Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I guess in my experience, which is only the previous Parliament, the idea was not the balance in the House as a whole but fairness within the committee. Had we applied your rules last time, we would have had to take a lot of minutes away from the Liberal Party in the last Parliament.
It's creating some kind of new precedent whereby what happens at committee is judged in terms of the larger chamber. I don't know of any committee where parties were given different amounts of time in the rounds. I think that's a bad and dangerous precedent in the long term for Parliament. Yes, of course it's in my interest to argue that, but in the last Parliament we certainly defended the rights of the Liberal Party, as the third party, to have equal time in the rounds.
The second thing I would say is that with regard to the proposal to have seven minutes in the first round, six minutes is very, very short. I know a lot of you on that side are new.
It's not about equity among parties; it's about the fact that you might like to ask more than just one or two questions in your round. Seven minutes works fairly well for that. If we drop to six, we'll all find it very constrained in that first round of questioning. Maybe we can separate out those two questions as we're considering this issue, because I think the seven minutes is important in the first round. I'd like to not have that mixed up in the other proposal to shorten time.
Thank you.