Mr. Speaker, I was not here for the entire speech, but I did get portions of it. I got the good parts for sure.
If I could share with some of the new members in the House, this is significant. This would not be unique in past Parliaments. This is my sixth Parliament. In earlier Parliaments, committees at least were able to work together to find results to present to a minister and make recommendations.
I remember sitting on fisheries and oceans with the NDP, my colleague and friend Peter Stoffer, and John Cummins, Reform or Canadian Alliance and Conservative. John is a great friend of mine. There would be the right, the far right, and the extreme far right, and John would be just a little bit further than that. He was a great guy with the fishery. He understood the fishery. Out of 18 reports that we had done on that committee over the course of time, 16 of them would have been unanimous. Somewhere in the middle, Peter Stoffer and John Cummins would come together for the benefit of stakeholders in the industry, in the fishery, for the environment, and come forward with recommendations.
It was not until the last Parliament that the well was poisoned, and committees morphed into this thing that was just nothing more than a day care for MPs. The Department of Environment had greenhouse gases and global warming, yet we were studying the impacts of hunting and fishing on the environment. I think their time could probably have been better—