Mr. Speaker, the first thing I want to say is that I regret very much that my leader is splitting her time with me because I think she was on a roll there and I was sorry to see it end.
I think she was speaking to the underlying question that is of concern to anyone who is concerned about the state of democracy in this country and that is the way in which the preoccupation of the House with scandal and corruption, both real and alleged, has a tendency to call into disrepute the whole democratic process. I think she made a good point when she said that to some extent this serves political parties well, at least those political parties between whom there are not a lot of fundamental differences, in the sense that they like to focus on each other's ethical and administrative behaviour because there are not a lot of policy differences between them. Certainly this has been a condition of Canadian politics for many years.
I certainly remember that this was the case between Liberals and Tories and then between Tories and Liberals and then between Liberals and Tories, or did I get it the wrong way around? They did not want to focus on policy matters because there was not a lot that separated them. We certainly saw that after 1993 when the Liberals came in and carried on with all the policies that had been established by the Conservative government prior to that time. However, when they were in opposition, for the same reason that my leader outlined, they were very fond of scandal-mongering. Unfortunately the minister of public works may have created a little bit of bad karma for himself when he was so good at scandal-mongering himself when he was a member of the so-called rat pack.