Madam Speaker, the member for Pictou--Antigonish--Guysborough makes a good point about the ethics counsellor. There was a promise to create an independent ethics commissioner, and I think that was the original language, that would be an officer of the House and that would report to the House. That was never done. I think that is a source of a lot of the problems the government has had over the last nine years. If it had actually kept its own promise and put that kind of person in place, it would have been able to deal with some of the problems that occurred on the other side.
The member mentioned closure. He was anticipating my response when he said that I might want to reference other governments. He said that because he knows that when he asks me about closure I often refer to the frequency with which Progressive Conservative governments that I was familiar with used closure.
Clearly this has become a feature of parliamentary life which we should abhor. We need to find a way to negotiate, all of us, in such a way that really important issues get the kind of attention they need. Instead what we have is a parliamentary culture in which if something is really important, we debate it for a day and if something is not that important, we debate it forever because when--