Mr. Speaker, we had evidence of that just recently. A good example is with respect to the committee on the decriminalization of drugs. The committee was still in the middle of its hearings when the minister was already coming out saying that he thought we should start to decriminalize marijuana. The conclusions had not even been formed yet by the committee and already the ministers were out stating what exactly they were going to do. This is a very common thing and we see it all the time. Certainly finance is no stranger to this. We have seen it at many points in the past.
I expect what we will see is that the government will come along and cherry-pick from the report. It will say that it will do this and that but it will not respect the intent of the report. In many ways that is regrettable because, although I have not gone through the entire report, I do know that there are many good things in there and they do reflect in many cases exactly what people are thinking. However a lot of it will not get enacted because the government has no respect for the democratic will. It does not care what the public thinks. If it did, we would not be in the situation we are in today with Kyoto.
In the little town of Brooks, Alberta, where I live, we have over 200 companies related to the oil and gas industry. People out there are concerned to the point of being panicked about what Kyoto could do. They have gone through the national energy program and many of them lost their homes and businesses because of that.
I want to argue that if the government respected people it would not rush ahead with these things. It would listen to people, try to understand their concerns and at least, if it is going to go ahead with it, answer their objections, but in this case it is not doing that. It is just barreling ahead and, I would argue, putting the people of Canada at risk.
I agree with my friend. There is no question that the government does cherry-pick when it comes to these reports and forms conclusions independent of what these reports say.