Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I apologize to our guests. We're trying to cram in a little committee business before we get to you. I will speak as briefly as I can.
We've looked at this report in terms of the approach we are taking to the study of the recent Conservative omnibus bill. It will come as no surprise to my Conservative colleagues that, under this Conservative motion, the challenge the committee has is to divide the bill, in name only, so that committees around Parliament will then do a nominal study of various aspects, because the bill is so complex. However, none of those committees will be allowed to make amendments to the bill based on the witness testimony they hear. As you know, Mr. Chair, doing that is the job of parliamentarians, and we don't have the power to allow other committees to do that.
Under this process, they will then kick it back to this committee and, if history is any teacher, the committee will then take a rapid-fire approach to voting on amendments to a complicated bill when almost none of the voting committee members around this table will have seen the witnesses and heard the testimony. This is a bad way to do policy. This is a bad way for the government to conduct itself, and this has led to problems in the past. One would think that the best teacher is experience. The government has been through this before with these monstrous bills, and has taken this approach as a half measure due to the complexity and the massive non-financial elements of this particular piece of legislation.
Conservatives, I remember fondly, used to rail against this technique when in opposition and have since put the technique on steroids and made it common practice. It shouldn't be. It is an uncommon thing to act this way.
We have a massive tax treaty buried within this bill, the so-called FATCA, which may expose as many as one million Canadians. There are measures on temporary foreign workers. There are measures on reducing hospital fees.
There are measures within this legislation that deserve the respect we as parliamentarians can give them by doing our job. That's why people elect us and send us here.
With that, Mr. Chair, we argue that if a compromise can't be found on the way this legislation has been drawn up, the link between the work of committees and MPs will be broken. Committees were created in the first place to study legislation, hear witnesses, and affect legislation through amendments that we think are viable. The past has also taught us that on these omnibus bills—and I can't recall a single amendment from the opposition having been adopted by the government through hundreds and hundreds of pages of omnibus legislation—the government has refused virtually every single amendment based on expert witnesses. There is all of that as well as the experience that the government, in this omnibus bill, has had to fix measures from the last omnibus bill, which had in it measures to fix mistakes from the previous omnibus bill, so obviously the model has its shortcomings.
I'd implore the government to reconsider this approach. It doesn't work for them, and it doesn't work for the opposition, and it certainly doesn't work for the Canadian public we are meant to serve.
With that, in recognition of our guests being here, Mr. Chair, I, for my part at least, don't want to prolong this conversation. I don't know if other colleagues will have things to say, but this motion, as presented by my Conservative colleagues, does much of nothing other than provide confusion in a parliamentary process that's vital over a piece of legislation that is some 300 pages in length and that affects many aspects of Canadian law.
I suspect the next omnibus bill will have to fix mistakes that are in this one. What a way to run a country. It's no good, and I wish the Conservatives would hearken back to the position they held when they were in opposition and they had so much distaste for this type of technique.
I'll leave it at that, Mr. Chair.