Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I just wanted to set things straight on a number of facts.
My colleague and friend Mr. Rayes said several times that the government had made a mistake. It's not the government that rejected clause 3 of the bill, but rather the committee members. We are all independent members of the committee. All MPs on the committee, whether from the Liberal party, the Conservative party, the NDP or the Bloc Québécois, voted in favour of removing clause 3.
And then even the Conservatives wanted to amend clause 3 of the bill to limit the scope of the proposed clause to certain users, while ensuring that others were not subject to it. Now if the proposed clause was so terrible that the Conservatives wanted to introduce amendment CPC-5, why do they feel so strongly about the deletion of this clause?
It's too bad that the debate has taken this turn.
The other thing I want to say is that regardless of the scope of the amendment that is proposed, I maintain the position that I stated. I'm not seeing that it is absolutely desperate to finish things in one or two days. I am saying that without seeing the scope of all the amendments on the section that has been amended, it would be impossible to make sense of a new charter statement.
We need to finish the amendments and continue the clause-by-clause study so that at the end of the results.... We know there are other amendments coming forward that have not yet been debated that deal with the exact issue of the removal of section 3. There are other amendments that deal with exemptions from the CRTC for users of social media and posts that are put up. How can any attorney then give a charter statement without having the full scope of those amendments? It doesn't make sense.
The reason to continue with clause-by-clause consideration is to finish all the amendments so that the person doing the charter review can then look at the overall context of the bill, including any and all amendments and including those amendments that are still to come forward that deal with this very same issue. It makes no sense to say that we're stopping now, that we can't consider further amendments that we know are coming forward, but we want a charter statement.
I support what Mr. Shields said, which is that we stop at the end of the amendments. We don't send the bill back to the House. We then get a charter statement taking into consideration everything that happened during clause-by-clause study. From my perspective, we do whatever we want with the ministers and their presence or non-presence. Then, if need be, because we haven't sent it back, we return to other clauses of the bill if the charter statement tells us something that I don't expect it to tell us.
However, it doesn't make sense to stop clause-by-clause consideration to get an interim charter statement when there are other relevant amendments that deal with the very same issues.
That is my perspective. I just don't understand why there's such a desperate need to have the charter statement before those amendments are brought forward and before the public and, most importantly, the lawyers drafting the revised charter statement can consider those amendments vis-à-vis the deletion of clause 3 of the bill.
If there were no other amendments coming forward on this issue it might make sense, but amendments are coming forward on the very same issue that would definitely change the position of any lawyer reviewing the bill.
I'm not going to speak to the wording of this particular amendment, but that is what I think should happen.
Mr. Chairman, I would like a brief word from you. Are we continuing past 1:00? If we are, perhaps we could have a suspension so we could all just take a brief break and come back.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.