Mr. Speaker, first of all, I would like to thank my colleague for his speech, his steadfastness, his interest in this matter, his very important documentation and, above all, his knowledge of the situation because I am going to ask him a question about what is actually happening.
All Canadians and all Quebeckers have seen in the news something that they had already heard about. However, over the holidays, we started seeing for ourselves, through television cameras, teams responding to real situations. This is a tragedy of huge proportions.
I would like to thank the member for pointing out the staggering number of victims. We would have addressed this some time ago except that this is a subject that elicits strong reactions, sometimes very unreasonable ones, from the Conservative Party.
Can my colleague explain why in the last 16 months the Liberal Party lost touch with what is happening? This is not a new issue; it has been brought up many times. We knew and said in advance that it would be a major problem if we did nothing. They did nothing.
Why does he think that they lost sight of the issue even though many members are from that part of the country?