I want to jump in on this discussion about programming. I went to Westminster about three weeks ago, and I had a lovely conversation with Margaret Beckett. She was the House leader for Tony Blair way back when. She introduced the idea of government programming for the sake of providing finality or at least putting a set time around bills, not at second reading, at report stage and third reading up to the vote. That's what they would do. She did this because she was tired of the guillotining of certain bills. When she was in opposition, she had wanted to debate a bill on welfare back when Margaret Thatcher was prime minister. She had her debate done in three stages: about this, that, and this. By the time she got to the second part, it was guillotined, time allocated, and done. She never got to the crux of her argument. This is why she thought there must be a better way than that.
They went to other parliaments similar to that of the U.K. They found this thing about government programming. They had a commission set up from 1995 to 1997. In 1997, they fleshed out the idea of having an outline where they would use it for some government bills that were important to pass.
I don't mean this facetiously, but—I look at you, Candice, because I know you were there before—I'm surprised that your government didn't look at this prior to.... Maybe you did; I don't know. It actually is an effective way. If you want legislation to go through in a reasonable amount of time and, by the same token, attain the balance where a set number of people can be involved in the debate, you can set the time by which you do report stage and third reading.
In doing that, people really found this issue to be so important to them, whether it was their constituency or their area of interest, that they were able to leverage time into that debate based on what they knew, their expertise, and how they were going to do this. They were able to do this because they were able to see it.
They instituted a review, and I think in 2004 they decided it needed to be tweaked because there wasn't a lot of getting along, we'll say, as far as the House leaders were concerned. It sounds really familiar on occasion, but you get the idea—sorry. They decided that both the government and opposition.... It was also endorsed by the Liberal Democrats, who at that point had been the minority partner of a coalition. They, too, agreed that this was the way to go for major government bills, to provide programming, and the Liberal—