Mr. Speaker, I took great interest in the comments of the secretary of state.
I would like to make a couple of comments. I was interested in the fact that there was the motion to extend the sitting, once again another attempt to rush this bill through.
This bill was tabled in the House on Friday and is being debated for the first time today. There has been virtually no public discussion. The public discussions the process allows for are the independent commission hearings that the bill seeks to terminate.
I find this all very interesting in that we have had a number of speakers today and this is really the first debater from another political party other than the hon. member for Kamloops who gave a very reasoned and considered intervention. We had the first two speakers from the government and from the Official Opposition. It is not questions and comments, not true debate. They just state their position. Since then we have been talking here to ourselves.
I find it peculiar this great effort we are going through to make sure that the public does not have a right to go to the hearing process.
Perhaps the hon. member could explain to us precisely why that is such an important public policy objective, why it is so important that we not get some reaction from the public before we continue to debate this particular issue?
The member raised some of problems, some of which I am more sympathetic to than others. He raised two complaints, particularly in relation to the province of New Brunswick. This bears some examination. On the one hand he noted the radical changes that the commission has proposed in some parts of New Brunswick because of population shifts. On the other hand he raised concerns about increasing the number of seats in the House of Commons.
I suppose if we were ultimately to revise the formula, which would require a revision to the senatorial clause, so that we were able to resist the increase in seats then we would have fewer seats in provinces like New Brunswick and we would have even more radical changes to the boundaries. This is what I find particularly disconcerting. The various reasons that are being used, not in this House but sort of in the hallways, for stopping this process are a complete contradiction to each other in terms of the results that they would bring about.
Besides his commenting on the necessity of killing this, as a government minister would the hon. member favour having a public policy objective to this whole thing that the public would support limiting the number of seats so that we can proceed to at least give the public some reason why we would be interested in killing Bill C-18 after we have spent $5 million on the process?