Mr. Chairman, I can only say that if I ever thought there was a consensus on anything, in the time that I have been in Parliament, it has been on this issue on revocation. The previous government was going to introduce legislation when the House was prematurely defeated, and it was the expectation of an overwhelming number of ethnic groups and Canadians across this country that the Conservative government, having made a promise, would follow through on it.
Let me say to you that the Alliance Party supported it back in May 2000. The Alliance Party has supported this issue continually since then. Your members went on cross-Canada tours. They heard the presentations made by groups all across the country, and in all my years in Parliament, I have never come to anything closer to a virtually unanimous consensus. It wasn't unanimous, but it was virtually unanimous.
It was in your platform in the last election. You come in here, in your first appearance before the committee, and you tell us that the votes of the Conservative members, the Alliance members in the past, didn't represent a consensus. We took the report from this committee into the House of Commons. That received concurrence, which means it was adopted by the House of Commons unanimously. How can you say there's no consensus? By any standard, if that's not consensus for you, I don't think you're going to accomplish anything as a minister that the bureaucrats don't approve for you, because right now you're here representing the bureaucracy. You said “I'm quite a fan of the people in the department”. Well, Mr. Solberg, I am not. I don't think it's the job of the minister to be a fan of the bureaucrats in the department. It is the job of the minister to stand up for what they promise in elections, what they tell Canadians, and not to break faith when you get into office.