Going back to the percentages, I think Mr. Chong talked about trying to have the number of seats that we have on the committee reflect the number of seats that we have in the House.
I would point out that obviously this proposal by Mr. Savage would give us each 25% of the minutes allocated for questioning in this committee. I would point out that the motion I put forward earlier would have only given us each, as Conservatives and Liberals, 29.3% of the minutes allocated for questioning, far below the percentage of seats we have in the House and significantly below the percentage of the vote we had at least, pretty close to the percentage of the vote that the Liberals had.
I'm not sure about Mr. Lessard's comment regarding the minority government, because obviously the motion that I put forward in the first place was more than fair, even considering the fact that we're in a minority government. We would still only get 29.3% of the minutes allocated for questions. Even so, we would still be in a situation where we were under-allotted in terms of the number of minutes allowed for questioning.
Obviously there's a game being played here. I guess the Liberals are playing a game of, you know, we'll shaft ourselves if we can only shaft you as well.
I would hope that common sense would prevail here and that we would take a look at something that was obviously unfair. If you were to go back before Mr. Savage and the rest of them joined the committee last time, there was an obvious unfairness. This is not the way the questioning rounds worked, going back into previous Parliaments. It was only the rules that were put in place after the last election. Anyone who watched what happened on the committee could tell that there was a clear unfairness in terms of the way those questioning rounds worked.
So I'd like to propose an amendment, that we leave the first round as is, but that in the second round we add a five-minute round for the Liberals and a five-minute round for the Conservatives, to get still below 30% for each of us but at least somewhere near some semblance of fairness.
I would point out that it would still leave one member of the Liberal Party and one member of the Conservative Party unable to even have a turn to ask any questions during most meetings, unless we have a chance to go to a third round, while each of the Bloc's members get to ask a question, and in fact, the NDP member gets a chance to ask twice as many questions as anybody else. So I would point out, when we're talking about fairness, that this gets taken into account.