Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague again for his speech. However, I do not know why my friend insists that there are no bogeymen. I am sorry, but I do not know how the member would say that in French.
I really do not understand why my hon. friend insists that there is a government bogeyman here that is going to somehow take away the authority of the local responders. That has never been the case. It has not been the case in the past. It is not the case now. It will not be the case in the future. Nowhere in the legislation does it imply that.
Clearly, the province of Quebec, thanks to my hon. friend, has a very refined emergency response procedure from the local level on up through the province to the federal government where it is necessary.
There are many very talented and smart Canadians living and working in the province of Quebec as there are in the other provinces and other provinces have refined plans as well. It really baffles me why we are insisting that there is some kind of usurping of Quebec's authority from the local level. That is just not the case.
I also point out to my hon. friend, and I think he did bring it up, that the failure in Katrina was in fact at the local response level and more so than anywhere else.
I ask my hon. friend with respect to the ice storm of 1998, which he mentioned, does he appreciate, and I am sure he does, the fact that it did go from the local emergency through the province to the federal authorities, and in fact internationally where most of the big generators that were moved around in that emergency were in fact transported by U.S. air force C-17 aircraft?
Does he not appreciate the fact that it has always been a matter of what is going on at the local level that drives the response and that drives it up through the chain from the province to the federal government? I guess I would ask him why he insists that there are bogeymen here trying to take away the authority when that is just not the case, other than it might satisfy his local politics?