Okay. All right.
I wanted to address as well the changes made to this bill when we were starting to run into a time crunch in May. The committee requested of the House an extension of time, which I think was a reasonable request. Along with that request for an extension of time was also an extension to expand the scope.
I think this is one of the places we ran into trouble, as I've spoken to before. I just wanted to reiterate some of the implications, I guess, of that change to expand the scope. I've spoken about before, so I won't repeat, how it changed the direction of the bill from track A to track B. The other thing it did is that it opened the door to doing many different things to the bill. The government had their ideas on how they wanted to change the bill. The NDP had their ideas on how they wanted to change the bill. I think the Bloc just wanted to get past the bill. We had our own ideas of how we wanted to change the bill. By opening up the scope of the bill, we took it as a statutory review. I think essentially that's what was happening with the members of the government and the NDP as well.
By doing so, it really caused us to step back and say, “If we have the option and the ability to actually make changes in this legislation, this very complicated Citizenship Act, what are the things we've been hearing?” That's where we were able to go back to our offices, to constituents who had spoken with us and to stakeholders who had contacted us to really go through and look at those things that had been sort of on the priority list. Essentially, the question was, “If you could fix the Citizenship Act in one way, what would it be?” Out of that discussion came the suggestions we've made.
I think people need to understand that when this bill's scope was opened up, it presented an opportunity to fix multiple things that were wrong in the system. That's what the members of the government chose to do. That's what the NDP chose to do. That's what we chose to do. When we got to our amendments, that's what they were. They were sensible amendments that were drawn from the suggestions and thoughts that we and our constituents had so that we could improve and fix things. In the same vien, we didn't want to have any unintended consequences in those amendments, so we were careful to draft them in such a way that they wouldn't do that. The result of that was to have what we call the statutory review, which is essentially what was happening.
The other thing I wanted to touch on relates to that. It still could have gone easier than it did. My colleague Mr. Kmiec made a very reasonable proposal or motion: Given that we are expanding the scope, and given that we are expanding the time, let's have an extra two weeks—I think at that time it was two weeks—to submit the amendments we want to submit. Of course, that motion was not approved. Therefore, we were not able to do that. As a result, we had to take more time here. We had to provide our amendments one by one as we went, which made more work for the clerks and everybody around the table. If we had accepted that very reasonable motion by Mr. Kmiec back in May, we wouldn't have had this issue.
The other issue I want to touch on in that same line of thinking is the fact that there was a breach of privilege when an amendment that had been shared in confidence with members was actually shared outside this room and shared very explicitly and in a very detailed way with members of the public. That is another reason there was great hesitation to submit the amendments we had. It was the risk of those being put out there in the public. We weren't sure what was going on with the committee and who was supplying that information to others.
That was another reason this took longer than it needed to. There was a lack of trust, I think, in how that happened. I'm not sure we ever quite got to the bottom of that, but we need to ensure, number one, that it doesn't happen again. It's a disappointing thing that happened. Of course, it's a well-established principle of parliamentary privilege that certain things are allowable and certain things aren't, and that was one that wasn't.
I just wanted to add those things to the record, and some of the reasons we ended up where we did on this.
I'll leave it at that for the moment, Madam Chair.