Mr. Speaker, as one of the House leaders I would certainly undertake and be willing to be part of a discussion among the House leaders as to what might be done in this area.
There are some difficulties that would certainly have to be overcome if the House leaders were to be able to arrive at the kind of advice that I think the Chair is seeking with respect to how to exercise this discretion. It has not been exercised very often, or one could argue at all, certainly in the time that I have been here.
I wanted to make the argument in principle, as I have before, that this discretion on the part of the Speaker should exist and should be practised. I take the point that the Chair might want some guidance, if that is possible. There is room for judgment that emanates from the Chair itself and not just from the House leaders in this respect.
I do not think it is a matter of numbers, although it does stand as a condemnation of the government that it has now broken the record of a previous government with respect to the introduction of time allocation. I nevertheless think that if the Chair were to exercise this discretion it would have to be judged on the merits of each and every time allocation and not now that we have reached 55, 65, 10 or whatever. I do not think that is a very strong argument. It may be a strong argument in terms of how the government behaves, but I do not think it is a potential source of guidance to the Chair as to when this discretion should be exercised.
It is unfortunate that the record was broken on an old piece of legislation when it probably should not have been. It is an old piece of legislation. It is not something that is momentous. I can think of lots of pieces of legislation that have come before parliament that have been time allocated which were very significant and never should have been time allocated. It would have been nice to have had this debate around those pieces of legislation rather than the bill we are having it around.
I just wanted to make the point that I think there are occasions when the Chair should take it upon itself. It is also true that I think the Chair has the right to ask for some guidance from the House, if it is possible, on these matters. Hopefully we might be able to do that in the near future.