I am going to quickly address some of the stuff that has been said. This idea of delay, that somehow this is the Conservatives trying to delay things, I think having Mr. Kmiec here is a good reminder of exactly how capable we are of delaying things for a vast amount of time if we choose to. The fact that we're not filibustering or doing long, lengthy speeches here should be evidence enough that this is not our intention. If that were our intention, we could certainly do that, but we're not trying to do that at all. We simply want to ensure that the committee has all the information available. I don't need to reiterate the points made by my friend Mr. Nater, because I think he outlined it pretty well.
I don't buy the argument that nothing could be provided to this committee. Maybe the full report in a hardcover book would take a few months to come up with, but there has to be something that is accessible now, something that would provide us with at least some general information as to what was heard through those consultations. There has to be some information provided to us. We've heard a lot of testimony. From what we heard as a committee, I don't think there was a consensus on how this should look going forward. Maybe some further information would give us some idea of what that consensus is.
Just to summarize, this is not an attempted delay. If that was what it was, you'd know it. It wouldn't be very hard to figure out. I don't understand or buy the argument that there isn't some information that could be provided here. I don't understand why the government is so reluctant to provide it. Hopefully, they'll think better of this and provide something that could be helpful to this committee. That's all this is about. I hope we can all agree that we should have all the information.
I would think as parliamentarians each of us should take a look at this and say, “Hold on. Our job as legislators is to try to make sure that we're making the best decision possible”. I don't like the idea that we have to rush to make a decision today rather than wait until Tuesday or whenever. It wouldn't take long to get that information to us. The information could probably have been presented in the amount of time or less than we've spent arguing about it.
I appeal to those on the other side to try to do their jobs as legislators and make sure we have all the information required to make proper decisions, as opposed to rushing to make our decisions a few days earlier without the information we need. I can't understand why anyone wouldn't want to do that.