Thank you, Chair.
Thanks to all the witnesses for being here and for all your briefs. We've all had an opportunity, I'm sure, to read over those and listen to your testimony. It's all very interesting.
We've had representatives from the International Fund for Animal Welfare visit my office, and we've had a bit of this discussion. The situation we find ourselves in with this bill is a little odd. We, as a Parliament, obviously have rules that you are all probably becoming familiar with over the course of the debate on animal cruelty. We deal with one bill at a time in a committee like this. Usually when we have a bill before the committee, whatever the nature of the bill, our discussion is focused predominately on the bill in front of us.
The way things usually work here is that we don't pick one bill or another. That's what makes this issue complex. For one reason or another, whether it's deliberate or not, it's been put to parliamentarians to pick one piece of legislation or another, and that is actually not the way we usually operate. Usually we have a bill in front of us, and we decide around the table if we support the bill or not. Then we decide on other things on other days. We can only really deal with what's in front of us.
My colleague Mr. Bagnell put this question to the panel of witnesses: do you support raising the penalty for animal cruelty? I didn't hear anyone say they didn't support that. I haven't heard any of the members around this table say that they don't support increasing the penalty for a conviction under animal cruelty.
The problem we're faced with is that we have a bill in front of us that admittedly does only one thing: it increases the penalty for animal cruelty. We have a panel that's saying we should increase the penalty for animal cruelty, and yet we're being told not to support the bill. I'd like to know how people reconcile that.
Some witnesses have said that they liked another bill better. That's fair enough. The only problem is right now, today, we're not dealing with that bill. What I would say to that is that we can only deal with this bill now.
We've had all kinds of legislation in this committee on gun crimes, for example. The police come, and the bar association comes. On impaired driving, MADD Canada will come, the Quebec Bar Association, and victims groups. We are never under any illusion that there will never be before this committee another bill dealing with gun crimes or another bill dealing with impaired driving.
The witnesses come, and they say they support this bill because it does this, or they oppose the bill because it does that. We don't usually have a witness say that they support what the bill does, but it doesn't do everything they want so they want us to oppose it now. I've never had anyone say that before now.
In light of that, I'd like to put it to any of the witnesses to comment a bit on the peculiar situation that I think we're being put in. It's a bill that does something that every one of you is asking us to do, and yet some are asking us to oppose it. Does anyone have any comments on that?