Thank you, MP Fergus. I appreciate the question.
When you live in a northern riding like I do—and Rachel and some of the others at the table, and many in the House of Commons—when we sign up to be a parliamentarian, we know the distances. What happens is that there are factors that change that impact our work. That's what's happening in my case, right now, with the shift in airlines and the lack of transportation capacity to get between there and Ottawa.
When I look at my schedule, other than the constituency weeks, I don't get to go to my riding on the weekends. In order to do my parliamentary duties here, I can't be in my constituency on the weekends. It's physically impossible, based on the airline schedules and how I have to travel to get there and get back. I need that extra day in order to be able to do that. Is that an extenuating circumstance? I don't know. However, if there were a hybrid option, I could at least opt for that option one or two days out of a month, so that I would get that weekend to go back to my riding.
I see hybrid as an option for MPs who are really going through challenging and difficult circumstances. We're all human beings. We're all going to face those things in our lives, cases and stories like those everyone heard here today.
You go all over the country. Employers today are looking at how they can make a better workplace environment for their employees, how they can make a better situation for them and their families, and get good productivity out of them on the job. We need to be doing the same as a Parliament.