These meetings may end up getting scheduled in Kanata at the rate we're going.
The issue of private members' business is addressed within the discussion paper that the government has put forward. There are plenty of possible changes that could be made to the way we do private members' business. One might be to distinguish between private members' bills and private members' motions and to create avenues for greater debate and a faster movement of the discussion specifically on bills on substantive legislative initiatives that members of Parliament might want to put forward. That would be one option for change.
The important point is that there needs to be an engagement of all parties and all members in this process. We've seen with respect to private members' business a really interesting dynamic on the government side where—and I'm not sure whether this is a function of forms of communication or just the way they intend it to be—very often members of the government propose private members' bills that have more support from the opposition than from the government. I have had a chance to vote in favour of many, I think, good private members' bills that have come from members of the government. I'd have to do an exact count, but I probably have voted for more Liberal private members' bills than the Prime Minister has.
This is why there's a need for engagement of all members in the discussion about private members' business and why we should proceed on the basis of unanimity, which would not only protect the interests of the opposition in a discussion about the form and structure of private members' business, but would also protect the legitimate role and expectation for engagement by members of the government who may, on questions of structure of private members' business, have views that are slightly different from the government caucus, which they are a part of. So that's the issue of private members' business.
I'd like to talk a bit about the issue of prorogation. This is particularly serious because, although it happens on the advice of the prime minister, it is not the prime minister who does it. Prorogation is a crown prerogative. It is not, strictly speaking, the Standing Orders that prescribe crown prerogatives. As much as we wouldn't want to have a system in which our monarch or her representative exercise too much discretion, I think that the weakening of some acknowledgement of the role of the crown in this can have the effect of strengthening the office of the prime minister in a way that we wouldn't want to see.
I was politically active, actually a staffer, at the time of the infamous coalition crisis of 2008, when opposition parties proposed to form a coalition and assume the government. At the time, of course, the prime minister prorogued Parliament. Members will remember the history of this. I think that privately, many Liberals were relieved that Parliament was prorogued because they saw that the public was not reacting well at all to their proposed coalition strategy, and they were not at all sure how their planned collaboration with the New Democrats and the Bloc would work in practice.