Madam Speaker, I loved the speech of my hon. colleague. I want to make a comment and then ask him a question.
In December the government said that it needed to prorogue the House because it had to recalibrate, that it had to listen to Canadians, so it padlocked the doors to this chamber. In the meantime, a whole lot of other places were being padlocked too, workplaces in Ontario and indeed right across the country, such as U.S. Steel in Nanticoke, for example, where it padlocked the doors and locked the workers out. Workers were profoundly worried about their jobs, their pensions and their wages. That happened from coast to coast to coast.
Did the government listen? No. A short time after saying that it had to prorogue to recalibrate and to listen, the finance minister was in the Toronto Star saying, “We know what we have to do. We have to stay the course”. Staying the course means that we have 1.5 million unemployed Canadians. We have 810,000 Canadians who are about to run out of EI. We lost valuable House time for us to be debating those issues and to be bringing solutions to our constituents in our ridings.
One of the things that was so heartening in my hometown of Hamilton about the prorogation rally was that people got it. They knew it was not about us and our right to speak. It was about the right of their voices to be heard in this chamber.
Could the member comment on what the rallies were like in Newfoundland and whether the response by Canadians, particularly young Canadians, was as positive and as vehement as it was in my hometown of Hamilton?