Thank you, Madam Chair.
I think I will start my intervention by recapping some of the important points and areas that I've heard from my colleagues yesterday and today.
The most important point that I wish to reiterate is for what I trust to be thousands of Canadians who are following this and watching this particular committee. I'll give them advance notice that this committee will potentially sit until 11:30 this evening.
The important point that I wish to make—this is following up on my colleague Mr. Van Popta's earlier interventions—is that there is an overriding theme that is being developed here. It's not being propagated and established by any party other than the Liberal Party of Canada, supported by their coalition partners, the NDP.
If they truly cared about victims—I intend to go through some legislative history over my three-plus years as a parliamentarian that demonstrates the complete opposite of empathy towards victims in this country—they would not be engaging in this particular position that they are taking. This is nothing more than political gamesmanship. It is partisanship and, quite frankly, it's petty politics, which I find extremely disgusting.
As Mr. Van Popta pointed out, this particular bill reached our committee before we recessed this past summer, in June 2024. We returned to Parliament in mid-September, and committees resumed toward the end of September. While the justice committee was studying two important reports regarding the rise of both anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, Bill C-270 was always waiting in the wings. You, Madam Chair, would bring it up from time to time.
I'm also mindful of the fact that we had many meetings over the course of two-plus months that ended early. Some meetings didn't actually happen at all. I can't say with any degree of confidence that all the meetings that have been scheduled for the justice committee since we returned this past fall have been utilized effectively in terms of utilizing all the resources that we had available to us. Here we are now, with a looming deadline that we were all made aware of weeks ago.
Not to put too fine a point on it, Madam Chair, but the Conservative Party of Canada submitted a significant list of witnesses—subject matter experts in this particular area. That was last Friday. In that interim, we had a meeting on Monday. We had a meeting yesterday. We're meeting today. Perhaps we're meeting again next week, but there is absolutely no sense, no urgency and no direction from this committee that this committee is prioritizing the hearing of witnesses.
When I listen to some Liberal members—