Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague from Ottawa—Vanier for his remarks. I particularly appreciate his tone and personal remarks. I have known the member quite well over the last few years working on the Canada-Africa Parliamentary Association. I have the greatest respect for him and for his love and commitment to this country, but we disagree on some areas of how we should approach that.
I have always had a great deal of difficulty especially with the Liberals in defending the unnecessary Senate by virtue of the good work, the good reports and the good deeds it does. My thinking on that has always been, that is great, and there are some wonderful people there, but if we need them to do good deed work, we can create a committee, commission, or task force so they can do that work. The issue is that they ought not be allowed to have a say in what the laws of the country are because they do not have the legitimacy to do it, so I do not buy that argument.
I do want to ask about the notion of the check and balances, a favourite phrase of the Americans in their system. In ours, I do not see any check and balance. The hon. member mentioned one example where the Senate corrected a mistake or found a mistake here in the House. I served on two local councils and in the Ontario legislature and mistakes, unfortunately, are made all the time. However, they did not have a Senate or an overseeing body. They just made the corrections. In Ontario we did six amendments to fix one bill. It took a lot of time, but we were able to do it. We have the tools. There is nothing they do in the Senate that we cannot do here. I would like the member's thoughts on this.