Right. I'm a little off on my math there. I must be thinking of a few other things.
Scott comes at this from a certain perspective of an MP who has been around, seen it all, seen the good, seen the bad, and, really, in a non-partisan way, I will say. Scott certainly calls it like he sees it.
My perspective is different. I came to the Parliament to be an MP more recently, obviously, in 2015. I joked the last time I talked in PROC that I consider myself a seasoned veteran—but not really. I don't kid myself. I have so much to learn. I do the best I can. I want to be a good representative for my riding. I want to convey the hopes, the dreams, the concerns of my constituents in Ottawa. I want to represent this riding the very best way I can. I certainly would never say Scott hasn't been out in the real world, because he certainly has. I come at it much more recently, and from a different viewpoint.
I look at this as somebody who always is saying, “What do Canadians really think about what we're doing? What do Canadians really think about the motion, and to be perfectly honest, MP Turnbull's amendment to the motion?” I know there's give and take and there's compromise and there's back and forth.
Obviously, the Conservative Party has a certain outcome they want to see from this, which is fair, and we have a certain outcome we want to see from this. Typically when you have a motion and then an amendment, there needs to be some compromise. There needs to be a way to meet in the middle. I know my Conservative friends won't agree with this, but there's also a time when I think all parties need to step back and say, “Okay, we've made our point.” We could say, “Look, we've made our point. We've defended it.”
This is where I'm coming from, Madam Chair. A business person who lives in the real world—I shouldn't say the real world, because certainly this is the real world too—has to do things like balance budgets and make payroll and deal with agents and sign and trade players, all those things. There has to be a point where, as parliamentarians, we need to realize the country, our constituents, want us to move on. They want us to move past this.
As MP Simms has said, I think it's significant that the Prime Minister has testified. I think it's extremely significant, unprecedented, and wanting him to come back.... I hope MP Vecchio will indulge me here, but the original motion—and don't worry, Karen, I won't read it out; I promise—cast such a wide net, such a wide net, that it was blatantly obvious to me that the Conservative Party just didn't get the answers they wanted to get.
It's not that there weren't answers. It's not that there wasn't testimony from the Kielburgers, the Perelmuters, the Prime Minister or Minister Rodriguez. It wasn't that questions weren't being asked. It was that the answers weren't what the other parties wanted.
I'll very quickly give you some context. My riding, Saint John—Rothesay, is a great riding. I'm very proud of my city, as I'm sure anybody that ever hears me speak knows. I think it's on one of the Parliament sites, on ParlVU or whatever. You get that word chart or graph about words you speak most often. Mine was Saint John—Rothesay. I don't apologize for that. I'm proud of that. Every time I speak I talk about my riding.
I really wasn't a political person. I briefly served in the student union at UNB. I first became politically aware and cared about the riding when Elsie Wayne was the member of Parliament for Saint John—Rothesay. Elsie Wayne was larger than life. We couldn't have been further apart in our beliefs from an ideology standpoint and what we wanted to champion. Elsie Wayne was very well known and a long-standing MP of this riding. I think she was there for 11 or 12 years.
For one term the riding switched back to Paul Zed, who was a Liberal MP. Then from Paul Zed it swung back to the Conservatives, and MP Rodney Weston. Then, obviously, it went to me. If you go back through the long history of this riding, I'm actually the first member of Parliament to win the riding back-to-back as a Liberal. I'm really proud of that.
The riding itself is a mix between great business success and a lot of challenges with child poverty and social issues. The meat and bones of this riding are union, middle-class, hard-working Canadians, who are represented here and in many ridings across the country.
People in this riding are extremely concerned with respect to the pandemic we're in, number one. The variants are number two. International travel, vaccines.... I walked by the television on my way in about an hour ago and I saw a flash which said that India today—I may be a little off my numbers and I apologize for this—had 315,000 cases of COVID diagnosed in one day. In one day, India had 315,000 cases.