Mr. Speaker, I listened carefully to what our colleague from Richelieu said, and I wish to congratulate him on his re-election to the House of Commons. We have known each other for a very long time, he and I, and we sat together on several committees, interparliamentary bodies and so on.
I must tell you, Mr. Speaker, that I was rather surprised by what our colleague opposite said. He just said that since his arrival in 1984 or almost since then, he has found that the federal system was not working and, to quote him, that there was a lot of waste.
Nevertheless, a few years later, while he was still a member of the Conservative government, his present leader, when he got elected as a minister-he was a minister even before he was elected as the member for Lac-Saint-Jean, as I recall-some $25 million in promises had been made for a byelection in Lac-Saint-Jean, Mr. Speaker.