Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the comments of the President of the Treasury Board and I take them in the spirit in which they were offered. I am perfectly well aware that on the first few days one is here very nice things are said and, from my experience in two other times, the only other time we hear similar comments are on the day we are actually leaving the chamber. I will take these comments in the spirit with which they were offered.
It was a very famous Conservative, Edmund Burke, who once said “there is nothing more dangerous than governing in the name of a theory”, and I am sure you, Mr. Speaker, will be familiar with that comment. I think I can mention Edmund Burke's name because he is dead. Although he was a member of the House of Commons but not this one.
However, what troubles me about the Conservative Party is that it has, in my view, slipped over into the error almost on the other side of where the NDP has gone. In a sense, we have three ideological parties in the chamber. We have the Bloc, which is committed to the breakup of the country and is committed to a very old ideology of nationalism which is quickly becoming more and more irrelevant. We have the Conservative Party on the opposite side, the government side, that is intentionally ideological. We have a New Democratic Party that, as I have described, has somehow failed to turn and failed to move. We have a Liberal Party that is a pragmatic, practical and progressive party and one that I am very proud to be a member of.