Yes. Mr. Sopuck is the third-base coach.
This is material that most people will not want to watch, but I think one of my colleagues told me that she has had a million views for her video that she made on just this subject. Also, it's astounding how many Canadians have sent me comments. I already have a hundred comments on one of my videos that I made earlier today. We had people watching at 3 a.m. when we finished on that first night. Twelve people with insomnia back home were still watching us. I was getting text messages from a former member of Parliament who was asking me what was going on and responding to my tweets.
I'm surprised by how many people have taken an interest in this, but perhaps I shouldn't be surprised. People have become more astute. They know where to find information, and it's easier to find now than it was before. Also, they're interested in this because they understand the value of an independent, autonomous opposition that is able to oppose and obstruct, but loyally, so that's not to go and take your gavel, Mr. Chair, so that you cannot suspend the meeting and we can continue ad infinitum to debate. I promise not to do that at this time.
On question period, questions, and written questions—I see that the chair is now hiding the gavel—we've talked a lot about question period, but not enough, I think, about written questions in the House. I'm one who submits quite a few written questions to help me do my committee work. I don't think that any of the changes proposed here will help in any way to get better written question responses from the government.
In fact, as a rookie member, I have risen in the House to complain, not about the quality of the answer—this was on Order Paper Question No. 510—but about the contents, the non-response I received. The Speaker reminded me in his ruling that the Speaker plays no role in adjudicating whether I have even received a response. The format of the response indicated quite clearly that they had not responded to every single point I had been asking questions about. If ministers don't respond to questions orally and they don't respond to questions in writing all the time—I'll say here that I have received responses that were complete and fulsome—this will not help.
I would say, let's change that to do something more, and in this case I do mean radically. Let's look at all the written questions submitted over the past three Parliaments, let's say. The most common questions that are submitted—the themes, the types of questions—should simply be information that is made available online automatically by the government for public consumption.
The government should not be forced to produce the information for parliamentarians when they request it if they can expect that they'll be asked this question all the time anyway. Why not look at the Order Paper question system that we have right now and say that, at the end of every Parliament, the clerk shall be instructed to review all the OPQs, and the 10 most common OPQs will be then perhaps automatically requested from the government? It will simply be information that's automatically requested in every Parliament, or at a certain tempo at a certain time.
I don't think that adds extra work. If a public servant who's producing this information today could have the certainty that he or she will be asked the exact same Order Paper question at a future point, then it really doesn't matter if they have 45 days or 65 days to answer, because they could just cut across all of that and produce a recurring document that could be tabled in the House or publicly posted on opendata.gc.ca—hopefully, it's still called that.
We parliamentarians ask questions in written form because they're more technical, so why not simply produce the information automatically if it's a common, recurring question? A lot of them are about ministerial expenses: sedans, per diems charged, and private flights. I table a recurring question about my constituency in terms of how much government money has been spent in my constituency, and for all contracts over $25,000, and for whom. It's a very common question. I've seen many New Democrats table such questions, so I've started doing it too because it's actually quite interesting. I get to track government money as it is being spent.
Why isn't that done automatically on a government website? The difference between 45 and 65 days is small. The complaint here—and it is a complaint—is this. “However, written questions have increasingly become more complex and voluminous over the past 10 years.” Really? So has government. It's a $300-billion operation. We as parliamentarians, all 338 of us, have a responsibility to ensure that money is spent wisely.
The only way I can do that is to ask these written questions. How else am I going to get the information? The proposed changes here will just delay further down the road and potentially limit how many written questions I can have. I can have only four at a time tabled before the House. Four is not an unreasonable number. Four questions over a 45-day period is not unreasonable. I should be able to ask four written questions.
I think the government could save itself a lot of time by being proactive, and that is not in here. All I see here are ways to avoid doing things and to give themselves more time. If you want to expedite the answer, look at the top 10 or top 25 most common OPQs and simply produce the information automatically. You don't need to change the Access to Information Act. You could do it by order in council. The executive can do it today. There is really no reason not to go ahead with that.
The omnibus section talks about omnibus legislation and the government's concern about it. Their proposal, though, is to inject the Speaker into the legislative process. The Speaker does his or her best to avoid injecting himself or herself into question period and determining whether a member has a written question response that is accurate or fulsome. Why should we inject the Speaker into determining whether government legislation is omnibus or not, or what the themes are? I think it's placing the Speaker in an extremely difficult situation. If you were to make these changes, the Speaker would have that type of power and would be expected, then, to rule. I think that's a problem.
It's not to say that I believe the Speaker would not be neutral in the processing and the activities they undertake in their role, but I would like it if all of us could agree on what the Speaker does. Now I fear that you may change the rules over what the Speaker can and cannot do. Just by having that section in here, I am worried about what the Speaker's role could be changed to. The Speaker works for us, as parliamentarians, to enforce the Standing Orders of the House on our behalf. He admonishes us in different ways. He can do it more publicly, more directly, but he can also do it more kindly and privately.
I know that I have complained to the Speaker many times about a lack of decorum in the House, either directly or in person, but I've also used the Speaker to ask questions and to clarify how things work in order to get to an understanding of how I should be behaving in my job. If the Speaker's role changes fundamentally to more of a referee, where the Speaker is a referee between the Liberals, the Conservatives, non-aligned members who are independent, and New Democrats, then the Speaker becomes a referee. Just like a referee in hockey, I'm afraid the Speaker could perhaps have collisions on the ice. Perhaps an elbow would go too high and take out a Speaker.
I'm worried about injecting the Speaker into the proceedings of the House. That is not the role that was intended. The intended role was to provide bad news to the crown. Some poor soul would be directed to go to the King or Queen to give them the news they did not want to hear, which was that the House had not approved the spending the crown had wanted. A few Speakers did not survive the experience of giving bad news.
I don't think we should be expanding the role of the Speaker to do these things. I think it would be a great mistake. But now I don't know whether the unwillingness of the government caucus to vote in agreement with this amendment is because they have other intentions for the Speaker.
Mr. Simms perhaps will speak to that later, when eventually I do yield the floor. I am running low on material. I'm sure he's delighted by that.