Thank you, Madam Chair.
Mr. Brodie, in your opening testimony, you made reference to the fact that this is a first-of-its-kind study here in Parliament, in terms of the government being required to give some reasons for its prorogation. That was something that the Liberals brought in during the last Parliament because they were—ostensibly anyway—concerned with preventing the political abuse of prorogation, yet here we are.
I think it's pretty clear for a lot of us that the prerogative for prorogation was abused and was used to get the government out of a political crisis, which I don't think is the legitimate use of that. Here we are discussing the reasons after the fact, but I'm wondering what can come out of this exercise. It seems that something we haven't talked about yet is the legitimate role of the legislature, or bringing the legislature into decisions about prorogation. I recognize that traditionally it is a prerogative of the Crown, but just because things have been a certain way doesn't mean they must always be a certain way.
It seems to me that if a government truly wanted to have politically uncontentious prorogations, or to resolve the political tensions around a prorogation in advance, they would include the legislature in these kinds of decisions.
I wonder if you have any reflections for the committee on that interplay between executive power and the legislative branch and what kinds of reforms we might consider that go beyond asking the government to give a justification after the fact. We can all dispute whether that's an accurate justification or whether there were other reasons that were the real reasons behind it, but what could we recommend or what should we be thinking about in terms of concrete measures to prevent the political abuse of the prorogation power?