Madam Speaker, I was very interested in what previous members had to say, and I think that it would be useful at this juncture to remember why we are here tonight.
For three and a half years, we have had a Conservative minority government. Before that, we had a Liberal minority government. This is actually our second Conservative minority government. In other words, this is the third time that Canadians have decided to give their government a minority mandate. This is a sign that people want us to find ways to work together.
We just heard the Liberals talk about cynicism. The member for Toronto Centre said that it is not working anymore and that people have become too cynical about politics. I would like to review a number of very relevant facts.
The minister across the way made the point well before in response to one of the Liberal members when he said that this is an attempt to make Parliament work. That is exactly what Canadians are expecting of their elected officials.
The NDP has consistently stood up for its principles in voting for the things that the people who put us here have asked us to do. Let us look at what the Liberals have actually done in the last couple of months.
These are the same Liberals who love to waive their index fingers under other people's noses. They voted to remove a woman's right to equal pay for work of equal value. They voted to destroy the Navigable Waters Protection Act. We voted against it and if this type of thing ever comes up again, members know that we will vote against it again.
What is on the table today is $1 billion for employment insurance that the leader of the New Democratic Party was able to obtain when he held out his hand and said, “We want to work in the public interest. We want to make Parliament function. We cannot go through a situation where Canada has an annual general election”.
Rather than spending $350 million on an election that nobody wants and that probably will not change anything, we are going to be putting $1 billion into the pockets of 190,000 Canadian families. That is what we were put here to do.
I was listening before when the member for Papineau stood and started talking about all his ancestors and his relatives who had been in this House. There is an old Irish expression that when the only thing people can talk about is their ancestors, they are a little bit like a potato. Everything that they have of interest is under the ground.
However, let us look at the actual dossier, the actual results of the Liberals on the environment, shall we? Talk about corrosive cynicism.
They signed the Kyoto protocol. I was listening as the member for Toronto Centre got weepy, got teary-eyed in his defence of the former leader, the one that he helped backstab. He got teary-eyed about what a wonderful man he was. Let us look at what he did when he was environment minister, and let us look at what Eddie Goldenberg admitted the Liberals had done in signing Kyoto.
In the spring of 2007, Eddie Goldenberg, the former chief of staff to Jean Chrétien, gave a speech--