Mr. Speaker, first I want to say how much all of us share the view that the hon. member for Saint John should live to be 117. However, we do not know if we want her to hold her seat that long.
The member makes a good point. He was asking me what went on in that time, which is not completely over, of misrepresenting political life and the perks that go with it. I was very hard on members of the Reform and Alliance earlier. It was not only them, it was also a general sense which they both contributed to and also played off of and exploited. The tragedy of it is, as politicians we do not want to be a closed club in which we defend our collective habits, come what may, no matter what. On the other hand, we all need to defend politics collectively because politics is the art of democracy. If we do not defend the democratic enterprise, if we do not defend the democratic task, if we engage either collectively or individually in calling that down and feeding public cynicism about it, then who will?
The member may not like this answer, but I personally feel that the extent to which the Conservative government created a lot of cynicism about politicians and politics, which was sometimes centred on the prime minister, was that this was part of the problem. From my point of view, I would like to see more decisions made here about Canada's public life rather than elsewhere, rather than in the corporate boardrooms or by trade bureaucrats or in the courts or by the first ministers or in all of the other places where decisions are now made that at one time would have been made here.
Everything we do collectively or individually to disparage this place for short term political gain is, in a way, an unprincipled attack on democracy. That is not say that we should not be critical or that we should not encourage public skepticism. Skepticism yes, but cynicism no; criticism yes, but exaggerated attack no. We have seen too much of the negative and not enough real reflection on how important it is to hold this place up, and not for our own sake. If we do it only for our own sake, then we do nothing. We hold it up because in so many ways this place is under attack.
There are many quarters in this country, both politically and non-politically, which take joy, which celebrate, which rejoice in the erosion of the power and the prestige of parliament. They would like decisions to be made somewhere else. We should all keep that in mind every time somebody sticks a microphone in our face and we are tempted to say things that perhaps we should not just to get on the news.