Thank you all for the kind words.
I'm the same way. I remember the day Jay Hill called me and told me that I was going to the procedure and House affairs committee to sit as a member. I went, what the hell did I do wrong?
The only other committee I sat on before that was in opposition, and it was the government operations committee. It was a shit show, pardon my language, but it truly was. It was one of those committees that I said I would avoid at all costs.
And so I recognize, as Tom said, that we went through some very partisan times in the procedure and House affairs committee when I first came here—and I mean over the top partisan times. We voted out the chair and elected Joe, whether or not he was screaming, “I don't want the job”. It didn't matter. All the way through the contempt of Parliament hearings at the end of whatever Parliament that was, which I was chairing, it was a very hard time.
Nonetheless, it's always been a bit enjoyable. Certainly I think this chair is the best chair to hold in the House, if it weren't for the Speaker's chair. That's the best role there is, getting a group of people to go in one direction. Even though they want to hit each other with the oars, they start pulling them in the right direction.
David, you're right that it was always a failure if we couldn't come up with consensus, because that's what we're supposed to do when we're sent here.
I said it at the dinner for retiring members that 308 men and women—soon to be 338—come to this place, all for the same reason, all for altruistic reasons. We all come here saying we're going to make our little area of Canada better. And we all do. We do it in drastically different ways. And we do it with drastically different political principles or philosophies. But that doesn't make one right and the other wrong; it simply makes them our own, and that's what makes this place work.
So I thank you all for all of that. And it works really well.
To the help, to the researchers, and especially to Marie-France, I had a few other committee clerks, you'll all remember. We had some other committee clerks who weren't nearly as good. They could look themselves up.