In a word, no. I accept absolutely no responsibility for the fact that it's taken, as you suggest, nearly a decade to get to where we are. This legislation has been before this House on a number of occasions for a number of reasons, and I can detail them as to why. The House was prorogued by your Prime Minister. An election was called earlier than legislation required it. There were all sorts of reasons that the previous versions of the legislation never got through.
One of the reasons, of course, was that the matter was debated and we just passed off and put aside one of the significant consequences, and that had to do with the summary trial matter, which took, I suppose, six or seven months after the debate on Bill C-15 started and took place in the House. The government finally acknowledged that perhaps they were prepared to agree to put back an amendment that was passed in the last Parliament.
In the last Parliament we had numerous amendments. We had a very thorough discussion, and I don't think the speed at which this bill passed in the last Parliament left anything to be desired. We went through clause-by-clause study fairly rapidly, in three or four days at the most, with witnesses and the clause-by-clause.
During that particular Parliament I was where Mr. McKay is. We brought forth a dozen or more amendments, of which eight or nine were passed. They were stripped out of the bill the last time, so I guess we have to argue them again. So I take no responsibility for the fact that Mr. Justice Lamer was asked to make some recommendations back in 2003, and that we're here now in 2013. I only came here in 2008, and we had an opportunity to debate Bill C-41, and we made improvements to it. It was actually sent back to the House in good time to be passed, but the government chose not to call it for debate in the House of Commons. That's not my doing.
So we don't accept any responsibility for that. The government chooses when legislation is called.
To suggest that all of these reports are being taken into consideration, I would refer you to your own comments about Mr. Justice LeSage. Whereas that was only tabled in the House in June, well, that may be, but the government had it in December because it was tabled with the government in December, and the government had plenty of time to incorporate Mr. Justice LeSage's recommendations into this report and also to deal with amendments that had been proposed the last time and which the government didn't agree with, only because they thought the wording needed to be improved. Yet they didn't take any steps to improve the wording and bring them back some two years later.
So let's not be too sweeping about these remarks. What I'm suggesting here, with what we now have from this government, after recognizing that it took some time to get to where we are, is that there'll be another seven years before we even look at what needs to be done to this legislation. That's what's wrong.
If we are here now still dealing with the LeSage recommendations going back to 2003—