I'll be brief, Mr. Chair. I appreciate the motion by Mr. Saxton. This has been done before. That doesn't actually make it a good way to make laws. This is an incredibly complicated piece of legislation, being 460 pages in length and with 401 clauses, about a dozen of which fix old omnibus bills, so a new omnibus bill to fix an old omnibus bill, which had in it changes to fix the omnibus bill prior to that.
We're going to come to some agreement on the calendar, at least for the finance committee to study this. Our challenge has been previously and remains with this motion that we are going to, in effect, try to carve out this bill. If committee members will remember, when the first major omnibus bill came forward, the opposition, the New Democrats, tried to get the bill actually divided.
Witnesses have to come before all of these committees on these important laws that are being changed. We needed to hear the witnesses and make amendments to the legislation in real time in that process. You don't have this bit of a mess in which other committees see this bill nominally and are not able to amend it directly, and all of that gets dumped back towards the finance committee. Finance committee then does clause-by-clause over a day, because it's been ordered by the government in a time allocation fashion to deal with hundreds of clauses with we don't know how many amendments. Much of the time, committee members who will be voting did not hear the witness testimony. As the chair or the government members will point out, we can sub in and sub out MPs from other committees who may not have heard the witness. It's just a mess. This is why the mistakes get made.
This might seem procedural to some, Mr. Chair. The problem is that when you make mistakes in legislation, the effects of it end up in court. They end up costing Canadians time and money, and in other cases just make flat out bad laws.
With such a massive omnibus bill touching on so many different parts of our legislation and with the way governance is done here in Canada, it seems to be a lesson that has not yet been learned by this government. Of course, we'll be voting against this. The government members will push this through regardless, I suspect. But at some point or another they have to find a way to not have these kitchen sink bills show up in Parliament, with so many completely unrelated clauses—unrelated to the budget, unrelated to each other—and pretend that this is somehow a coherent piece of legislation, because it's not.
Of course, the New Democrats will take the work on seriously, because we do. Public safety, industry and science, human resources, natural resources, citizenship and immigration.... We could have had another dozen committees, I'm sure, brought into this. But this is as complicated a way as can be to make law in Canada. No wonder the government keeps making mistakes, which don't cost them but certainly cost Canadians.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.