Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Just to continue on with the very compelling argument made by my colleague Mr. Lawrence, we're talking about the most important piece of legislation a government can table in any particular year. We're asking for the Finance minister to come to the Standing Committee on Finance to answer questions about her budget for two hours. We can't seem to get that commitment from other members of this committee.
It makes me wonder, and I want to return to this argument, about the omnibus nature of this bill because, as members might recall, I actually read quotes from the Prime Minister during my last meeting. He commented on the nature of omnibus legislation and said essentially that he thought omnibus.... I'm just paraphrasing now because I can't seem to put my hands on the actual quote, but I did read it into the record before.
He said a couple of things. Gone are the days when legislation is not coherently strung together with a consistent theme. Gone are those days when bills are created that have a hodgepodge of everything but the kitchen sink thrown into them. He said that when he was the leader of the Liberal Party running to be Prime Minister. He went on to say that this type of legislation is undemocratic. I agree with him.
What's very alarming to me is that the government should have learned its lesson about this three or four years ago when the budget implementation bill of the day—I think it was 2018—came to this committee and had this innocuous clause buried in it.
Now to be fair, the committee members at that time did speak about it. The Liberal members and the opposition members alike discussed their concerns about this idea of giving the Minister of Justice and Attorney General a power that office had not ever held before in Canadian history. It was the power to reach into the public prosecution's office and to alter the course of a prosecution. It gave a politician that power. That was buried in a budget bill. That should have been its own bill, frankly.
That's why I'm so concerned. What happened? The committee members were kept in the dark. It turned out that there was a hidden agenda. Prime Minister Trudeau had a hidden agenda when that provision was introduced into that particular budget bill, because he knew with that provision he could help out his friends at SNC-Lavalin who were under a very serious—