It's probably me. I'd rather not think about it, but I'm pretty sure it's me. We all take our work seriously. This stuff matters. We weren't going to play games with our election laws, and we didn't play games with them.
The dynamic that Mr. Badawey saw, I would say, was about kind of a normal discussion. Sometimes it's not as good. It can get a little bumpy and stuff, but other times—I have to tell you—we're firing on all cylinders, and everybody has ideas, and it's all the chair can do to manage everybody and to keep their ideas alive but to hang on to it.
It's really like us, Alexandra, when we're working on a report at public accounts. We have a common goal. We are holding the bureaucracy to account in implementing the government's policies. It doesn't matter who the government was when the policy was made or when it was implemented; our focus is on the Auditor General's report that analyzed how well the bureaucracy implemented and carried out the procedures they it should in carrying out the policies of the government of the day. We take that seriously. We work together as one unit. If you walked into our committee room and we were sitting in different chairs, I think you'd have trouble telling which one of the members were government and which ones were opposition. To me, that's the purest sign of an effective public accounts committee.
Alexandra, Madam Mendès, you know exactly the kind of culture I'm talking about, and how stimulating it can be to work together as a group. As a rule, parliamentarians are—I make myself the exception—interesting people. MPs are interesting people. They have interesting lives. They're usually very good communicators. That's how they got elected. They usually have a great sense of humour.
When we're in camera and working together, it really is enjoyable. You have a lot of smart people who are there for the same reason. Nobody is the boss. Everybody is kind of sovereign in their own right. We have a common cause. We have great coffee, great staff, all the brains we need to get us through the exercise, and hopefully we pull our political ability and bring it all together. It is actually very stimulating, and I enjoy it far more than screaming, hollering, and yelling at the government, which I have done a lot of and still have to do from time to time, but it's not my favourite.