Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to ask the member for Cumberland—Colchester—Musquodoboit Valley a brief question. I want to say that I appreciate that the member for Halifax West has asked the question because I think he would be the first to be willing to acknowledge that he was not totally persuaded at the front end that this was doable.
When we sat together with John Hamm, the premier of Nova Scotia at the time, he expressed some reservations quite openly. What we saw is that the more people did get their head around what it really meant for Nova Scotia, then none of us was prepared to take no for an answer if working across party lines and across jurisdictional lines we could actually get the Atlantic accord into an agreement that would be honoured by the Government of Canada.
The member for Cumberland—Colchester—Musquodoboit Valley is quite right to suggest that maybe we should now be calling it the “triple-A agreement”, the amended Atlantic accord.
My question arises out of the response that was very clear from Nova Scotians yesterday to the gutsy stand that the member took in saying that he could simply not live with the broken commitment. There was an actual accord that needed to be honoured and he could not live with any other outcome.
I was also struck by the fact that Premier Rodney MacDonald made it very clear in his commentary to the media, and I have no reason to think it is not accurate reporting because I read it again and again, that he also acknowledges that this is a broken promise, that it is not fixed and that there is no offer on the table to fix it. I want to know whether the member has any advice for the rest of us on how we can work together to support the current premier in trying to get this fixed and what efforts he has made and to what effect.