Yes, I do. Thank you.
I'm struggling with the idea that we would now do eight meetings with an unlimited potential amount of travel, which may or may not begin until April, with then three weeks left to potentially—if we are satisfied with the consultations that we will have had on one amendment—try to figure out how, over the course of the next three weeks of the session, we're going to pass critically important gun legislation that I believe very strongly the majority of Canadians want us to get done.
I think we are all in agreement that it's important to get some more consultation and try to address a lot of the challenges, a lot of the issues, a lot of the concerns that have been raised. Nobody is disputing that point. But to say that we now want to effectively hold up.... How we got here is a different conversation for a different day. How we get to a solution is, I think, what Canadians are looking for here.
The idea that we would now sit, effectively, unable to move this legislation, at the very least until we return from whatever travel in April, and then try to spend three weeks to do this.... I just don't understand how we, in good conscience, can actually go back to our constituents and say that because we decided we wanted to go on trips, we're going to hold this legislation back until April at the earliest.
I am not saying that we shouldn't consult with communities in the north, in Atlantic Canada, in British Columbia, but we have learned over the last two years—my goodness, we managed to conduct Parliament virtually—that there are ways to try to do this in a way that is actually efficient and gets to where I think people want to go, which is to have heard voices and to be able to deal with misinformation—yes, I'm going to use the word “misinformation”—which, as Mr. MacGregor has rightly noted, is out there. I think it addresses some of the gaps perhaps in how people might have wanted this to have gone differently.
The fact that we would say, let's not get this over the finish line, in whatever form that ends up being, with everybody's input.... I've said this many times: There is no monopoly on good ideas. I have said this to every single one of my colleagues on this committee. I am open to hearing different ways of doing things. We are all open to that. The minister said this. The Prime Minister said this.
Let's get past the fact that there may be a difference of opinion as to how we got to where we are today. I don't know how we can say we're going stop all work completely until we have managed to do trips. Travel is important. Looking people in the eye is important, absolutely. But we've managed to do it for two and a half years. We've managed to consult with people in ways that use technology.
I am really quite worried about what we do when we go back, regardless of what party we belong to, and how we can go back in good conscience and say, look, we decided we weren't going to have active debate on anything past clause 4 of this bill until the entire year has run out and then maybe we'll take it back up again.
Canadians demanded of us that we pass gun legislation. The NDP, the Bloc—