I'll go back to the outline in a moment, because I finished the first part.
I think that's a really important thing to remember during the debate on this amendment, because this amendment will allow us to do that, to continue this. This amendment doesn't shut down the main motion. It doesn't say not to do a study. It says to respect us as parliamentarians and likewise we'll respect you as parliamentarians.
The last thing I wanted to mention is from this article here, because it mentions the United Kingdom, and that's an example used here too. The United Kingdom has a second chamber where they do other debates, where they move it for efficiency's sake again, which in this case means making it faster. In the United Kingdom, at least a quarter of government bills will start off in the House of Lords, which of course frees up more time for the Commons, and it avoids the problem that we have in our Senate, which this article says has next to nothing to do, which I think is incorrect. I think the Senate has plenty to do, and does plenty right now. It has plenty of bills to study, and it has been much more active in creating its own public bills. In the United Kingdom, though, the second House they have created really has to do with dealing with the large number of members of Parliament they have, and the inability of all of them to sit in one place.
The House of Representatives in Congress has a similar model, which they call the track. You can enter Congress in the United States and declare to the Speaker that you are speaking on a different bill from the bill debated previously. That's potentially something the government caucus and executive might want to consider as a suggestion. But that is not something you can introduce in the span of 45 days and just decide. That is a substantive, huge change to how this chamber functions. So is setting up a second chamber, which I would not like to see done either—and again, this is my personal view—since as it is we already have too few members participating in debates right now without opening a second chamber in order to deal with other issues.
I think any type of change to the standing orders should bring more members of Parliament back to the House for debate. I have experienced excellent debates in which there have been a few more members, and in which there was back-and-forth debate with them, when we didn't use the full 10 minutes for Q and A on a 20-minute speech, and there were very short and to-the-point answers. I've enjoyed the back-and-forth banter too.
I've had Mr. Lamoureux come to my side to explain to me what he was trying to say or to explain how I was wrong on a specific point. It's an educational experience for me—that's fine—and I've done it to him as well.
Now I keep stats and records and quotes in my desk, because I know they come up on a periodic basis and because I know members of the government caucus love to use the word “historic”. It's been overused: historic commitments, historic investment; everything's historic.