Mr. Speaker, I am going to support the motion moved by the member for Burnaby—New Westminster, but I want to make several points.
I think the previous Parliament, as we all know, overwhelmingly voted for a motion calling on the procedure and House affairs committee to examine reforms for question period. Despite that motion being overwhelmingly adopted by the House, a rubric of which was to examine the convention that ministers need not respond to questions, nothing ever came of it. Here we are, four years later, once again debating the reform of question period.
The other thing I would say is that we need to avoid turning these debates about parliamentary reform into partisan advantage or disadvantage. I think it is really important to focus on the substance of what is at hand.
In closing, if making members of Parliament and members of the ministry respond to questions is going to be a responsibility of the Speaker, then so too should it be the responsibility of the Speaker to make sure that irrelevance and repetition are not part of a questioner's line of attack when asking questions. I think we need to focus on the substance of the issue here.
I will be supporting the motion, and I encourage members not to turn it into partisan advantage or disadvantage.