Mr. Speaker, I am glad the hon. member left me a few moments to respond, although he ate up more than half the available time with his question by repeating several points over and over again.
Let me start with his question regarding whether there are Progressive Conservatives still in this party. I am looking around the room right now. The House is not as occupied as it often is, but nonetheless I see a former president of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada, one of my hon. colleagues who has been listening with rapt attention to every word the hon. member for Yukon said, one of the men with whom I helped negotiate the merger of the two parties, the hon. member for St. John's South—Mount Pearl. He would never have joined a party or reached an agreement that did not take into account very seriously the values of the party that he then represented. I could go on and on.
With regard to the issues that the member points to, housing, education and so many other excellent priorities, I have two thoughts. One is, if these are such important values, why were they not in Bill C-43? Why was it that the New Democrats had to impose them on the government? That would be a legitimate question for a New Democrat to be asking me. Perhaps if one of the New Democrats had raised that question, he would have a point.
The fact is that this was forced on the Prime Minister, who was desperate to save his government and did not give a hoot for any of these priorities a few months ago. He only developed this exquisite concern he now has after he realized that it was his ass on the line. I think we should not get too high on our horses about these being high Liberal priorities. They were not priorities of the Liberal Party at all.
Let me add the fact that the reason there is a shortage of funding for some of these priorities, all of which are in provincial jurisdiction, is that the government took so many billions of dollars out of the hands of provincial governments over a period of a decade while the current Prime Minister was the minister of finance. The Liberals should hang their heads in shame for the mess they made of this nation's finances.