That's an excellent comment.
I used to work with a lot of people. It was very moving for us as members. In fact, if you look at it from the government's point of view, it was obviously doing its best, but you can't change government agencies or programming systems, including the old age security system. I'm not even talking about businesses. The initial calls actually came from individuals. Entrepreneurs were something else. We had to completely rethink the machinery of government. Parliamentarians haven't even been able to meet safely until now.
We proceeded on a temporary basis; we held meetings and there were rounds of questions. I know that ministers' offices were prepared to answer all calls. Some of my colleagues from the opposition parties told me they had access to the ministers' offices and had answered their questions. They really wanted to help citizens who had problems.
We have to identify problems and key factors. I'm definitely not someone who follows all the COVID‑19 testing developments. Medical issues really aren't my field. In any case, we didn't even understand what the virus was.
If we wanted to be a responsible government, we had to stop working and take a break in order to reset the government, which is a political tool… Politics isn't bad. Politics is the set of activities, vision, policies and programming that a government has to put forward to ensure the proper governance of the country. Our Prime Minister had to prorogue at that time.
As my colleagues said, we can discuss or ask questions about the reasons for the prorogation. Frankly, I have to say that Parliament should have been prorogued earlier. We were in the middle of a crisis.
I have my own way of doing things. As soon as we got more information and control over COVID‑19, I wanted to know what we were going to do for people who needed help.
We all know we're living with this virus from day to day. There are always surprises.
We were doing our best, controlling what we could control. That's why we needed a new plan, to know how we would manage the pandemic and the financial crisis. We had to prepare to recover from the pandemic—which, we hope, will happen soon—based on an economic recovery plan.
Prorogation was entirely appropriate in my opinion. It was the right decision to make at the time.