I just want to apologize to Linda Duncan if this came across as disrespectful. I am the leader of a federal political party, and we have a very grassroots process for developing our policy, and that is an important part of who I represent here. What I find lamentable—and I've been doing, goodness knows, over decades, a lot of reading and developing a larger sweep of history around it—is the growth in power of political parties. Maybe that's what I should have said.
I turn to one of my favourite political scientists in this country, Peter Russell, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Toronto. He wrote a terrific little book. It is short. It is, I think, essential reading for people interested in our democracy. It is called Two Cheers for Minority Government. He goes through the history of false majorities and minority parliaments, and what minority parliaments were able to accomplish. The point he made in that book was that he put a lot of the difficulties in our political culture down to the growth of well-organized and powerful political parties.
When I first worked in this building, I was senior policy adviser to the federal minister of environment from 1986-88. Linda and I were already friends. We've been friends a long time. In 1986-88, when I worked for the federal minister of environment in the Mulroney administration, there was much less partisanship in Parliament. There were shots taken in question period, for sure.