Mr. Speaker, it is very instructive to hear my hon. colleagues talk about the standing orders and decorum in the House.
As one of the cohort of new members in the House of Commons, I greatly appreciate what I have discovered upon arriving here, such as tradition and parliamentary procedure. I love being here. It is a privilege to have a seat in the House.
Then again, it must not be forgotten that this is a job for which we are very well paid. Canadians see this and they are watching us. We are very lucky, but we also have very good conditions that oblige us to work from Monday to Friday, as well as Saturday and Sunday. If we have such fine conditions, it is because Parliament has recognized that MPs have a job to do and that we ought to do that job as best we can, while taking the time to do it to the best of our abilities.
That is why all the suggestions we have heard about shortening the work week are hard for working people to understand or accept. For example, a friend of mine in my riding works a seven on, seven off schedule. He goes seven days without seeing his family, then spends seven days with them.
People who work 21-day stretches up north work all the time. They adapt. They still have families because they do what they have to do to maintain that. I am sure we can have our families and still do the job we are here to do.
Our job is to ask the government questions and hold it to account. The government and the ministers' job is to answer our questions because we speak on behalf of Canadians who want to ask the government questions but do not have access to ministers like we do.
That access is what I want to talk about in the House today. How can we improve Canadians' access to the House of Commons? Petitions are among the few ways Canadians can send their messages directly to the House of Commons. We present petitions every day, at every opportunity. Petitions are messages from Canadians to all parliamentarians.
Unfortunately, I have a petition here that I cannot present to Parliament because it does not comply with the Standing Orders, which contain not one, but eleven requirements that someone from Lac-Drolet who never comes here must satisfy if he or she wants to be heard in the House by presenting a petition. I think that shows us an easy way to improve access to the House.
I have a concrete example. It is a petition signed by many of my constituents to get cell phone service. Since there are no cell phones in Lac-Drolet, people signed a petition to demand cell phone service, but they made a few mistakes.
First of all, the municipality that wrote the petition included its logo. Too bad. Petitions must not have any logos on them, or they cannot be presented. Second, who provides cell phone service? It is certainly not Parliament. The petition calls on Bell to provide cellular service. That was the second mistake. Petitions must be addressed only to Parliament. Third—