Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise again to speak to this legislation. I was thinking the other day about how many people have actually put work into this since the issue first got started. The first time I heard about this legislation, I was not even a member of Parliament. I now have been elected twice, although I know that in this current era we tend to have elections more frequently.
The first time I heard about this I was actually watching Hockey Night in Canada. I saw one of Canada's more well-known citizens--some would say distinguished and some would disagree with that--Mr. Don Cherry, discussing the matter and going on about how ridiculous the ruling by the government was and how it was harassing hockey players in Saskatchewan. At that time, there was a very excellent member of Parliament for Souris—Moose Mountain, Roy Bailey. He began to get this going because he had the Weyburn Red Wings and the Estevan Bruins in his riding, two hockey teams that were affected by this.
He worked on it for a couple of years and tried to work the back and forth between finance and national revenue to get the problem solved without having to go through legislation. In the previous Parliament, in 2004, there were 12 or 13 Conservatives elected from Saskatchewan. The member for Cypress Hills—Grasslands moved an almost identical piece of legislation to try to solve this issue. At that time, it passed in the House. I must thank to the members of the NDP, the Bloc Québécois and the odd Liberal who--