The relevance is as follows. The most reliable story you can write as a commentator is to bemoan the loss of the golden age of civility in Parliaments past. What a shame it is that we are sliding toward less and less decorum in the House, less and less respect, and so on.
I want to say, number one, as a historian.... That's my profession; I'm an historian. I've written books on Canadian history and have read through early debates of the House of Commons. I can say emphatically, as a historian, we're all sober here. We don't physically assault each other. We don't rush the Chair. We don't climb over the furniture. Hence we are way ahead of our 19th century colleagues. Whenever the golden age is being referred to, it was not the golden age of Sir John A. Macdonald, and it wasn't the period that came after him through the 20th century. Now I'm old enough that I can actually be a bit of a piece of history myself. It wasn't the age of the third Chrétien government when I arrived here, or the minority government that followed it, or the two minorities with a change of administration that followed that. We've actually been getting more civil.
Now I wish that, in the interests of scientific research, I had brought into the House a decibel meter for each question period. I would have to have moved it around, as it's quieter along the edges than it is in the middle but, my goodness, we have become so much more civil, measured simply by volume, than we were when I first arrived here. We have improved so much—