Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I'm going to get off the topic of debate for one second because I was trying to be polite and not raise a point of order in the middle of Mr. Bellavance's speech, but I would like the record to clearly show, or somebody to put on the record, that while Mr. Eyking did clearly breach, in my opinion, Mr. Hoback's parliamentary privilege by taking the floor away from him--without just ruling him out of order, but clearly taking the floor away from...Mr. Richards. Thank you for the correction, Mr. Bellavance. When the challenge of the chair occurred, our chair had the dignity to not sit in and vote, as he could have done, to overrule the opposition on this.
So our side isn't playing partisan politics on it. I want to congratulate the chair for trying to keep some kind of balance with this.
That being said, Mr. Chair, I would like to get onto the topic that we're talking about here, which is Bill C-474. While I believe that Mr. Atamanenko has put this bill forward with the best of intentions, as I've read in several articles and talked about to several of my producers and stakeholders, this is a bad bill. This may have good intentions throughout it, but the bill itself is a bad bill. I don't want to get into all of the different aspects of the bill, but I believe many of my colleagues have brought forward many of its negative aspects.
One that really concerns me is moving away from the science-based approach to a market-based approach. I would like to spend a couple of minutes talking about the crux of this and why it's important to take care of it right now. First of all, while this is continuing to go on, the industry is in turmoil. There is uncertainty as to whether this bill is going to be passed or not. I've had many industry representatives come to me about that.
Mr. Easter shakes his head at me, but the fact of the matter is that Mr. Easter.... And no more backroom games here. Let's get it all out on the table. Mr. Easter has come to us in the past and said he's going to vote against this bill. Mr. Easter has come to us and said let's just bring it to committee for a little bit and get some hearings on it and then we'll vote against it there. Well, Mr. Easter, you can't simply gut the bill in committee and not have it heard from again. Mr. Atamanenko will simply bring it forward in the House and there will be a vote anyway.
You ask why we don't simply move forward on this quickly. Well, because Mr. Easter has not only flip-flopped on the long-gun registry--and I'm not going to get into that at length, but he has flip-flopped on issues when it comes to the agriculture committee, on issues when he's dealing with colleagues on this side, so there's really no trust left from our side with the Liberal ag critic. We really don't know...and we all know that his party uses the whip more effectively than our party, which has more free votes than any party in the House of Commons. That's a fact, Mr. Chairman.
The crux of the matter is that I really believe if Mr. Easter wants--and I want this on the record--to move forward for farmers, if he wants to do the best thing for farmers.... If all he wants to do is spend his last dying years as a member of Parliament on scandals and doorknob press conferences, then he should resign today as the Liberal ag critic and let somebody sit over there who can make deals that we can actually trust and move forward on for farmers. So I think Mr. Easter should do the honourable thing and resign so that we can move forward--