide to Canadians through the odd opportunity that opposition members have in question period to raise substantive issues, to raise their concerns, and to raise the issues of their constituents, etc. That's what I think it's really about.
They brought forward the family-friendly initiative and said that we have to get rid of Fridays because that's family friendly. A lot of people spoke out and said that they didn't really see how that was family friendly. Some people probably thought it was, but there were a lot of people who didn't, so they said, “Okay, well, we'll back away.”
If you look at the report that we put out—I don't have it in front of me, so I can't remember the exact wording—you will see that we essentially reported back that we didn't feel there was a need to get rid of Fridays. That was the decision of this committee. It was done the way they're usually done. It was a consensus decision. We agreed unanimously that would be the way that this would be done.