Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I listened to a program called "As It Happens" last night. It deals with current events right across the country and there was an interview with a man called Peter Dobell who runs the Parliamentary Centre in Ottawa.

Mr. Speaker, the Parliamentary Centre did a survey of Members of Parliament who served in the last federal Parliament. They waited a year after the defeat of the Tory government of Mr. Mulroney before contacting Members because they wanted to measure the impact of the federal election on Members of Parliament a year after the event. Some interesting facts have emerged from surveying all of these Members.

The first one, Mr. Speaker, is those Members who retired and did not seek re-election were, for the most part, happy, contented and had adjusted to life outside of politics. Many decided to pursue other options, people like Mr. Clark, for example; Mr. Don Mazankowski; and, John Crosby, who is now the chancellor of Memorial University. The second point is that of those who ran but were defeated, only 50 per cent after one year have found employment. They were not very happy people because they had not been able to adjust to life outside of politics.

Many of the people who were surveyed noted that in the rejection letters they received for employment, the fact that they had been in politics had been given as a major reason for turning them down for employment. It was no longer seen as an advantage of having served the public because the public no longer felt, at least employers no longer felt, that whatever had been learned there had any relevance to the kind of work they were seeking to do. This particularly applied, Mr. Speaker, to Tory and NDP Members whose parties had been rejected quite thoroughly by the electorate in quite large numbers.

Mr. Speaker, those who did find work, examples like Mr. Perrin Beatty, were very rare. His appointment as the head of CBC was an exception. The vast majority of defeated Members who had served as backbenchers, and these were the vast majority of people in that Parliament, were now living on their pensions with little prospect of entering the workforce.