Procedure and House Affairs committee  I'll have to look at it. I don't really know the answer to the question.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Yes, just to say that I don't want to leave the committee with the impression that I am in favour or against any of the options being discussed. I'm neutral on all of this. As the House administration and as a procedural team, we will do whatever the House decides it wants to do.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Here again, bearing in mind the theme of family friendliness, it should be remembered that all parties run a roster system in the chamber for House duty. The lost hours on a day that the House would choose to not sit could be made up on those other days. This has been the pattern

Procedure and House Affairs committee  It's hard to know precisely without knowing what those longer hours might look like. I'll give you an example. Right now we begin the sittings on Mondays at 11 o'clock. If we started at 10 o'clock or 9 o'clock, that would have no impact, because people are here anyway to work a

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Again, I don't believe there's a huge impact financially there. Obviously, we haven't done a full analysis, so there's always that caveat, but if you picture it more as an additional committee, then you immediately get the picture that we can do this very quickly. As I said ear

Procedure and House Affairs committee  It's hard for me to speculate on that. It would really depend on how the committee would want to structure that. Members might want the set-up a bit like the House is set up, with chairs on either side, with maybe a central podium, or members could rise and speak from their assig

Procedure and House Affairs committee  That's certainly one way of looking at it, yes.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  We staff the chamber on the basis of shifts. We take turns. Whether the House sits three hours, five hours, or eight hours, it's all of a piece. We supply the necessary personnel to run the chamber. I don't see a huge impact. There might be if it sat for eight hours on a Friday

Procedure and House Affairs committee  If the committee wanted to recommend a complete change to the House's weekly schedule, it could do so. It could move the statements by members to a parallel chamber. It could recommend that, certainly.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  If, let's say, the House didn't sit on a Friday, what could be done is to have the day count just the same for notice purposes. I know our colleagues in Britain do that.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Well, no. If the House doesn't sit on Fridays, it doesn't sit on Fridays. It is not a sitting day.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Again, that would be something for the committee to consider, what counts and what doesn't. Remember, a parallel chamber is not the chamber. It's a different beast, so you have to be careful how you quantify things after that.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I'll have to turn to Benoit on that one.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  The idea of a parallel chamber is actually not at all complicated from a procedural standpoint, from our perspective. The way the parallel chambers are structured in Australia and Great Britain is that they have a very small quorum. The chambers and houses there have delimited th

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Again, the House is sometimes used for various purposes. If it weren't the House sitting that day, it wouldn't be the House sitting, so those concerns wouldn't occur.