Mr. Speaker, I am glad you held up the discussions that were beginning to develop here so that I could offer a measured opinion on behalf of all of my constituents and all Canadians on the bill. It restores my confidence in the fact that this place can actually work when there are men and women of goodwill who take the public interest at heart. It is the public interest that I want to discuss for a moment.
One might think some of this strange, given the events of the last few days in the House of Commons with respect to confidence and trust in the way that we manage and adhere to the common interest through budgetary measures and through legislation that is designed to ensure that the public good and the public interest is safeguarded through the way that governments spend money and in the way they regulate the generation of wealth, the redistribution of wealth and the incursions of other entities and other corporations in the Canadian marketplace.
I do not want to be partisan because this should not be a place where partisanship dominates, but we need to keep in mind that we have, through our electoral process, given the House and, through it, one party at least, the authority to present a budget to meet the needs of all Canadians.
Through all of that, there is a particular underlying ideology that Canadians have expressed through the electoral process that says that we need a government that can take a measured approach to establishing a regulatory system that provides for the appropriate structures of market development and the protection of Canadian entrepreneurialship in that marketplace that we have come to define as geopolitically Canada.
I will be speaking at some length to this but I think my colleague from Scarborough—Guildwood, an eminent member of Parliament and an eminent member of the finance committee, would also like to speak on this. I, therefore, want to share my time with him and I hope the House will allow me to do that.