—and I'll pass it back over to you, John.
Oh, there's one other thing, though. The prime minister of the U.K. is inherently more held to account than the prime minister of Canada, and this goes to the efforts that Michael Chong tried to make through his reform bills in the 41st Parliament. We have, without even examining the process, made ourselves unique within the Commonwealth in that we do not have a parliamentary caucus with the ability to oust a prime minister by replacing that person as the leader of our parliamentary caucus. We have presidentialized by custom and tradition without ever examining the fact that this has created for Canada a presidential-style prime ministerial role with far more power in the executive in Canada than in the executive in the U.K. or the U.S.
The U.K. system is different, and I did find it unusual that the proposal for changing our Standing Orders from the government House leader picked on this one thing of prime minister's questions on Wednesdays without looking, as you are, at the whole gamut of differences between a Westminster Parliament and the Canadian Parliament as we've evolved.
I'll raise one other thing with you. As I mentioned earlier, I was just in Westminster Parliament during our break week for other business. It was very useful to attend both the House of Commons and the House of Lords, study their rule books, and buy different books while I was there. The questions that are asked are submitted in advance as well. Even a question that's called an urgent question is submitted to the Speaker of the House the day of, so the Speaker vets the questions even though the Speaker has some flexibility, as you said, about who gets recognized. There's no such thing as a party whip handing a list of names to the Speaker, which, by the way, isn't in our Standing Orders either, but happens by custom.
Just to trespass on your time a little bit more, John, when the Speaker of the House was Jeanne Sauvé, she claimed—and it may be my faulty memory, I don't want to disparage her memory—that she had trouble seeing members all the way down the rows, and in order to aid her eyesight, she asked whips to submit to her the list of MPs who would be standing and the order in which they would be standing, so that created yet again more control from political party apparatus over our process in Parliament than would otherwise occur, and certainly more than currently occurs in what we know as our Mother of Parliaments in Westminster.
Thanks again for letting me break in on that point as you discussed Prime Minister May.