Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'll be supporting the motion, but I have a couple of amendments.
Briefly, this is a train wreck for no reason. We had Bill C-27 tabled in the House of Commons. The reason it's tabled in the House of Commons and goes through first reading is so that we can have discussion and it can be publicly examined, not only by ordinary citizens but also by the groups that want to have input. That's why we have a process of debate. It took a long time to get out of the House, and it came here.
I won a prima facie case in the past because my ability as an MP was impeded by the actions of another government. It resulted in changes, to this day. This is how I view it: You had the minister come forward. He talked about amendments. There were going to be goals and objectives from those, which had to be clarified. After this was clarified, I had a point of privilege, and then it was admitted there weren't amendments. Government members went back to saying, “Tell me more about these amendments.” We're back to where we shouldn't have to be. I've heard nothing but shock from people who are interested in this bill. What is the government's agenda on this?
I think it is a fairly reasonable approach—and that is my appeal—to look at getting the three privacy ones in front of us. In fact, it should be separate legislation. However, the government created flawed legislation by putting three acts together when it probably shouldn't have done that. That was a critical error to begin with. This was raised, and it's probably one of the reasons why, structurally, we have issues right now. There's no reason we can't do some of these things separately. In fact, it would have been wiser and we would have actually gotten things through.
To me, the minister can't just come here and say, “Okay, we have eight specific amendments” and then not provide them—not for us, but for the other people coming here. We have groups and organizations paying lawyers to draft legalese and make submissions to us. They need to know what's in front of us. We don't have that anymore. That's terribly unfortunate. Having the background letter from the minister is fine, but I also want to go over a best practice.
I knew it was going to be bad when it began, because the minister.... A lot of times, ministers come to committees with prepared documents and table them for members to go through while they give their presentation. That's a fairly common practice. A minister will come with a preamble and even the material they will present. Not only did we not get that.... I asked for that. I made a joke about how we'd have to put that testimony into ChatGPT to create the amendments for the minister, because that's all we have to go by.
I want to see whether we can move forward with some consensus here.
I would like to amend the motion to have the three privacy amendments...and I would also like to make an amendment to drop section (f). The reason for dropping section (f) is that—I'll be quite frank—I don't need the minister to come here anymore. I just need his amendments so others can see them. I don't need to have another group of clown cars showing up and distracting us from the work we have to do. That's what this is about. For my part, I would like the three privacy amendments to be tabled, and I don't need the minister to come here anymore. I want to get on with the work here. I can't have people continuing to speculate about what they have to present in front of us. It continues to be like a dog chasing its own tail. That's what we're doing right now.
I'd like to amend section (e) for the three privacy amendments; it can just say “privacy amendments”. Then I'd like to drop section (f), because I don't need the minister to come here.