Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Mississauga South.
I do not know if anyone read the Globe and Mail this morning but there is an article by Norman Spector, a man who is hardly a great friend of the Liberal Party of Canada, having been Brian Mulroney's chief of staff and a former ambassador to Israel. Regardless of whether we agree or disagree with him, he is a noted commentator on the political scene in Canada.
He starts his column with a trenchant observation that no one should be surprised when the public interest gives way to what interests the public. He goes on in his article to point out that there are quite a number of areas in which public policy gets lost in favour of what is political expediency.
Jeff Simpson makes a similar observation when he says, “What's going on here is part of a pattern set early by the Harper government -- the making of political commitments in defiance of”--