Yes, John Fraser was Speaker of the House, and he's a dear friend of mine and Linda's. The nature of partisanship was that it did not continue past the election. The party strategists controlled the House business, and there was far too much engagement by partisan strategists who were looking for their big win in the next campaign, as opposed to looking for how to serve the people who elected us and sent us here.
I would love to see the spin doctors and the strategists be given a nice long hiatus between elections, and stay out of the business of Parliament. While that role is here, it undermines.... On this, I agree with Linda. There's good in having a political party that lets voters know the general thrust of the issues that engage the different candidates who represent them.
When you look at the growth of political parties, I remember I was shocked the first time I realized that up until the early 1970s, Canadian voters looked at a ballot with just the names of their candidates on it. No party was referenced on the ballot. One problem they had in Quebec, apparently, was that quite often they'd end up with candidates with the same name. So what do you do when you have two Pierre Lafortes or two Ayottes? They thought they had to identify them differently.