Thank you very much, Chair.
Thank you for recognizing me before we get into the first clause, because there is a significant issue right now in that this committee was supposed to have had six hours of witness testimony from witnesses who had a range of concerns about a variety of issues, from both the political left and the political right. There have been people raising civil liberties concerns, people raising religious freedom concerns and people raising concerns about how this would affect enforcement of the law.
What was interesting in all of this is that we should have had five full meetings. We had deliberately decided as a committee to extend the length of our meetings to three hours each. The reason for that was so that we could get through all of what we needed to get through to have a proper, fulsome and holistic understanding of this bill before we got to the point we are at now.
I will remind members and all invested in this where we are now. At the previous meeting of this committee, the Liberal members—I'm very grateful—whether by incompetence or cross-partisanship, supported a Conservative motion. Then, Chair, you suspended the meeting to deal with this and then abruptly ended the meeting two hours early.
We were told that we had a very short window of time to produce amendments for this. We had to rush this process, understanding that all amendments had to be written by legislative drafters, who do not work weekends. I'm very grateful that we had a very committed, dedicated set of drafters to help with our amendments. We did as good a job as we could, but the reason we were shortchanged on that crucial time to deal with Bill C-9 when we were supposed to is that Liberal members of Parliament on this committee were filibustering, because they couldn't just accept and support a very basic, very clean motion from Conservatives to condemn heinous sexual abuse of children and call for a reinstatement of mandatory minimum sentences. That was the motion.
This took three meetings. It took almost nine hours of this committee's time, and it showed that the Liberals were so unwilling to make a simple condemnation of lenient sentences and judicial leniency for heinous child abusers that they were prepared to blow up the time that we desperately needed for Bill C-9.
This is important because the motion I'll be introducing shortly realigns and resets this committee's priorities to what members have previously agreed to.