Mr. Speaker, I listened intently to the speech of my colleague and I would like to ask him a very simple question.
Is the government's lack of leadership with respect to the vote issue not simply a reflection of its lack of an action plan? The Minister for International Trade, for example, said there was an economic slowdown. The Minister of Finance said there might be a deficit. One day, he says there might be a deficit and the next he says the opposite. After all these statements the Prime Minister himself said that the economy was doing very well and the situation was not so bad.
Could we say that the democratic deficit we see in the House and the government's lack of leadership in this regard are demonstrations of the fact that the Canadian government is now totally disabled by the Prime Minister's lack of leadership on this issue?