Mr. Speaker, the best way to respond to that question is to refer to the Annotated Standing Orders of the House of Commons. This is an excellent volume, which gives a bit of information regarding the rationale behind each of the Standing Orders.
Standing Order 11(2) deals with the kinds of rulings that have been made regarding relevance. I would suggest that it would be very difficult for a Speaker in the context of question period to indicate where the problem lies with relevance, given its rapid-fire nature. It is very different from the longer debates that go on. That is the reason this would not work.
Here is an example. A Speaker once asked the following:
How can you tell if a Member is repeating until you have heard him, and once you have heard him he has completed his repetition and therefore you cannot ask him to swallow his words.
That is regarding repetition. With regard to relevance, one example says:
...the Speaker pointed out that debate on a motion for the production of papers in connection with steamship service between Montreal and Gaspé “could not properly include the terms of union between Prince Edward Island and the rest of the Dominion.”
This is something that takes time to express. There are other similar examples. On another occasion it was pointed out that a member's remarks with regard to criminology had “little to do with import duties”.
These are all things that cannot be expressed in a few words. They would involve the Speaker actively disrupting question period, or else, as the Standing Order assumes, waiting until the end of question period and naming the member. Essentially it is only at the end of question period that members would find out that an answer had been considered so inappropriate by the Speaker that the Speaker was going to take remedial action. That is very problematic.