History
The first oral question occurred during the 1st Canadian Parliament, before rules had been established providing for formal questions. According to the record of debates for November 29, 1867, a question was posed to Chairman of the Printing Committee before Orders of the Day were called.
In the absence of formal rules, the Speaker of the House of Commons of Canada exerted great control over form, nature, and admissibility of questions. The first codification of formal rules to govern Question Period occurred in April 1964, and subsequent rule changes have been adopted; however, the opinion of the Speaker carries the most weight, as the actions of the Speaker set precedents when a new Point of Order or questions arises about practices during Question Period.
For a detailed discussion, see Robert Marleau and Camille Montpetit’s House of Commons Procedure and Practice.
Read more about this topic: Question Period
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker’s body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers’ intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)
“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)