No, I don't have....
There's the House calendar. This is an item that is intimately related to the Friday sittings. This goes back to the problem of.... I think I should deal with these two together. If you try to deal with these two together, it is conceivable you can get them done by the late May, early June deadline. I don't think you deal with them separately. My own recommendation would be they be pushed back and we deal with the electronic voting first. On the House calendar, the House leader's paper reads, “Should the House decide to move to a more efficient week, consideration could be given to having the House sit earlier in January, later in June and earlier in September.”
I assume that these are presented as a set of three as opposed to three alternatives from which we can choose on the basis that you'd lose about a week once you sever the Fridays and you'd need to get about three weeks back. You need to get back a week in each of these three places, so I could delve into those things.
Actually there's a thing I don't understand here, it says, “There is a correlation between the size of the House (number of Members) and the number of sittings.”
Anyway, the House, it says here:
For example, the House has nearly three times the number of Members than the largest provincial legislature. The House currently has more sitting hours than Ontario and Quebec even though the legislatures have approximately the same number of sitting weeks per year.
A greater degree of flexibility could be built into how many sittings the House has in any given year. The number of sittings could be based on the demands to sit. Urgent and important matters before the House should be given their fullest consideration despite certain time pressures. Allowing the House to agree to sit beyond the dates of adjournment and to sit longer on any given day, would provide more opportunity for Members to participate in debate. Another obvious benefit would be to calm the acrimonious proceedings leading up to the summer and winter adjournments. While there are mechanisms to allow the House to sit beyond adjournment dates, they are usually implemented by unanimous consent or by the use of closure.
In terms of “While there are mechanisms to allow the House to sit beyond adjournment dates, they are usually implemented by unanimous consent or by the use of closure”, there's actually a factual error in this. It says “usually”, but there's a possibility that's not stated here, which is you can go beyond adjournment dates with the support of the majority of the parties in the House, a supermajority. This was done in 2005 as a way of sitting extra time to allow us to enact the same-sex marriage legislation.
The Liberals, NDP and the Bloc, which I think had party status at the time, were in favour. That was sufficient to allow an extension thereby permitting the passage of that legislation in the House and sending it off to the Senate prior to the summer by allowing for some extra days of sitting.
With regard to the idea of greater flexibility, I think you could achieve that. I think you could achieve it in ways that the government might not like. You can, for example, summon a hearing, a meeting of a committee, if a certain number of members, less than a majority of the committee, ask to have it summoned. I think if I'm not mistaken—and here I'm looking to the chair for correction on this—it's four members of the committee. Am I right? Four members of the committee can summon it back or call for it to be called back for a special sitting. I believe that's right.