Mr. Chair, while it's true that the government introduced this division as stand-alone legislation, Bill C-60, back in 2009, they did not bring it forward for second reading and it was never debated in the House. The bill was reintroduced a year later as Bill S-13, but again, at the time it was not a priority bill for the government and it died on the order paper.
This is the first time these legislative changes have come up for debate in the House. It does require more consideration, and frankly, to say that these were considered under different legislation, under different parliaments in the past, does not reflect the reality that we do have a different Parliament, and the makeup of the current Parliament is quite different from the makeup of the last Parliament. We have new members of Parliament who have a fiduciary responsibility to oversee legislative changes.
It's not enough to say that we considered these in previous parliaments. The people spoke in the last election, much to my chagrin in some ways, but the reality is that a different Parliament was chosen by the Canadian people, and as such this Parliament—the current members of Parliament of all parties—has a responsibility to ensure full oversight. I think this is not enough, and that we ought to have engaged and enabled the members of the current Parliament to have more time as they do their jobs at the appropriate committees and to provide oversight on these legislative changes.