Mr. Speaker, I want to thank all members who participated in the debate. I am very grateful that we appear to have widespread consensus in the House on the virtue of going forward to look at this issue in committee.
Following up on my colleague the parliamentary secretary's comments, I took a moment to do a little math. He pointed out that, on average, seven hours have been consumed in electing a Speaker in each of the Parliaments since the procedure was introduced back in the 1980s. I did a little math. Seven hours times 308 members equals 2,156 hours.
In case members are wondering, a person working 40 hours a week all year long, with no holidays, would work fewer hours than that, so essentially, it is an entire work year gone.
Assuming, for the sake of argument, that we returned to the worst-case scenario, 12 hours of balloting, in the next Parliament, when there will be 338 members, math dictates that we would spend 4,056 hours doing this, which is about two work years.
Not all of this time would be saved, but if we brought it down to the member's estimate, two hours, and I think that is about right, we would be saving the better part of a work year for a body of people who, I think, without engaging in undue self-praise, are engaged in important alternative activities carrying on the nation's legislative business.
Last summer I had the chance to read Boswell's biography of Dr. Samuel Johnson. At one point in the book, he mentions that Dr. Johnson once observed that nothing concentrates the mind like the prospect of being hanged in a fortnight.
By the same token, there is nothing like a month of free time between the first and second hour of debate on a motion to give one a chance to refine one's thinking. Having had that month, I have had the opportunity, with the assistance of my staff, to continue our investigation into the various alternative methods used by different parliamentary bodies in the Commonwealth to elect their Speakers.
It has come to my attention that I had, in the first hour of debate, overlooked the fact that one of the most prestigious bodies in the entire Commonwealth, the House of Lords, in the United Kingdom, has, since 2005, had the practice of electing its Speaker by means of a preferential ballot. It is very similar to the system I am proposing here.
The exception, the difference between its system and the system I am proposing, is that in our system, we would retain the practice of keeping the vote totals confidential. They would not be revealed to anyone, including the candidates. That is, of course, our current practice.
In the British system, the vote totals are revealed at each count. It turns out that not only are they revealed and made public but that there is actually a Wikipedia article discussing them. There is a Wikipedia article on everything.
There is a Wikipedia article on the Lord Speaker election in 2006. If we were to go to Wikipedia and look that up, we would get the vote totals at each part of the count. There is a separate article on the Lord Speaker election in 2011. These are the two elections that have been conducted under this system. They reveal certain things that I think may be useful in guiding us as to how much of a change engaging in this electoral process would produce.
One of the questions that arises is whether we would see radical shifts among the candidates between counts, as candidates are eliminated from the ballot. The answer to that question is, apparently, that we would not, at least based on this experience.
In the 2006 Lord Speaker election, which involved eight counts, as candidates were dropped from the ballot, no candidate shifted position.
Baroness Hayman, who wound up winning, led on the first ballot and also on the eighth count. Lord Grenfell, who was in second place on the first count, was still in second place at the end of the process. The third candidate was still in the same position, and so on.
The same thing happened in 2011. Therefore, we are not looking at a radical change in that respect. However, in a different respect, it seems to me that we would see a change, I think, and one that is very positive.
I notice, looking at the 2006 election, that Lord Grenfell, who was in second place, rose from having 103 votes on the first ballot to 236 on the second, which was more than a doubling, whereas Baroness Hayman, who started off with 201, barely rose, going up to 263.
This is significant, because Lord Grenfell was an independent member of the House, whereas Baroness Hayman was a member of the governing party.
Looking at the 2011 election, we see that the leading candidate, the one who led on the first ballot and won on the end, Baroness D'Souza, was a cross-bencher—that is, not a member of either party, but what we would think of as an independent. This suggests to me that this process would likely produce the person among the candidates who is the least partisan and the most independent in their thinking, which I have to think is a profitable and beneficial change to what we have had in the past.