Madam Speaker, on Bill C-54, an act to amend the Old Age Security Act, the Canada pension plan, the Children's Special Allowances Act and the Unemployment Insurance Act, any sane, reasonable scrutiny of this bill would very quickly indicate to almost any informed reader that this has to be what has become known in Parliament as comma legislation, that is to say legislation which seeks to make certain technical changes but substantively has very little impact.
There is a need for comma legislation, technical legislation, to tidy up the business, to make it of more service to the people it is purporting to serve. That is the reality, this is in effect comma legislation. It is legislation that will seek to do a number of important but relatively minor things in the scheme of things.
That is not to say they should not be done. I support the bill and in a moment I will state two or three reasons why I support the bill. However, if we accepted as the reality of the bill and then listen to some of my friends opposite, we would wonder if we are both talking about the same piece of legislation.
As I listened to a bit a of the debate this morning for some strange reason I found myself deciding that what I needed to do was reread an old poem that I learned and taught in high school called "Matilda".