Thank you.
This has been very interesting, because you talked on a couple things, not just prorogation but the culture within the House of Commons and the culture among MPs. Part of that culture is also the media. We work in a world here in Ottawa where the media looks for a specific clip or a specific soundbite, and it's not one of a committee like this that gets along and works together; it's one of antagonistism, who can get the best shot out there, who can say the meanest thing and get on the news. And that's the culture we work in outside these rooms.
I had a situation during prorogation. Three weeks before that period I went to California with my 80-year-old dad to see his 92-year-old cousin. While I was there I was working on some cases in Haiti, getting some people out just after the earthquake. The first day of prorogation, a blogger picks up a report from two weeks earlier and says that I'm in California. We went to the media and asked them to correct it, and they didn't. Or they did very little. I got blasted in an article three days later in a local paper saying that politicians are all bad people because they're out holidaying during prorogation, which is absolutely false. If he would have picked up the phone and called me he would have caught me in my office in the riding. But it seems that we've got a culture hear in Ottawa where if I can get one on top of Ms. Gagnon, I have to do that, because otherwise the media won't look at me as a serious contender here in Ottawa. How you break that culture is a challenge.
Where I come back to prorogation on this is I wonder if the protest was the actual prorogation, or was a protest about the culture and prorogation the straw that broke the camel's back?