Mr. Speaker, I listened carefully to the speech by the secretary of state and hon. member for Beauséjour. I have several questions but I do not know where to start. I will ask two at the same time and, time permitting, I will ask another one later on.
Now for his first comment, and I must say I find it hard to follow the federal government's thinking today. They say they needed this legislation to make the Coast Guard part of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, although this was already done last spring in the finance minister's February budget. What is going on? Is the department trying to rectify an illegal situation? What was or was not illegal before? I think we could draw quite a few conclusions in that case.
I remember saying in a speech to the Minister of Fisheries at the time that he should consolidate the fleets owned by the Government of Canada. I mentioned the Coast Guard. Their ships could have been included in the same fleet with the Fisheries and Oceans vessels. But there are other fleets as well, so why the piecemeal approach?
Once again, the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing. As far as the ships of the Department of the Environment are concerned, why did they not look at the kind of work involved, since in this bill, for all practical purposes, the minister will have the authority to set environmental standards for oceans?
What does the Department of the Environment intend to do? I was told there were a number of ships, so what are they going to do with them? Why did they not consider integrating all this?
My point is there is still room for improving the bill. The Department of National Defence has ships as well. Why did the government not consider some kind of plan or strategy in which these ships could be used, and I am thinking of the quite spectacular operations we saw last spring?
In any case, I am glad that was done. However, why does the government not take advantage of this experience to consider a system for integrating these ships?
That is one point I wanted to make. As for part III of the bill, I already mentioned two departments that were not consulted. What is going on? I wish the secretary of state would tell us. Where are they headed and do they really intend to merge? Good, I see some messages coming. Do they really intend to merge or is this just a lot of smoke and mirrors?
I repeat, the Coast Guard fleet has been under the jurisdiction of the Minister of Fisheries since the spring budget. I would like to put a question to the secretary of state, who may be able to remove this perception I have that the bill is improvised, that the government is going a little too fast and has not finished its consultations, starting with the parliamentarians in their own party.
I would like to draw the secretary of state's attention back to clause 54. In formulating this bill, they are already including conditional amendments in clause 54, which provides: "If Bill C-84, introduced during-the thirty-fifth Parliament-is assented to, then-". Should I read the whole thing? We are told that this bill will have consequences, and given that, attention will have to be paid to this and to that.
Bill C-98 involves regulations, and must be able to accommodate other existing regulations and legislation. But we already have C-84, which is in the process of changing it. They could not even agree among themselves to wait for C-84 to be drafted.
In connection with this, I would like to mention another doubt. I will read you subclause 54(3): "Any fee fixed under this Act shall stand permanently referred to a committee described in section 25 of the Regulations Act to be scrutinized as if it were a regulation".
I would like to direct a question to the secretary of state to at least start getting rid of our perception that the thing is improvised. Can he tell us who will form the committee? Does he already have the answers this morning? There are a whole bunch of amendments, but I would at least like to know whether he has had time to read the bill to the end and ask these questions and whether he got an answer from an official somewhere. We did not.