Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I appreciate Mr. Turnbull's intervention. I would encourage him to go back and listen to what took place. It still doesn't explain why the minister would be in front of the committee that day talking about the issue and then go to the public and do another announcement that he didn't want to share with the committee. That's more information about it.
However, let's go back specifically to what took place here and why I support this subamendment. I want to clean this up and get moving on this bill, but if we don't clean it up properly and start properly, we'll have to circle around again.
What took place was the minister sat there and said he had amendments. He then went through several things really quickly and presented them to us as amendments. Government members then referred to them as amendments. I raised a point of order to explicitly find out if they were amendments, and there was still the indication from the minister that he felt they were amendments.
We even spent our time questioning the minister about that. We not only wasted time today, if you view it that way, but we also wasted the time with the minister in front of us, because we couldn't responsibly ask him questions about what he was proposing as ideas.
The history of Parliament has been—for the most part, but not always—that the minister provides us with a copy of his or her remarks in advance. That's really the history and the best practices that often taken place. I think I've spent 17 of my 21 years in Parliament on this committee, and we often receive those. It helps everyone.
I don't understand how we can go forward again and use the time in a constructive way if we are speculating about what is or is not on the table. We're going to have to circle back anyway.
To be quite frank, I don't think it's the Conservatives with the motion here who are wasting the time with what's taking place. What's wasting the time is the government coming up with the claim that they were interested in moving this bill. They weren't prepared and they threw some stuff out at the last minute.
I don't know whether they were trying to be too cute with something or not, because they say that they don't have them. By saying they have amendments to ease off, I guess, the criticism they've heard about the bill that's coming forward and some of the criticisms that we've presented, they put themselves in this situation. I don't know how we can fix this by going through a speculative process.
I would suggest that if we do this process, another thing we can look at is that the NDP has split the bill into two different votes in the House of Commons. We have the privacy and the competition issues separated from the other, the third part. We could find a constructive way, then, to even separate the legislation if we wanted to and if there was consent. There are lots of things we can try to do, but I don't know how we go forward....
This actually goes to some of the roots of the workings of our parliamentary process right now. At one point in time, you didn't have a parliamentary secretary sitting at the table. That was actually brought in by Paul Martin because of the infighting going on with the Chrétien group that they'd had before, so they brought in parliamentary secretaries, and the committees now have a person at the table who has a set of information that's different from what the rest of the committee has. This is with no disrespect to Mr. Turnbull. It's everything else; everyone's been there. It was done under Harper as well. That's just the way it works, because of the connection to the ministers through the parliamentary secretaries.
We already have that, and then on top of that, we now have a situation in which we have specific information that might change the way the presentations are made in front of us, to which we can't provide any really intelligent response.
I support this, because I'd rather clean this up and do this right. I'd rather clean this up and do it properly. If it means extra work and whatever it is, I'd rather have that in front of me.
How am I supposed to do my work as a legislator, even with my own team, if I have no idea what the minister is serious about and not serious about? I'm going to spend time with the amendments I have, when they could be redundant, and then we all end up submitting the same thing anyway.
This is just.... I haven't seen anything like this in all my years—