Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We have seen the Minister, over the last hour or so, change from being the cool, calculated, calm, collected Minister of Finance. We all expect finance people to be like that. They are very much controlled people. When we get into the more warm blooded business of dealing with economic development, especially when you are talking about development that takes place in exotic places such as Seville, then suddenly, another personality emerges, which I find very refreshing. I did not realize Mr. Pollard was capable of so much passion. I congratulate him for that. There is hope.
In making these comments, Mr. Chairman, I would like to commend the government, although it was much too late to have a proper debate and discussion on this, it is the kind of thing which can happen in our form of government. These are the kinds of things which governments do everything to hide. Whenever they do something wrong you find a thousand ways of hiding it. That is one of the weaknesses of provincial systems as they exist right now. Is that you do something wrong and then you hide it because you do not want your government to look bad, or your party to look bad and you never learn from your mistakes. They just keep on doing it because the public does not know half of the time with regard to the mess that is going on around them. I feel very good that this review was done in a very professional fashion and it showed us the problems that all armies have when they have to fight wars in distant places, when they are cut off from their headquarters and the supply lines, they are dealing in a foreign country with foreign languages. It is very difficult. Things such as a different financial system and trying to mix them, all those kinds of things we could have predicted. However, we did not do that. We went ahead because we are young, bold and enthusiastic and felt that we could conquer the world. We really did not do it.
I also agree with Mr. Pollard's comments about the young people. I know many of them who went there. I am sure that they represented the people of the Northwest Territories very well. After all, all we ran there was a restaurant and a gift place. We were not running a big pavilion. We had a small part to play. There were not too many things, in sense, that could go wrong because we were not mounting a big exposition of our own. We were performing two very straightforward functions. If you look at it dispassionately, it was not that complicated. Because of the conditions in which we had to operate in, we obviously found ourselves coming up short in the way that has been very dramatically given to us in these reports.
I think it probably will not serve much purpose in continuing with this discussion at any great length this evening. I feel good about having this kind of information in an open forum where we admit our mistakes and also show some indication and willingness that we are going to learn from it. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.