Mr. Speaker, I do appreciate the comments from my hon. colleague.
On the first point his comments are well taken. However, with respect to the point he made about misleading, I do believe if someone is intentionally misleading and those comments are directed to a person in debate, that it is cause for question. I believe that misleading and using that term within debate and in reference to government is not a point of order nor should it be taken to mean anything other than exactly what I stated. It is a personal opinion of mine and it is probably carried by many others as a matter of fact.
The member's second point was a little bit rambling and I will try to extrapolate from it what exactly he was getting at. We have been dithering around for months on the whole question of unemployment insurance. I know everyone was waiting throughout last year for some substantive items to be put on the government agenda. It is rather unfortunate that the hon. member chose to cite gun control as an example of legislation. Gun control legislation took up the agenda of the House of Commons for months and months and months. We are going to go into committee and we will have only 50 hours in our committee to deal with witnesses on one of the most important pieces of social policy legislation this government has put forward. Therefore, I really have to question his comments in that regard.
The other thing is about the analyses we requested. It is our understanding when we go into a briefing by and with government officials that if the questions we ask are not answered on that day, that at least they are going to be followed up on at some future point.
These are questions of a fiscal nature and are very important for the analyses, especially when we are looking at such job creation programs as the $300 million one that has been put forward in this bill. I do not think those requests were out of line or out of order in any way.
Those are my comments to the hon. member. Once again, let us hope we can leave off the dithering and actually get down to some very basic work in this extremely important area of social policy reform.