No problem.
It's important for the interpretation to be working properly.
I'd like to refer to a document prepared by the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat in 2005. It's an overview of ministerial responsibilities and accountabilities. It's interesting. I'm going to quote a few excerpts.
It states:
Ministers, who together as the ministry form the government of the day, exercise executive authority in this system.
Here, “this system” is the Westminster system of parliamentary democracy. It continues:
These ministers...are accountable to Parliament both individually and collectively. All accountabilities in Canadian government flow from ministers’ individual and collective accountability to Parliament.
Although Parliament does not exercise executive authority, it is the principal guarantor of the government’s accountability, scrutinizing the government’s policies and actions and holding it to account. Parliament has a spectrum of tools for doing this, ranging from its role in the passage of legislation to the review and approval of public expenditure to the interrogations of Question Period.
I'm going to get back to question period in a bit. You'll see why it's relevant. It continues:
But while the specific tool may vary, the environment remains constant—that of partisan politics.
This is in a Treasury Board document. It continues:
Parliament and its processes are inherently political.
Here's what I would like to say there.
I know that the concept of partisanship can have a negative connotation for many Canadians, but all it really means is that most elected representatives are members of a party and take a apolitical approach. They believe in a set of ideas, values and policies, and a way of seeing the world.
Within each of the political parties, there is a shared vision of how the organization is run, how to deal with problems and how to govern society. There's nothing wrong with that. You can't mince your words. If a partisan reason is given, then that needs to be pointed out. To be sure, most parties focus on having their members elected. However, I can tell you that's definitely not the goal of the Bloc Québécois...