Madam Speaker, the first thing I would say with regard to whether a convention of that nature exists is that the man who invented the concept of constitutional convention was Albert Venn Dicey. In his outstanding work, Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution, which everybody should have at their bedside, by the way, he says that there is a way of testing whether a convention exists, and that is to see whether one watches, in their actions, whether the two major parties in the House are both in agreement. He lived in a time when there were two major parties in the United Kingdom. He points to the confidence convention's development during the period of Disraeli and Gladstone as being the example. Before that, one could lose what we would regard as a confidence vote in the House and carry on.
I think that this is the way one judges whether a convention exists. I would say, based on that and the fact that it was uncontroversial that our House leader was the leader of the party after being speaker, that no convention existed. It might be starting to gel. It is possible.
To answer the question that was specifically asked about what the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs should study, I would say that, among other things, the British practice of having a Speaker shed the partisan energy in the expectation that they can run again and will run again as an independent has some merit.
It was tried here once, by the way, in Canada. As we may know, Speaker Lamoureux did that. I suspect it might have stuck had some other accidental things not come along. It is very much worthwhile to consider that for the future.