No. Thank you.
I was distracted by someone speaking to me while we were doing this. I apologize, Mr. Chair.
No, I was in mid-flight, but I noticed the time at ten to two, and I hadn't had an opportunity to partake of the food.
We have had a small break during question period, an opportunity to reflect on some of these things and also an opportunity to review some aspects of this question that I think are important to recount.
The chair has suggested from time to time that we should stick to the topic, so I will certainly endeavour to do that. The topic is, of course, the government's decision to forego having a reasoned debate on this in an orderly manner and to proceed to clause-by-clause consideration, unless they first pass the motion saying that it all has to be passed today. This is clearly a closure motion, or time allocation.
This is not new to Parliament. It happens from time to time. Sometimes, I suppose, it may be necessary, after prolonged debate on a matter that has gone on for days and days and when it appears that nobody is willing to cooperate. But when it happens at this stage of the debate, parliamentarians get upset about it. It's not surprising.
For example, I'll give you a quotation on the whole issue. I'm quoting from Hansard of November 27, 2001:
For the government to bring in closure and time allocation is wrong. It sends out the wrong message to the people of Canada. It tells the people of Canada that the government is afraid of debate, afraid of discussion and afraid of publicly justifying the steps it has taken.
I agree with that statement, Mr. Chairman. I want you to know the source. It was not Stephen Harper, in this particular one; no, this is Vic Toews, the Minster of Public Safety, the one who attacks lawyers for having careers as defence lawyers. I know he didn't include Mr. Jean in that attack; he was attacking specifically the House leader for the official opposition.
That's what Vic Toews said on November 27, 2001, the current Minister of Public Safety. It wasn't the only time he expressed his concern about the use of closure. The next day he said—this is very colourful language, so folks at home, be aware that this is potentially violent talk here—:
Mr. Speaker, yesterday the Prime Minister of Canada swung an axe across the throat of parliament. While committee members had an opportunity to speak to Bill C-36, members of all parties in parliament lost the ability to express the concerns of Canadians. If the bill was the right thing to do, why did the Prime Minister do the wrong thing by invoking closure?
That is similar to the kinds of argument I was making this morning, Mr. Chairman, that the opportunity for Canadians to have their voices expressed to the members of Parliament, after we're hearing representations through this committee, and allowing the debate to take place.... If the bill is the right thing to do, why is there not an opportunity for people to debate this, have the discussion, and have the requirement that it somehow publicly justifies the steps they are taking?
That's what Mr. Toews said when he was in opposition, and I think the comments deserve thought today.
We have another quotation from that era, from Stockwell Day, another former public safety minister:
A columnist wrote something interesting today. He wrote that in his view the decision to invoke closure on the bill represented in some ways the death of the true meaning of parliament. Parliament is the ability to gather together as elected representatives to talk, discuss, debate and hopefully do things that can enrich the lives and in this case the safety and security of Canadians. The federal Liberal government has failed Canadians.
If you just switch the word “Liberal” to “Conservative”, Mr. Chair, in this context that statement has an important message to the government and to the people of Canada.
There's a whole series of them, Mr. Chair. I think Mr. Jean has asked for a quote from Stephen Harper, the Prime Minister. I have one here from December of 2002. He said:
We have closure today precisely because there is no deadline and there are no plans. Instead of having deadlines, plans, and goals, we must insist on moving forward because the government is simply increasingly embarrassed by the state of the debate and it needs to move on.
Well, you know, this government seems pretty embarrassed by the fact that we had the Province of Quebec here again today, as they were last week, saying that the Government of Canada is not being very cooperative, is not listening to them, is not responding to their request to have some influence on the state of the Young Offenders Act last week, and this week they're also asking for cooperation with respect to public safety and they're not getting it.
This is what we're having here. It must be an embarrassment to this government, and it's the only justification that I can see for invoking closure. We're doing this; we're not waiting until after people have exhausted themselves and each other by debating. We're doing it after two hours of consideration of the bill, and the government is now saying we're not going to discuss this bill any further. We're not going to discuss clause-by-clause any further unless it's under the conditions of a closure motion that says we'll only discuss it today—a bill with 207 clauses, only six or seven of which have been dealt with.
We have a schedule, Mr. Chair. We have members of Parliament with significant obligations that they've made, in some cases, months and months in advance for action, for things that they've committed themselves to do with constituents, or in Parliament, or in their various roles on committees. This is something that has been sprung on parliamentarians without any basic consideration of people's schedules and times and other work that they have to do. We all know as parliamentarians—the public doesn't always understand that and it's understandable that they wouldn't—what busy and committed lives we lead and how many demands there are on our time.
And yet without any consultation, without any discussion about possible ways of cooperating—none, zero, nada—nobody came to me or any other member of this committee and told us they were hoping to have a little cooperation in terms of how we can move this bill forward and how long do you think it's going to take. No. At 8:45 this morning we had this laid upon us, a provocative motion, with no warning and no notice. Since then, there have been some discussions, but not before the hammer came down, not before the Prime Minister's office instructed somebody to come and bring a motion here to shut this place down, shut this bill down today, shut down debate, so we can have it back in the House tomorrow. They've had enough of this. They've had enough of this debate about this bill. They've had enough bad press. If they can limit it by time, at least, maybe the damage will be less.
They're getting so much bad press day after day. Ordinary Canadians are speaking out, and so are members of the Canadian bar associations, and experts and law professors, people who know what they're talking about even. The government fears that the most: people who are opinion leaders in our communities and in our universities and in our provincial bars and our provincial governments, governments who know from their own experience what works and what doesn't. They're embarrassing the government, because the government is operating based on some sort of ideological plan and not based on evidence.
From time to time we hear governments saying public policy should come from an evidence-based consideration of the facts and reality. Well, we have just the opposite here.
All of the experts, all of the people with expertise in the sense of having studied the issue for dozens of years, having written papers on the issue, having examined the facts--some of them even have PhDs from the best universities in the world--are here talking about what works and what doesn't. And this is embarrassing the government, because it's totally at odds with what the government plans to do. So they don't want the debate to continue.