It's my recollection that this issue came to light when we were dealing with Bill C-60. As members of this committee who were members of the last committee will recall, Bill C-60 was one of these large omnibus budget implementation acts that included not only finance measures but a whole range of other measures that were all bound up in one bill. As with the latest BIA, it was a catch-all of many different changes and concerns, all bound up in one very large bill. As with the current BIA, it was pushed through. We had time allocations; we had severe time restrictions on our ability to study that bill. It makes it extremely difficult for members of the committee and other members in the House to be able to study and have input into changes that quite frankly should not just be the purview of the finance committee. We see changes to the navigable waters act, changes to the Indian Act, changes that will affect the RCMP, national security, and a whole range of issues in this latest bill. We even have some Supreme Court appointments thrown into the latest BIA.
This makes it extremely difficult for members to grapple with these bills. I think that is the fundamental problem we're facing. This method of throwing all of the government's agenda into one bill and then restricting the amount of debate and the amount of time members have to learn what's in the bill, to be able to discuss and debate it, is at the root of this issue.
I question whether this particular issue of independent members has been a concern in the House going back a number of years. It first came to this committee—again, if my recollection is correct—with the omnibus BIA, Bill C-60. To me, the fundamental problem is not the role of independent members; it is the nature of these omnibus budget bills. I think that's what we should be taking a look at.
With our past experience, it's been extremely difficult for members of this committee, let alone other members in the House, to even know the contents of these bills and be able to give adequate input and suggestions and to have discussion on this kind of bill. We've said this many times: it's not a good way of developing legislation.
What we do notice is that mistakes get made, and the government has to go back and correct those mistakes in subsequent BIAs, which they are doing in this one—correcting some past mistakes. One of the mistakes affected my community directly. It pertained to credit unions. We have a number of credit unions in the riding of Parkdale—High Park. I know some of you from out west have many, many credit unions in your communities. They were beside themselves that their taxes would be double what the banks were paying because of a mistake that was made in the last BIA. Now that it's been discovered and highlighted, the government is trying to correct that in this BIA.
The haste with which laws are being passed and the number of laws that are being thrown into one overarching bill are, in essence, what is causing the problem. I can say very concretely that for credit unions, for example, that had year-end reporting in the period between the adoption of Bill C-60 and the correction of this measure, there has been considerable stress and anxiety, because they have to budget and plan for that doubling of their tax. Even if the government intended to increase their taxes to match those of the banks, which we disagreed with, inadvertently, in its haste, it doubled the amount of tax they would pay to even more than what the banks are paying.
We think if there is a problem and we want to correct that problem, we should be looking at the very nature of these omnibus budget bills. There are a great many changes that have nothing to do with budgets or finance that are thrown into these bills.
I can tell you that when the finance committee ends up dealing with massive changes to the navigable waters act, which has nothing to do with finance, there's a serious problem with the way we are crafting legislation in this country. It doesn't make for good legislation. It doesn't make for good democratic process.
I believe at heart that what my colleague opposite, Mr. Saxton, wants to do with his motion is to improve the democratic process. I think he's addressing the wrong problem in order to do that. The fundamental problem is these omnibus budget bills.
Canadians as a whole are very uncomfortable with how legislation is being made. The measures that are being adopted lead to mistakes and do not lead to the best outcome.
I've said this before, but I will take the opportunity to say it again. If the government wants to make changes, say, to the navigable waters act or to the Indian Act or to the National Research Council, or on other environmental measures, it has a majority. The normal practice would be to introduce bills that pertain to each subject; they would go to the appropriate parliamentary committee, the members of which would have the expertise and the experience and would have worked in those specific fields, and they would have the opportunity to examine, discuss, debate, amend, and adopt bills in those areas.
Frankly, the practice of bringing omnibus bills to this committee and then parcelling some parts out to other committees for them to review with very little time—sometimes they get one meeting—and then bringing those sections of the bill back to finance, where ultimately we vote on them, has not been a great practice. What happens is that those who know about the subject—whether it be the environment or the National Research Council or labour legislation—the MPs who actually know about those areas and who may have questions and who hear witnesses and debate those issue, are not ultimately the ones who get to vote at committee on those bills. I think that's a real problem.
Fundamentally, it's the issue of omnibus budget bills that has created this problem.
Now, in our experience here at the finance committee, the Conservatives proposed something very similar to this motion to deal with Bill C-60, and we did oppose it at the time. We didn't think it was the right way to go because it would deny a long-standing practice for independent members who don't sit on the committee to take their amendments to the House.
Perhaps the intention of the government was to try to reach out and offer them the opportunity to participate in committees that they don't sit on. I'll assume that it was a positive intent the government had, but what we found at the last budget implementation act we dealt with was that when these independent members tried to bring amendments to the committee, they had extremely little time to be able to present their amendments. It was—
