That might become an issue if we had to yield the floor to him then, which we will not do just yet.
Silence means something, and when you don't speak up on behalf of Parliament as a parliamentarian, you will find, maybe not in this Parliament, but maybe in the next or the one thereafter, that you will regret it. You will say that you wish you had spoken up and stopped this from going off into a bad structure that led to the rules being changed in a way that has now hurt your ability to represent your constituents and your ability to leave Parliament in a better place than when you took it on as a parliamentarian.
You become a steward the day you take your seat, not the day you are elected. The day you take your seat, you became a steward of Parliament. Your job is not to steward the government. The government has the executive council. Every minister is there to steward the Government of Canada, to leave it in a better place than it was before.
As a Conservative, I would think they should spend less money. That would be my great hope. Hope springs eternal, and I'll always believe that. However, for Parliament to function well, we have to be the defenders of the Standing Orders, the rules of the House that protect us as members. We cannot allow a government document....
I find one of these things galling, to the point I made very early on about this concept of the board. The Parliament of Canada, the Senate and the House of Commons together, are not the Government of Canada. We are like the board of directors of an extremely important organization. We tell them what to do; they don't tell us what to do.
When I worked for the Human Resources Institute of Alberta, I would never have produced a document like this, telling my board everything I thought they should do and where they should change, unless they had given me direction and told me to do it and had told me what format to use, and never would I have ordered it done by June 2, 2017. It's such a short timeline. It took us well over a year just to get to the point where we were ready to accept a new standards of practice and a code of ethical conduct that I helped to write, but it was the members who proceeded to write it.
The board of directors of an organization—a corporation or a not-for-profit corporation—is just the same as every single parliamentarian in Parliament, whether in the Senate or the House of Commons. It's not a perfect comparison, but it's pretty close. We have an executive team and we have an executive, and that's where it kind of gets convoluted sometimes.
However, this document is written by the Government of Canada, by the leader of the Government in the House of Commons, and there's a little flag on the top left side. I'm looking at the French here. It's the same thing. It's on the Government of Canada's website. I have a real problem with the Government of Canada telling us to change our rules so they can get their business done more efficiently, by which they mean faster, not more efficiently.
They really believe that this place is adversarial in nature, that we're adversaries. You heard Mr. Genuis say this, and I'll say it too, because I agree with him on this point: we're not in a sports competition. It's not me against you. It's not me against the government caucus. It's not us against the world. We're a deliberative body. We debate, and debate takes a long time, because we're trying to achieve consensus and co-operate on ideas. We're trying to find where we agree, and because the issues are so important and because the stakes are so high, it could take hours of time.
We've already spent, I think, four days debating this, Mr. Chair. Is it four days?