Mr. Speaker, I would first like to thank my colleague for his excellent question.
It is true. We know that the Conservative government did not want to have to deal with questions about the Senate because the Senate is clearly its Achilles heel. That is where the government has failed on every count. It appointed a number of senators who have been playing politics for many years, probably at taxpayers' expense in some cases. Perhaps that is not true and we will have to see what the RCMP investigation says, but this is clearly a serious problem.
With regard to the Speech from the Throne, it is true that the Prime Minister did not see fit to address the issue. When I asked the Minister of Transport a question about the throne speech, she said that I was not supposed to speculate on the speech. That is strange, because everywhere in the media, whenever I turned on the radio or television, there were questions about the government's intentions. Let me just remind my Conservative colleagues that the whole point of the Speech from the Throne is to make the government's intentions known, so it is only natural for people to ask questions.