And I will move it with a minor change, having talked to Mr. Davies. I think he's right that in the second operative clause the word “will” I would change to “could”: instead of “that such disregard will”, it should say “that such disregard could”.
In the second operative clause, “...and that committee further advise the Minister of Public Safety that such disregard could...”, I don't think it's fair to say that it will.
Look, I'll be blunt here. Committee made a lot of accommodation. There were a lot of arguments made as to the imperative nature of dealing with this matter because it was a mandatory review. We moved our calendar around. We even moved ahead by a week the dealing of clause-by-clause so we could get the report out to the House as quickly as possible, and it came as a surprise to me—and probably even as a surprise to the government members—that the legislation was tabled in the House really when we only had maybe a week or two before we tabled our report.
Now, having been on committees for some period of time, I know you get used to your recommendations being ignored—more often than it should happen—but it's pretty rare that they don't even wait to hear what your recommendations are before they ignore them. To be blunt, it is incredibly disrespectful and it undermines this process. If the government comes and asks us to undertake another review, and asks us to invest our time and energy, and if government members come and tell us to bump the other items on the agenda because this is important and we need to have compromise and work back and forth, and we do that, and then the net result of it is that it's all tossed out the window and legislation is introduced without the value of our input or the input of all those witnesses who came before committee and shared their time and their energy and their expertise, then it really begs the question how, in the future, committee will respond when the government says it needs committee's help and it needs committee time and it asks us to bump other items to deal with an issue.
I'll tell you that I'll be very hesitant to bump other items or things that we think are important for government items, if the response of the government to this committee's work is to not even bother waiting another week to hear what we have to say and what our recommendations are.
In this example, I think there are several items in the sex offender registry that were omitted, and I think they were omitted because of the haste with which the legislation was put forward. Had they waited for the committee's report, I think the legislation would have benefited from it. I say that not in some kind of partisan way because we had some partisan point to make that wouldn't be grabbed, but because this committee, in a unanimous fashion, was moving towards a couple of recommendations that were not included in that legislation. Had the government simply waited for our recommendations, it would have found that those were beneficial to add from the start.
So I really think it undermines our process. It really blatantly disregards the value of this committee and our work, and it makes it difficult going forward to work in a collaborative fashion when the government operates in this way. I think it's important to put as a matter of record the committee's displeasure with the way in which this was handled and to state going forward that, if this continues, it fundamentally undermines our ability to do our work here.