His staff, of course.... That goes without saying about all of us, let me tell you.
But Joe's a smart guy through force of personality. He always had his eye on the prize, but he also knew how to use humour. Remember, this was in the Harper days when the way we are right now would be like a regular Tuesday. So far this is unusual, and I would hope it would remain unusual, but Joe would use all the techniques that a chair can bring, from his personality, his caring of the issues, moving things along. I felt for whoever was going to follow in his footsteps, because we all sang his praises, and I'm sure I'll have an email from him by tomorrow that he got mentioned again, because he still keeps an eye on these things. By the way, he's somebody we should bring here. Do you want to talk about fairness and democracy and how to do things? We should bring in Joe Preston as a witness, but that requires getting past where we are.
Mentioning him was deliberate because it also gave me a segue to mention that the last time around when we were reviewing the Standing Orders, Joe, Tom Lukiwski at the time too, and I were very strong that we at least take a run at the Standing Orders. They don't send out federal marshals after you if you don't get to the Standing Orders, but that is your obligation.
He made sure that we found the time, and it was one of those low-lying fruit processes that we've been using already. We didn't get to the tough stuff, but we did go through it all. We agreed on a number of things. We did get a report off to the House, and I think it made a difference. That was under Harper. That was under the bad guy, remember. This is what floors me. We did the right thing, the right way on exactly the same file under a Conservative chair with Harper as the Prime Minister, and it was light years more democratic than what the sunshine crew is doing here.
I leave that again to you, Chair. Often our rights, like the right to filibuster and fairness in the chair, are the only things we have as the minority up against the absolute 100% power of an overwhelming majority government, which is what we have right now.
Anything you can do, Chair, to get us more into a Prestonian era and not let the Bagnellian era be known as the dark one when their leader is promising sunshine.... By comparison there was Joe under the ogre of Harper, and he managed to get to democracy as we dealt with the Standing Orders.