Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his thoughtful remarks. He is right. We have had a lot of these discussions before. I do very much appreciate his giving me the opportunity to talk about proportional representation.
If we really want to go a long way toward offsetting some of the less than pure aspects of the way that we represent ourselves in this country, many of us believe that proportional representation would allow us to go a long way toward correcting that. Many of us believe that may be one of the keys in terms of what we do with the Senate ultimately. If we really want to get angry, we do not have to go too far down the hall to look at what is going on down there for $100 million a year. Then we really have something to get angry about with all those appointed people making decisions about the laws of this land and they are not accountable to anybody. That is something to really get enraged about.
I say to the member with the greatest respect, when I go home to my riding I am going to take heat. I have no doubt about that. I have wrestled a bit with that, as I am sure every other member has too, but at the end of the day, Hamiltonians are just as proud of being Canadian as anybody else in this country. This is the piece that is necessary to build that strong country so that all of us, regardless of what province we live in, benefit from that.
I am from Ontario, the biggest province, but not necessarily the strongest anymore. Ontario is not really known on the world stage. I would like to think it is, but it is not. The fact is it is Ontario, Canada. The beauty is that Canada's strength and its respect are things that all Canadians get regardless of what province they are in.
This is all about us inside the boundaries of Canada determining how we go about maintaining this country, building on it and making it even stronger. Quebec is definitely a part of that future and that equation.