Mr. Speaker, in the British Parliament, members of Parliament are able to ask questions and make comments during a speech by asking if the member who has the floor would give way or yield, but we do not have that system here. When I am finished, the hon. member can ask me questions or provide comments and I will be happy to respond to her, but not during my speech itself. Of course, she may have a turn to speak if the government House leader has her on his list of the members from his side who will speak.
I think I was talking about how much the Prime Minister hates committees. It is because that is where the most egregious forms of his waste and mismanagement are exposed to Canadians. That is why our common sense proposal is to say that we should keep participation in the House in person. Let us at least say that when members are in the House, when they want to intervene, when they want something on the official record or when they want to give a speech on behalf of their constituents, they should do that in the chamber.
As for committees, we could allow committees to continue in a hybrid format. We have lots of expert witnesses for whom it might not make sense to fly them all the way to Ottawa, put them up for several days in a hotel and then fly them back if they are really only required to give testimony for an hour or two. Conservatives recognize the reasonableness of that particular proposal, and doing it that way—separating the hybrid chamber from hybrid committees—would completely ease the strain on the translation services. However, that proposal was rejected.
I also want to address something that the House leader referenced.
He was actually making one of the points I was going to make, and then he kind of glossed over it in, I believe, an insincere way. He talked about the parliamentary precinct, life in Parliament and how our day-to-day routines actually help a lot of work get done outside of what I am doing right now, which is speaking to legislation. I just had an example of this. I have an issue in my riding that I have been trying to get a government minister to address. It often takes days and days to get a response back from a minister's staff. Obviously, they are handling a lot of different files, so sometimes when a request is made, it takes sometimes five to seven days to get a response.
When the Speaker was welcoming the Portuguese ambassador, the minister was there. I happened to be in the same room and I could have gotten an answer right away. I could have said, “I have this important issue that I have spoken to the minister about before. I have not heard back yet. Could we get together tomorrow?”, and the answer would have been yes. All those types of meetings and the ability to advance files, the ability to move something along or to have things addressed, whether it is a program or a project in someone's riding, are lost if ministers are not physically here. If the—