Okay, no problem. We've been here for many, many hours, Chair, so a few extra minutes won't make a difference.
The proposal is to just breathe life into this private member's bill. As my colleague mentioned a few minutes ago, the right of a private member to bring a bill is something that all of us in the House need to protect and encourage. We need to make sure that our legislature is strong through the creativity and the genius that private members contribute when they do something like Mr. Shory has done by bringing this bill before us. After hours and hours of debate, which we would all concede has not necessarily been relevant to the substance of this bill, it's now time for us to look at making sure we can focus on just that.
I've seen a private member's bill through from the beginning to the end, and I know how many hundreds of hours might be contributed, how many stakeholders may have invested, how an MP may have consulted broadly within his riding and among the people who are affected.
In this case we have a member who is trying to speak to the importance of Canadian citizenship, the importance of peace and security within our borders. All of these things are threatened to be suffocated by a lack of opportunity for them to be reviewed by the House of Commons. I stood in the House quite recently to fight for the rights of members to do the type of thing that Mr. Shory has done, so I find it really ironic that any members of the House, in any party, would try to suffocate the substance of a bill through a procedure.
You're a lawyer, Mr. Chair, and you know that the courts are able to stop an action for want of prosecution, but at the same time judges are governed by a doctrine to keep alive the substance of a suit if they are able to do so. In this case what we're talking about is keeping alive the substance of a private member's bill, because if the amendment isn't passed, then the private member's bill will die. For all of those who have said in this committee that the private member's bill is really the result of third parties, government or otherwise, how ironic that is, because they are the same people who are threatening to rob the private member's bill of the real hearing, the hearing that comes in the House of Commons.
Mr. Chair, it's increasingly evident as we sit here that the time has come when we move ahead, we breathe life into this bill. We do what we can, not necessarily to pass it, but to give the bill the opportunity to be passed, to give the opportunity of legislators to reject it, but at least to make sure that the bill goes from life support into its healthy state that it needs to have in order for the debate to be fulsome, clear, and democratic, just the way Canadians want us to have a debate.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.