I guess I'll continue talking. Perfect.
I'm sure that one of my colleagues will move that motion because they feel exactly the same way about this. This motion that we are debating, which is entirely political, stops us from doing the work we need to do.
I'm absolutely fine talking about the failures of this government on foreign interference, which we have seen play out over the last nine years.
This particular issue has, frankly, proven that the Prime Minister has failed on foreign interference. The Prime Minister, at the Hogue commission, admitted that our intelligence agencies have been gathering information on India and that it has been committing foreign interference on our soil for a number of years, yet it's clear that he did nothing to act on this.
Now, he didn't need secret clearance to be able to say any of that at the Hogue commission. He didn't need anybody else to have secret clearance when he got up in the House of Commons and gave out information about what we knew and when we knew it at the time. He certainly didn't need anybody else to have clearance. He doesn't really need clearance to be able to walk across the House of Commons—take 10 steps—to tell the Leader of the Opposition if there are members in his party...like he suggested at the Hogue commission.
Look, if the Prime Minister has nothing to hide, then I think Canadians have a very reasonable question about why he wouldn't release the names. Is it that they actually sit in his caucus or in his cabinet and he's done nothing about it?
Anyway, this all casts aspersions certainly on members of Parliament. I think it casts a greater amount of scrutiny on the Liberals, who perhaps have members of their own caucus, members of their own cabinet, perhaps committee chairs and perhaps parliamentary secretaries who have been involved in foreign interference. It's the Prime Minister who's really withholding that information from Canadians.
Going back to the foreign interference that he's done nothing on, even when the Liberals were given the opportunity to protect Canadians from extortion.... Bill C-381 was brought forward by my co-deputy leader, the great Tim Uppal, who worked hard to speak to communities right across the country about an extortion issue. I know that some Liberals didn't want to look like they were voting against the bill, so some were absent. They knew that extortion had gone up threefold, fourfold or fivefold in their communities. I get that. What I don't understand is that a party claiming to be seized with this issue would vote against an extortion bill that would put these violent offenders behind bars.
Extortion, of course, is one of the crimes that the RCMP highlighted during its press conference that happened on the matter at hand. Voting against this protection against extortion act makes very little sense. In fact, it makes very little sense that the Liberal members have not taken seriously the rise in crime in our country.
First, it was Bill C-75, which allows violent, repeat offenders out on bail, sometimes minutes or an afternoon after they commit a crime. It's Bill C-5, which allows people to serve a sentence in their basements after repeatedly stealing cars, for example. They have made this country a more dangerous place.
When presented with the opportunity to work on things like extortion, members of this government, members of the Liberal Party and members of the House of Commons decided that, no, they are not going to take this issue seriously, even though it's the one that they purportedly are taking seriously because the RCMP came out and said that it was part of the issue at hand.
The United States managed to thwart an assassination attempt on American soil by agents of the Indian government. Canada was unable to do that.
I think conversations like that would be best had with the witnesses we all agreed on for this study before this motion was brought forward. I think I speak on behalf of many on our side of things when I say it is a great shame that we are not looking at the seriousness of this issue and that we are holding the actual study hostage.
After the Liberals said no to a committee, you would think they would do something to reverse themselves, like they always do. After Kevin Lamoureux stood up in the House and said we are not having a special committee on this, he spoke to members of the Sikh community and members of all other communities and he said no, we are not having this committee. You would think the Liberals would want to at least have the study here, which was agreed upon. It is a shame.
It turns out, Mr. Chair, that this was just enough time to have me subbed in. I'm going to move the motion I did before in order for us to close off the debate on this so that we can get back to the work of committee, which the Liberals and the NDP are stopping.