I'll try to be brief too. I know we want to wrap this bill up today, and we don't, and I don't, want to extend this.
As much as I could agree with a lot of what Mr. Dechert and Mr. Woodworth have said, if it was just this one bill, fine, but the speech writers and slogan guys in your backrooms have preceded you.
We are supposed to be adopting a short title, not a big long paragraph commercial. This is supposed to be a short title. I will just refer members to other legislation we now have in front of us.
Bill C-21, the long title is “An Act to amend the Criminal Code (sentencing for fraud)”. The short title is called—believe it or not, this is supposed to be short—“Standing Up for Victims of White Collar Crime Act”. This is how the bill is expected to be cited by people in courts of law, and the short title is actually not very short.
And as if to really, really cap this, Bill C-16, which is simply called “An Act to amend the Criminal Code”, the government drafters have walked away from the short title, which is what we normally do—give it a short title so people can refer to it. They now describe Bill C-16—go check it out—with an alternative title. Why do we need an alternative title? It now reads, “This Act may be cited as the Ending House Arrest for Property and Other Serious Crimes by Serious and Violent Offenders Act”. How short is that?
So I am sorry, but in this particular Parliament, it is my hope that members, legislators, will grab hold of this—the attempt to torque the short title of a bill for a political purpose—and bring the thing back to a normal level where we can have a nice, clean, accurate short title.
That is why Mr. Murphy took the approach he did, and that's the approach I'm going to be taking in the future. And we'll have a chance to debate this again probably.