The point I wanted to make here was that Mr. Kenney, when he was the member for Calgary—Midnapore, mentioned this allusion. He called it an echo of history, just like our Standing Orders are an echo of history. He said that it was an original chapel where the monks would pray that the members met in before they moved to the Westminster Abbey chapel. They were in rows, and they would face each other.
When I was completing my studies at Oxford on an exchange, I went to some of the cathedrals in Oxford. I was surprised to see that unlike here in North America, the pews actually don't face the altar. They face in all types of directions. I was surprised by that. No matter what type of denomination of church you were in, it was pretty consistent. You had pews facing walls. You had pews facing pulpits. You had pews facing staircases, for some reason, and the entrance way. It was different.
They kept it that way because they respected not just the church and the institution it represented—a 2000-year-old institution, in the case of the Catholic Church—but also the fact that the place had accumulated a certain way of doing things. Their standing orders were that the layout was to be this way, so they left it that way. It's not to say that they didn't amend it a little bit. They moved a few things around as more and more people were using it. You could see that they started changing the way the pews were arranged, but the general principle was that they left it that way.
I would hope that whatever changes we make in the future to Parliament, we don't move to the semicircle, because we are not Europe. This is Canada. I think we should keep that echo of history. I think the Standing Orders of the House of Commons are part of that echo. Whenever we want to change them, we should change them by unanimous agreement, because in that way, that echo, that concept of speaking as one voice, we could continue together, having built consensus and then trust.
Many members have heard me say that I like Yiddish proverbs, and I've used a great many of them. I have one: He who is silent means something just the same. I know that very few members of the government caucus have spoken to this issue maybe as long as I or Mr. Genuis or Mr. Christopherson or others have done, but I've appreciated every time Mr. Simms has made a contribution, because he's tried to explain and maybe elucidate, make a point, about where we have maybe erred in our description or in our judgment of actions taken by the government.