Thank you very much.
Thanks, Scott.
I point that out to the committee because I think that in almost all cases, the best results for Canadians are achieved when there can be a consensus. I'm not so naive as to suggest or even believe that there can be consensus in a lot of areas. Clearly, a government is elected, regardless of political affiliation, to govern, and if given a majority mandate by the people of this country, they have the absolute right to bring forward legislation that they see best fit and pass it. It does not give them the right to do so at the expense of the democratic opportunities of opposition members and, unfortunately, I think that's what we're seeing in this instance. The government is trying to quash the ability of the opposition members to make a meaningful contribution to any potential changes to the Standing Orders.
To give you a sense and or some specifics of what I'm speaking to, I want to give you a few examples of what happened in the last Parliament. I've mentioned on a number of occasions that I chaired an all-party committee that was examining potential changes to the Standing Orders of the House. The way we got to that point was that I'd written a memo to Prime Minister Harper suggesting that we make some changes. I gave him a couple of examples that I thought would be better for the Canadian taxpayer. Let me give you one example. As you know, opposition members can write written questions to the government and the government is obligated to respond to those written questions now within 45 days. During the period of time between 2011 and 2015, we found that many of the questions posed by opposition members—I think primarily the Liberals, but they had, I think, a little better procedural staff at the time—would literally go on for pages and pages. Any time a government gives an answer to a written question, it has to be done in both official languages, obviously, and then photocopied and presented. To prove a point of how ridiculous I thought these questions were getting, I once read into the record one question from a Liberal member. That one question alone took me 17 minutes to read into the record. I felt this was an abuse of the process of the written questions that were afforded all parliamentarians. So I suggested to the Prime Minister that maybe we could look at putting either some sort of a limit on the number of words that could go into a question or somehow clean up the object of these questions, because the object of written questions originally was for them to be specific to one particular area of concern. You were to ask that question and to request a response. But to get a question—
Mr. Chair, perhaps you could ask the House leader to take her conversation outside, unless she wants to participate by sitting in and listening to some of my comments? I would appreciate the attention.