Madam Speaker, I listened with interest to what the hon. member opposite just said. In a way, he just sang the praises of the port of Montreal. The fact is that Montreal did do rather well after all. I say after all on account of the statistics referred to earlier by the hon. member for Laurier-Sainte-Marie, data from our revered Statistics Canada indicating that for every dollar it pays in taxes to the federal government, here, in Ottawa, Montreal gets only 75 cents back. All in all, Montreal did quite well on its three quarters out of a buck. But how much more would Montreal have been able to accomplish with that last quarter? That is the real question. You see, for decades now, the problem has not taken the form of sword of Damocles dangling over our heads, but rather that of a ball and chain that we have to drag behind us all the time and that keeps getting heavier and heavier every time we send money to Ottawa. We keep getting less and less back and end up getting shortchanged.
I notice that the majority of government members standing up are not from the Montreal area. Where are the hon. members for Pierrefonds, Saint-Laurent, Verdun? I am not saying that they are not in the House-