I just wanted to add, on this very point, that we don't need to change the Standing Orders; we need to draw attention to the reality that there is a great fiction operating out there. I relayed the story in my presentation to this committee and to the government House leader, of the example of Mark Warawa, the member for Langley. I don't know how many of you remember the 41st Parliament—Blake was here and Scott was here. Remember, Mark Warawa was denied by his whip the right to make an S.O. 31. He was very brave, and he stood up and said, “My right to free speech was curtailed by my whip who, just seconds before I was to take the floor for an S.O. 31, said I couldn't make it.”
In that complaint to Speaker Andrew Scheer, Scheer's response was that Mark Warawa was not deprived of his right to free speech because he failed to try to stand up and get the speaker's eye. According to our standing rules, there is no list from the whip. According to the standing rules, the speaker is—according to the fiction as handed down to us in the ruling from Andrew Scheer that day—just waiting to see someone stand up and catch his eye, and that person will be recognized and it has nothing to do with the list. As I mentioned, the list is the result of a very strange turn of fate in which Speaker Sauvé asked the whips to give her a list because she had trouble seeing the MPs.
To reform question period and make it more useful, all we have to do—and perhaps this committee could offer guidance—is recognize that this is not a change to the Standing Orders, but it is by tradition. The more we observe it and bow down to it, the more concretized it becomes that the whip controls who gets up to ask a question, and that individual members of Parliament may also be asked by their parties to practise this.
I also agree with Jenny that the 30-second rule doesn't make a lot of sense. There could be a little more latitude there. I put a timer in front of me because I'm incapable of writing out a question and practising it. It makes me go crazy so I just speak off the cuff, but I watch a little clock. Really, 30 seconds is something we live in fear of.
Why should we have this nonsense that there is, somehow, a control by the whips? That doesn't exist in our rules.
Thank you very much.