Mr. Chairman and colleagues, I gave an indication that we couldn't support this, not because we don't want to do what's right by this bill. You know that in the three years that I've been part of this committee no other bill has received as much attention as this one has so far and has received the good wishes and the cooperation of committee members like this bill has so far. The only other one had to do with the introduction of a safety management system, and with that one, we spent a lot of time on clause-by-clause.
In my experience, a bill of this nature where the minister came forward and said he would like to have the cooperation of everyone because he wanted everyone to be happy with the bill was again an extension of the cooperative nature of the committee.
This motion suggests that the cooperative disposition has somehow evaporated. I must agree with my colleague Mr. Bélanger that the open-ended nature of the motion really does strike at the heart of the intention of trying to do something in a deliberative fashion.
We have so far in this committee, on other bills and in this one in particular, tried to come up with a decision. Yes, on occasion there has been slight little political jazz, but I challenge anyone on the government side to say we haven't been looking for a way to resolve any differences. In fact, the minister acknowledged as much when he invited members of the opposition to sit with him in an open-ended discussion, which some members took as an opportunity to present amendments and others as an indication that subsequent to that meeting they could develop some amendments. We even said, let the government bring a whole series of amendments to this discussion, to clause-by-clause. This is a huge number of amendments from a government for one of its own bills. That's just to give you an indication of how predisposed we and the opposition have been to being reasonable about this.
So this kind of motion, quite frankly, jars us a little bit. On the procedural component of it, we can't find it acceptable; and on the substantive implications, I think we need to be able to give the bill its deserved attention and its requested attention—requested by the minister. If we were to follow this motion, if we were to accept it, we wouldn't accomplish either one.