Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague for noticing the passion and excitement in that speech.
As a party, we have just finished an exciting and amazing weekend electing our new leader. This is a culmination of a leadership race whereby our party has raised almost $10 million to the Liberals' barely $2 million. Our party has 260,000 paid memberships. We have just elected a new leader, a young man who has five children, drives a minivan, and is completely different from the current Prime Minister. He understands the needs of middle-class Canadians because he is a middle-class Canadian. I am pretty excited to be here today looking forward to our new leader's first showing here at question period as our leader.
As to what my honourable colleague from the NDP talked about, he is right that there really had been goodwill. We had been working well together. We had been having good debates, but votes would happen and the government was able to move its legislation through.
However, when we say to somebody that they are to do what we want and we have a gun to their head, that does not make for good conversation. That is what has happened with the Liberals. They are forcing changes through, and it is always for their benefit. It is always to make life easier for them. It is always to make life easier for the Prime Minister, easier so that members of Parliament might not have to be here on a Friday.
Frankly, when the House is not sitting and we are in our ridings, I understand that, absolutely. However, when we are here, we should be open for business five days a week. When the House is sitting, we need to be here five days a week. We know the Liberals really have an aversion to that, but we are not going to stop fighting this idea.
We would like to get back to a place where we can keep working together and keep doing the work of the House, but the Liberals do need to make some changes if that is going to happen.