Madam Speaker, we continue with the saga of pulling the bill together with amendments, subamendments, everything happening at the last minute and negotiations happening even at 11 hours and 59 minutes.
I continue to feel a sense of distress over this bill. We all want the bill to go through so I am begrudgingly recommending to my colleagues that we support these motions. However, there has been so much chewing gum, baling wire and paper clips put to this bill at this particular point I do not have a lot of confidence that we will not see a big problem in three or four years after this bill comes into effect. I am very concerned about that.
I will speak to Group No. 3 specifically. I will also comment on Motion No. 9 by my esteemed colleague from Sarnia, and I say that in all seriousness. I take him to be a very serious and competent gentleman. He has certainly put some very legitimate concerns in front of the House and has a deep concern about this bill. He is a very serious and worthy member of parliament but the problem with his motion is the phrase “and the operations of the centre” contained in that motion.
Why I prefaced my remarks yet again with this business of negotiating at the last second is that if in the procedure the government had seen fit to remove that or to propose an amendment to move that, then my colleague from the Bloc Quebecois could then have entered the motion that he has before the Chamber. The point is that we have to deal with his motion and we could have dealt with the motion against this wording and the operations of the centre. It could have happened and we could have had a clause in this bill that would have in its own small way gone to strengthening the bill. Unfortunately that did not happen. As a consequence, because the member's motion includes those six words “and the operations of the centre”, I will have to recommend to my colleagues that we turn down an otherwise worthy amendment.
With respect to the member for Charlesbourg, for whom I also have a great deal of respect, I understand what he is trying to do in terms of talking about parliament as opposed to the government and the whole attitude that there is vis-à-vis the Senate. The Canadian Alliance is certainly in favour of a total revision of the Senate before we afford it perhaps the kind of respect that a chamber like that should have. However, because we want to get this bill through quickly and come up to speed, in spite of the three year delay on the part of the government, I would have to vote against revising the Senate for the very simple reason that we will not have any constitutional change. We will certainly not have this Prime Minister do anything about the Senate. This would have to be included in the motion which we will have to defeat. This is terribly confusing.
On Motion No. 11 the Canadian Alliance generally would be in favour of sunset clauses. As a matter of fact, we have proposed them for bills like Bill C-68 and other very contentious bills that have no proven value. Just to parenthesize that particular bill is completely off track. It is costing hundreds of millions of dollars and going nowhere. There is no sunset clause. Under normal circumstances our party would be in favour of a sunset clause.
However, the fact that this bill, as written by the government, does call for a review in five years, and the fact that money laundering will not go away in the next five years, I do not think this particular motion would be at all helpful.
Those are the comments of the official opposition. I hope we can get through this without more chewing gum and baling wire because we are getting a little bit low. The confectionery is getting concerned.