Thank you very much, Chair.
I thank my honourable colleague Mr. Fergus. I have had occasion during other meetings to yield to him, so I thank him for the return favour. He has yielded the floor to me. We benefit greatly from his wisdom. As I ponder the words he said just before me, I think they are well worth repeating and coming back to in due course.
In the meantime, when I spoke earlier today I indicated that at that time I was speaking directly to the last amendment that was appended to the motion we had before us, the famous clause (c), I believe, which involved Speakers' Spotlight. I spoke at length about my opposition to that last amendment; indeed, in brief, it's for the reasons that others have mentioned today, in that it has been dealt with already at least twice in this committee and firmly rejected.
When I then look back upon the motion, Mr. Angus's motion as amended by Mr. Fergus, I am looking at clause (a). I understand the reasons. I agree with my colleague Mr. Fergus about compromise and about getting to that place where we can look at a motion. It may not be everything we want, but when we look at the different elements, we can say that this is something we can move forward with.
I would like to put some important elements on the record at this time concerning the origins of clause (a), why it has come up and why I gather that it is part of the motion we are discussing today.
I would like to say, Chair, that I was never one of those people who knew exactly what they wanted to do when they grew up. I've had a number of different roles in my life. In one of them—after being, if you can imagine, a community worker—I was actually hired by a major schedule I bank to be a commercial account manager, where, for the first time in my life, I was working with business people. I come from a family of educators, and I thought, “My goodness, what am I going to do?”
I'm talking about the eighties, Chair. If you remember, it was the yuppie era. Greed was good. We had The Wolf of Wall Street and all that sort of thing. I really didn't know if this would be an area that I would find interesting. What I did learn about, Chair, from the business people I had the pleasure to meet, the entrepreneurs—again, we're talking about the eighties and even the early nineties, when it was a challenging time for businesses, certainly in Quebec—was the creativity. It was the ability to see a problem and to come up with a solution, and to do that while taking risks with one's own financial well-being.
For someone like me, who comes from a family of educators with reasonable salaried compensation and more or less the security that comes with that, it was a real eye-opener to meet some of these entrepreneurs. In a different context, I would tell you the stories, but even then there's confidentiality in some of those stories. Let's just say they are household names today. I literally knew them when some of these business owners were operating out of holes in the wall, so to speak, but they are household names today.
Just as one little aside, I remember one rough, gruff old guy. You had to know how to handle these guys. He came to me and asked for an accommodation, a bond guarantee for a six-figure amount, to be able to sponsor his foreman, who came from, I believe, Nigeria, an African country.