We can already do that, exactly. What that means, though, is again, this is an instance in which the influence of the Senate effectively outweighs the influence of the House of Commons, because the timing by which members of Parliament bring forward legislation in the House is significantly informed by their ability to get support for their legislative proposal in the Senate. This is an unusual situation. If we allocated more time for private members' bills or if we explored some of the solutions that I've proposed as possible options, it potentially enhances the potential role for members of Parliament to bring forward private members' bills, and it introduces a greater ability for them to do so without the situation in which members of Parliament might never be able to bring them forward.
One of my predecessors—and I read out some of his comments on this particular issue—was Ken Epp, who represented my riding from 1993-2008. I think it was only in his final term as a member of Parliament that he was able to have a private member's bill go to a vote at second reading, and it actually was still far enough down the order of precedence that it went to a vote at second reading. It passed. It went to a committee, and we had an election. This was a minority Parliament, so it was a shorter Parliament. We had an election while the bill was in committee, and he decided, for a variety of reasons, that he wasn't planning on running again. If someone would go through a 15-year career as a member of Parliament, multiple Parliaments, and just through luck of the draw not have an opportunity to ever take their bill the full distance, I think that raises some questions. It's probably rather unfortunate, so we should look at ways of empowering private members to be more engaged in the legislative process with their own bills.
It may not be easy to adjust things so that we get all members who are eligible—I think there are about 260 of them—to participate in proposing private members' bills. We're not going to get to that number overnight by one little change, but in a four-year period, that every member of Parliament have an opportunity to at least see legislation go to a second reading debate would be a reasonable goal. It is not going to move forward under the framework established by this study, the process is defined in strictly partisan terms and all of the control rests with the government majority.
As for the Chrétien model that our House leader talked about for going through consideration of changes to the Standing Orders, in my understanding it would involve the appointment of individuals to that committee, who would then be on that committee and would not be able to be pulled back from that committee. The study happening at PROC still means that individuals can be pulled off that committee by their respective whips, and that creates some issues if members of Parliament were, at any point, to want to pursue a more independent approach to what they were doing than the powers that be, in the case of their parties, were interested in seeing.