They're still in recovery.
We don't want to reward bad behaviour. I think Mr. Keddy's point here to this amendment was whether it was connected back to the minister and whatnot, and that's all for that investigation. But on this amendment, if it has been identified that there was an inappropriate appointment and then that appointment then hired other inappropriate appointments, the last thing we want to suggest is that's good behaviour.
I can remember the Prime Minister's words when he was in Atlantic Canada at one point and said there's a culture of defeatism here. I just saw this one quote that I thought I would bring up here because it's absolutely germane, the people in Atlantic Canada shouldn't “sit around waiting for favours”.
I suppose the idea is that it's who you know in the PMO. What this amendment, which we'll support, is trying to suggest is that, if what's been found out has been found out in terms of the way this appointment process happened and that people were rewarded for political connection, and certainly if that's what the public commission has found, then we would not want to just simply roll that into some kind of a permanent status.
So if that's what the amendment attempts to do, then we should all be supportive of it because what we don't want is to reward any sense of patronage or cronyism that goes on within the public service using the taxpayer dollars to reward people—who may be nice people and may be lovely and whatnot—who got their positions because of who they were connected to, which is what this case has been talking about through the integrity commissioner.
We disagree with the Conservatives' view on this, obviously, and will be supporting this amendment.