To be able to discuss these factors in a meaningful way during a debate on clause-by-clause considerations is impossible to do in five minutes. That's what this motion is seeking to impose on this committee, and it is failing to allow reasonable consideration of these factors in order to do the bill.
We have a responsibility here and we have an opportunity here to continue a reasonable process. We were supposed to meet today for two hours. We have a meeting scheduled for next Tuesday for two hours. We have a meeting scheduled for next Thursday for two hours. We have a series of amendments that are here that can be discussed reasonably and be debated one way or the other.
If this were next Thursday, if this were a week from today and we had only gotten to clause 10 and it was apparent that we were never going to get finished and there didn't seem to be any effort to make any progress on the legislation, if those were the circumstances we were in and this motion was before us to try to obtain some reasonable period of time for consideration of the bill, well, then it would be understandable. I think Canadians would understand that you can't drag things out forever and not have a discussion on the merits and not get to the substance of the bill, and you can't hold up things indefinitely.
But we're not talking about that, Mr. Chairman. We're talking about a situation where we spent two hours on Monday discussing something that was for the first time before Parliament in a reasonable and meaningful way and almost got through it.
Today, if we had used our first meeting to talk about the next clauses of the bill, I'm pretty certain that we'd no longer be dealing with clauses 10 to 38, because they would have been dealt with. They would have been dealt with because there are no amendments before us regarding the child sexual offences, or there would have been a motion before any amendments came forward to deal with those clauses as a group and I think it would have been accepted.
Of course, clauses 32 to 34, for some reason known only to the drafters, ended up being inserted in the middle of that child sexual offences part, but that would have been dealt with separately. My guess is that we'd have gone beyond that whole provision and that we'd be either in the middle of or certainly would have gotten to the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act and be able to talk about the merits or otherwise of some of the provisions I was just referring to, clause 39 being the first one.
There's a whole series of references in the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act amendments that we feel need some discussion, and we'd probably be there now or we'd be partway through that before this was out.
Then we'd have next Tuesday. Well, if it looks like this thing is dragging on forever, then we could hear from the other side as to what consideration ought to be given to the provisions of this act in terms of time allocation. But to start today, and to put everybody in the situation that you put us in now, saying that today is the only day available for debate on clause-by-clause and we're not going to move to this debate or debate any clause-by-clause unless this motion is accepted is asking us to participate in and agree to a process that says we're not going to get proper consideration for this legislation. You're asking us to do that. You're insisting that we do that or else you're refusing to have any clause-by-clause consideration.
This is the all-or-nothing approach that the government has taken here, the all-or-nothing approach that either you do it our way today or we're not going to do it at all. That's the proposition in this motion before this committee: “Either we get our way by having this bill passed today, out of this committee, or we're not prepared to consider any amendments.” We're not going to consider the amendments that have been proposed already, before Tuesday--not the amendments proposed by the Province of Quebec, the reasonable amendments to the Youth Criminal Justice Act, and not a consideration of efforts by Professor Nick Bala, who came before us to argue that some of the provisions here are going to have negative long-term consequences on the youth criminal justice system in Canada. We're not going to consider those; we're not going to talk about those.
We're not even going to talk about government amendments, of which there's a handful that the government itself has proposed. We're not going to talk about them. We're not going to talk about any amendments unless the committee agrees to pass a motion to only have consideration on this day between now and 11:59 tonight. If we won't agree to that, if we won't let that pass, we're not going to have any consideration on clause-by-clause. That's what we've got here.
We had a simple proposition put forth by Mr. Goguen, as soon as the committee opened, to say that clause-by-clause shall only continue until 11:59 tonight. At that time all motions will be deemed to have been put and the bill will be reported tomorrow to the House of Commons. And any clause shall only have five minutes of debate per party. That's what we're debating right now, whether we'll have clause-by-clause only today or, unless the motion is withdrawn.... If the motion was withdrawn, we could start clause- by-clause. I suppose they could keep going. They could use their majority to keep going, but they're not doing that.
They've got a motion that actually imposes a deadline and limits debate. They didn't come here this morning, start going through clause-by-clause, and let us go, and then at 10:45 move a motion to continue and see if there were enough people available, who didn't have other commitments, to work on this bill. They didn't do that. They didn't even wait to see what level of progress might have been made during committee this morning. They came in with the hammer and said, “No, no, we're not going to consider clause-by-clause unless you pass this motion first. We're not going to move to clause 8 unless this motion is considered first, and if it's not accepted, we're not going to have clause-by-clause.”
We're objecting to that, Mr. Chairman. We're objecting to that on behalf of all of those who elected us to do a job in Parliament that involves giving due consideration to legislation, giving it the consideration it deserves.
We've heard it said in the House--I don't know if you heard it said here--that these pieces of legislation were before Parliament before. Some of them were. Some of them actually went to committee. Some of them were amended in committee in the last Parliament.
When I look down the row here, on this side of the committee, there are at least three people who weren't in that Parliament and who weren't part of that.
The fact of the matter is that amendments were passed to some of these bills, the nine bills, when they were before committee in the past. These are amendments that don't show up in the bills we have before us. Essentially those arguments that were made and accepted by this committee in the last Parliament have to be made again, have to be brought forward and argued. But the government is saying, “No, we're not prepared to have enough time to do that. We're only prepared to do whatever can be done today and only have five minutes for each clause.”
When you bring an important piece of legislation to the House of Commons and you invoke closure in the House of Commons, or time allocation, as it is now called, you invoke closure in the House of Commons because you want this to get to committee for a proper discussion. Then you go to the committee and you say whatever discussion you're going to have has to take place today, and it can only be five minutes for each party on each clause. That's what's going on here. It doesn't matter that we've got a majority government. The majority government is a recognition that there's an opportunity for the majority party—