Mr. Chair, tonight I am thinking about my dad quite a bit, clearly because I'm going to share another one of the phrases he used to repeat to us all the time. It was, “A lack of planning on your part does not make for an emergency on my part.” I understand the timelines that are related to this bill, but we had literally 11 hours discussing this bill. If this was such a key, pinnacle piece of legislation, the government could have introduced it weeks earlier. It chose not to. It chose to use a guillotine motion. It chose to allow us to have two hours of witnesses before the committee to study this.
I was looking up, just for my own interest, Bill C‑11, which was almost verbatim to what it had been in the previous Parliament. It was studied in the previous Parliament. Parliament fell, and then it got brought back. It was allowed to have 80 witnesses come to committee. I think that perhaps that was a little excessive, but we were allowed to have two, and they were ministers.
Frankly speaking, I understand that there is a timeline, but this is a timeline that was fully within the control of the Government of Canada. It was fully within the control of the ministers who brought this legislation forward. Had the government House leader done his due diligence, he would have brought this legislation forward much earlier and we would have had an opportunity to provide more meaningful contribution to and study of this bill rather than be pushed into an absolute corner.
I'm sorry. I think this entire process highlights that this is broken. We're not even following our own Standing Orders. This is a sham and an absolute shame.