An Hon. Member: Hear, hear!

Some days your heart just sings. Thanks to members of the Legislative Assembly, this is one of those days. From Hansard from last Thursday evening, a mention of my quick hack to demonstrate the utility of HTML in legislative documents.

Chair: The hon. Leader of the Third Party.

Dr. Bevan-Baker: This isn’t related to aquaculture or fisheries and agriculture specifically, but many in the House will probably remember Peter Rukavina was here the other night –

Mr. McIsaac: Yes.

Dr. Bevan-Baker: – and Peter is a great advocate of open data. Today he watched us here in the House with our desks overflowing with paper and trying to get from one section to another and accommodate them, and he just spent – he was just here yesterday so he did this in 24 hours – but he transmitted a whole section from a PDF, which is, as programmers, that’s where data goes to die, into an HTML form which allows you to access all kinds of stuff. He sent me the link here. I’d really like to send that around the House.

An Hon. Member: (Indistinct).

Dr. Bevan-Baker: It’s so much less work, less paper. It’s much more user-friendly. There’s just so much here which I think we could improve this process so we’re not kind of trying to find our way through bits of paper.

Mr. McIsaac: Yeah, I –

Dr. Bevan-Baker: I just wanted to comment on that.

Mr. McIsaac: It’s interesting because I saw Peter here yesterday and he sent me a note, too, and he said this is actually his favourite part of the House is doing estimates.

Dr. Bevan-Baker: Yeah.

Mr. McIsaac: Not Question Period or motions or whatever. But I’ll tell you an example. I went to the priorities committee today with my tablet and I got there and couldn’t get on. I didn’t have any hard copies. So I’ll apologize for having the hard copy but it’s really helpful.

Dr. Bevan-Baker: Yeah. No, I don’t think we need to apologize for where we are, but as a joke actually then he says: I move that for the next fiscal year we set ourselves a goal of crafting a thoroughly modern version of the estimates. I’d go with that.

An Hon. Member: Hear, hear!

Dr. Bevan-Baker: Anyway –

Mr. Trivers: Modernize it (Indistinct)

Dr. Bevan-Baker: – I’ll send that around so everybody has access to it.

Mr. McIsaac: Sounds good

I appreciate Dr. Bevan-Baker raising the issue, and I appreciate the spirit of collegiality his comment was met with by other members.