Mr. Speaker, I listened with interest to my colleague. I always find him thoughtful, sincere and well-spoken and I do have the utmost personal respect for him.
I gather he can the Prime Minister's mind. That is quite a feat.
I will not bother going into some of the crises that prevented us from getting to some of those things he would like us to get to, which we are getting to now. I will point out that perception for some people equals their personal fact. Other perceptions for other people may be a diametrically opposed fact, but that is okay.
I am pleased to hear the members of the NDP will support it, that they will work with the government to perhaps make the bill better, hopefully, at committee and wherever else they can. That is welcomed.
However, I will ask him to comment on one thing. When he said we did nothing to increase the number of police officers, that is patently untrue. There is some difficulty in doing that. We cannot just go to Wal-Mart, to the police section, and pick police officers off the shelf. We have to recruit them, train them and retain them. The robust economy that we had up until recently has added an extra challenge.
Would he agree that we have made efforts in that area? We are not there yet, we have a ways to go, but perhaps an outcome of the current economy is that it may be easier now to recruit members to the RCMP, members to the municipal police forces, and we will perhaps make more progress toward our goals.