Mr. Speaker, my understanding is that Mr. Chrétien was opposed to the bank mergers but Mr. Martin was very much in favour of them. I heard that through people who were very directly related to that situation, so clearly there was a vigorous debate within the government of the day about what was to be done. In fact, those were probably the cues taken to the senior bank executives when they announced in Toronto that they would merge. They probably got signals from Finance Canada at the time, which was then headed up by finance minister Paul Martin, that it was okay to merge. However, clearly someone higher up in the government, the prime minister, had different ideas, and that is why those mergers were not allowed to proceed.
With respect to the government's 10-year plan for infrastructure, we can bank on the fact that the government has delivered a record-setting amount of infrastructure funding over the last five years. We can bank on the government's past actions as a predictor of its future intention with respect to this 10-year plan that starts in 2014.