Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to take part in the debate although I must say that was not my intention when I arrived here a few minutes ago.
For six weeks all parties on this side of the House have been engaged in directing questions toward the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister and solicitor general about what he did or did not say on October 1 on that now infamous airplane ride.
Frankly a lot of us, certainly in our caucus and in I suspect in other opposition caucuses, would have preferred to talk about other things than whether the solicitor general would stay in his post.
A farm crisis is going on in Saskatchewan. There is the employment insurance issue which my colleague from Acadie—Bathurst is trying to raise. What should we do with budget surpluses? There are any number of questions, but because of the intransigence of the government we have been stuck dealing with the future of the solicitor general.
Here we have a private member's bill which talks about something that will not be decided by the House of Commons until the Supreme Court of Canada rules some time down the road. The Alberta Court of Appeal ruled after September 21. The Reform opposition party members could not wait. Never mind uniting the right. They were busily concerned about uniting themselves by having the motion on firearms.
The case is going to the Supreme Court of Canada. It will not be decided here. It was decided here between 1993 and 1997 when Bill C-68 passed the House of Commons. I was not in the House at that time. I do not know whether it is a good bill or a bad bill, but I know that it will not come back to the House at least until the Supreme Court rules against it. Why are we wasting the time of the House of Commons and of the people of Canada talking about something that is totally irrelevant?