I do find this astounding. The minister appeared here, and I guess it takes a certain amount of hubris.... I have a lot of respect for the minister, but any time you come and present a bill to a committee and basically indicate that it's perfect and there's probably no need to hear from any witnesses because you did such a bang-up job drafting it, and now, at the eleventh hour....
This is a government bill. We're in the opposition. We do not have the resources of government. We have to listen to witnesses when it comes to drafting amendments. All of us around this table work very hard at that as parliamentarians. We do not have the resources of government.
Why at the eleventh hour...? This should have been in our hands. Why on earth would the government be putting forward an amendment that, in my view, alters the bill? We would have heard at best conflicting evidence on an expansion to include “gender expression”, but this shouldn't be new to the government. They should be aware of these things, and if they want this, they should have had it in the drafting of the bill, and not literally in the moment proposing amendments.
I could understand that if it was coming from the Green Party, the Bloc, NDP or even ourselves. Yes, sometimes with a compressed time frame like we had—of only four days—something could come up in witness testimony that we might want to react on, but for the government itself to be proposing a change....
I'd guess I'd like to hear from some of the lawyers with the Department of Justice on what this change in wording would mean in practice, because we don't have.... We all sat here in testimony where it's not clear what has been captured definitively by the government's definition of conversion therapy. What we do know is that the minister has used words in the introduction of this bill that we've urged them to include in the legislation. The government chose not to do that.
Now we see that at the eleventh hour—or past—the government is scrambling to make changes. I think they have the wording, of course, that Mr. Virani is proposing in front of them. In law, what is the change that we are now being asked to contemplate, literally on the fly?