No, you said, “Shall the bill carry?”
I don't intend to make a long, drawn-out statement, but going through the amendments we've seen, I think the problem we have in this bill is that it does not touch on the question of oversight and accountability while expanding the powers of CSIS at the same time. That's very disappointing.
Also, we've raised some questions about how effective the bill will be. If it turns out to be unconstitutional, we will have wasted a lot of the time of Parliament and the courts and the agency if the bill is eventually thrown out. We had testimony from witnesses who felt that it was clearly unconstitutional. We asked the minister to table his advice on constitutionality, and I guess it would be too strong to say he refused, but he ignored the question.
We have problems with oversight. We have problems with effectiveness, and especially constitutionality. We've had a severe problem with the process here on a bill that we offered to work with the government on. We tried to get consensus, tried to have a full discussion. We were limited to, really, one day of opposition witnesses—two for us and one for the Liberals—and we ignored even officers of Parliament who wanted to appear before the committee with concerns they had about the bill.
None of those people were opposed to this bill; they were all trying to make this a better bill. At the end of today you're leaving us in a situation where we supported the bill at second reading, and you've made it very difficult for us. I'll go back to my caucus, and we'll have a serious discussion about whether we can continue to support this bill, based on those grounds that we laid out in the ways we tried to amend the bill: oversight, effectiveness, constitutionality.
I think we could have had a much better bill that would have served the country with regard to national security. It would have served CSIS in terms of effectiveness. And it would have stood the test of time.
I'm not sure we have that in the bill as it stands now.