Thank you, Mr. Brassard.
I thank you for the opportunity to work with you in your time as House leader.
I did make a choice to be here. I tried to give a bit of a colour of where that choice came from and I've tried to comport myself differently over the last seven years. What I seek to do is to encourage others to firmly shape those boundaries in their own world, in their own lives.
You're right: I do, as a guiding principle, try to be irrationally reasonable, so I'll talk for a second about pairing and my friend Arnold Chan.
Before he gave his last speech, it was incredibly painful to see Arnold in the state that he was in, and I do believe, actually, that he would have come to Ottawa despite the fact that he was in the stage that he was in. One of the things that I know about Arnold and that anybody would know about him was that as he was spending his last days on this earth, his duty to the job that he loved and the people whom he served meant that he wanted to be able to do that, so he dragged himself in. I don't know if people remember seeing him in the lobby huddled in a ball trying to sip water to find the strength to drag himself into the chamber—