Mr. Speaker, I agree. We should be talking about good ideas. We should also be disagreeing with bad ones, and it is a bad idea to cancel Friday sittings.
What is happening now, and people who tune in will know, is that on Thursday nights a lot of members of Parliament head for the exit. If one tries to find a minister on a Friday in the House, there are probably two, because they head out to the rest of the country to do their work.
I have been a parliamentary secretary. I have been here every Friday for an entire two years. That is a sacrifice that one makes when one is on that side of the House. However, if Friday is cancelled, people will start leaving on Wednesdays, and then we would have no ministers here on Thursdays. We would diminish the role of the House of Commons, and we do not want anything that would do that.
I respect the member and people who are trying to make this place more family friendly. I would argue that we have done it. On what the member is talking about by cancelling Fridays, I was in the procedure and House affairs committee when members of the NDP brought their staff out. There were two young moms who said that if we cancelled Fridays, they would lose time with their families. They would not be there for the critical hours from after school to bedtime, from supper to bedtime. They would miss that, and then on Friday, they would have to work anyway while the member was back home. Therefore, this is bad for our staff. It would not do anything for our families, unless we, as individual people and members of Parliament, carve out that time for our families.
The divorce rate here is astronomical. It is a very tough job on families. Again, we have signed up knowing that. It is up to each one of us to take the steps to protect our family, to protect that work-life balance. The Standing Orders are not going to do that for us.