Mr. Speaker, it is always good to hear from the member for Winnipeg Transcona, and on a number of issues. He is a long-standing and respected member of this place.
Earlier I asked a question about jurisdictional authority and whether Parliament should be involved in decisions made by any political party, knowing about the political infrastructure of each of our parties. I also looked at the parliamentary calendar. It appears to me that following the Liberal convention, which will pick the new leader on November 14, Parliament then has four weeks before its scheduled recess from December 15 to January 26.
The member is probably familiar with the historic experience in regard to transition of governments. The member will know that until a new prime minister is sworn in and he or she has selected members of cabinet and they have been sworn in, et cetera, a transition would take a minimum of two weeks, if not four, to do it properly so that a new government being sworn in could appear in the House and would be able to properly respond to the questions from all hon. members.
Having said that, it appears that the motion, which basically says that the Prime Minister should step down “as soon as possible after November 14”, would have virtually no impact at all on the number of days in which the Prime Minister would be in fact sitting at his desk, because it is going to take virtually the four weeks between November 15 and December 15 for an orderly transition and the House is normally scheduled to be off between December 15 and January 26. That basically brings us to February 1, the date at which the current Prime Minister has indicated he is going to be stepping down.
Having said that, I would be interested to hear the member's comments on what benefit could be achieved by some other arrangement for stepping down, an arrangement that would somehow improve the number of days in which the next prime minister would be able to be here before the House to take questions.