Mr. Speaker, the hon. member for Glengarry-Prescott-Russell will certainly not succeed in making me cry.
In response to a comment that the hon. member for Glengarry-Prescott-Russell made earlier, the hon. member for Vancouver Quadra told him that provincial representation in the Senate simply does not exist. So, you can just forget about regional representation.
Second, I will tell my colleague that his party is in a catch-22 situation. The Liberals are defending the allocation of funds to a Senate which, according to the hon. member for Vancouver Quadra, must be reformed and improved. My colleague does not realize that, to do so, we have to amend the Constitution, and it so happens that his own leader has said clearly that amendments to the Constitution were absolutely out of the question. Do these people talk to each other sometimes? It seems that they do not talk to each other at all.
Does the hon. member not hear what his leader says here in the House? Each time he is asked a question about constitutional matters, the Prime Minister says that he does not want to talk about the Constitution. Yet, the argument invoked by the hon. member to defend the allocation of funds to the Senate is that we must improve the Senate, change the name of the game, and so on. Such comments cannot be serious.
We know full well that the Senate has no power. Senators are appointed by the Prime Minister and they have a particular job to do, a job that is partisan in nature. Everybody knows that. The Senate costs a fortune to administer, more than $42 million to be exact, and yet, as mentioned by the Auditor General in his last report, it sits only a little over 40 days a year, with absenteeism running at between 20 and 25 per cent. It is ridiculous to invest millions of dollars in such a useless institution when there are so many unemployed and so many people on welfare in Quebec and across Canada.