Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague who, of course, is the youngest person ever elected to this place, an historic figure, very cool.
When I listened to the question, I immediately started to think about a detailed answer, but it struck me that back in the bad old days of the Mike Harris government in Ontario, the education minister was actually recorded saying that the government was looking to create a crisis in the education system so it could fix it. Create a crisis that does not exist, tell everybody, “Look at this mess, it is falling apart”, much like the length of time they are talking about, saying “Oh look how awful this is, and we are going to solve it. We will step in.”
Then the solutions they provided were much worse than the circumstance and even worse than the crisis they had generated. However, that is how they did it. They created a crisis and told everybody, “See, it is not working. We have to fix it.” They call the horrible thing they do “the fix”. That is an easy storyline to follow and it is very difficult to counter that, to get people to focus long enough to understand that they have artificially created this problem and it gives them the opportunity to say, “Here is the solution”, which of course is something they could not have done if they did not have the crisis in front of them.
It is not surprising that a number of the front-line cabinet ministers are from the Mike Harris government. It is not surprising that the former chief of staff to the Prime Minister used to be the chief of staff to Mike Harris.