Members, before I go into the next item on the order paper, oral questions, I would like to bring the Members' attention to something that came out of the House proceedings yesterday. I watched the House proceedings on TV last night to reaffirm my suspicions or feelings when I came out of the House last night. I would like to take this opportunity to remind Members of a number of things that have tended to be forgotten over the course of the last few days.

To begin with, I would like to point out that your rules allow for one of the most generous question periods in the Commonwealth...

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...one that permits as many questions in an hour as you can fit in to any of the Ministers of the government on any matter within their collective areas of responsibility. Used efficiently, your question period could be unparalleled among parliamentary jurisdictions.

However, having said that, I would like to note specific patterns and habits that Members have fallen into that detract significantly from an effective, efficient and productive question period.

Members continue to initiate questions with extremely long preambles. Your oral question guidelines, found in your copies of the Rules of the Legislative Assembly, provide for a very brief preamble to the initial question only. In addition, parliamentary authorities define a question preamble as not exceeding one carefully-drawn sentence. Supplementary questions should not require, nor are they permitted, any preamble. I know Members are aware that almost every supplementary question asked in the House contains a lengthy preamble. Often, such preambles constitute points of debate and occasionally they could even be construed as Members' statements.

I have also been aware of a habit that has become prevalent among Members in the course of their questions of posing a recognizable question and then continuing with added comments and statements before posing the question again, or at times posing a very different question or questions. This leads to the practice that some Members employ for asking more than one question at a time. The Chair has several options or remedies in dealing with this transgression that I will relate to you in due course.

So as not to leave out our government Members...

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I would like to comment on some areas respecting responses to questions. I would like to remind Members that under your rules, a Minister has three options when responding to an oral question: he or she may answer the question as briefly and succinctly as possible; take the question as notice to be answered on a subsequent day; or say nothing.

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It is your Chair's considered opinion that answers, like questions, tend to be longer than they need be and Members often feel the need to respond to each other on the points of debate, which detracts from the true essence of question period: that seeking of information from the government. If all Members approach oral question period with only this objective in mind, I think the result will be for a far more productive hour for all Members and our constituents.

On the matter of Members asking more than one question at a time, your Chair has been lenient in merely reminding Members that more than one question was asked. Other options include treating each question the Chair hears as a supplementary question, referring only one question to the Minister, or ruling the question out of order.

Finally, I would like to note a recent yet fairly subsequent occurrence of Members standing to pose a supplementary question and using the opportunity to make a statement instead. The Chair reviews such abuses of the rules as a serious matter and a waste of time for the House and the Members.