Madam Speaker, I thank my hon. friend from Rosedale, the head of the foreign affairs committee. We congratulate him on his reappointment to that post. It is well deserved.
I have to say that our party's deep concern is that the bill was labelled, as the minister said, as merely a housekeeping bill. While as a party we have been strong supporters of the RCMP, and indeed have backed them up when others have tried to criticize them in the face of doing a very difficult job, our concern is that when we start giving extra powers to the RCMP we do not believe this is merely a housekeeping issue.
This issue deserves a complete and public debate and public knowledge. Only by doing that will we be able to have the buy-in on the part of the public, the buy-in on the part of the House and the full knowledge of the public as to what powers we are giving.
I know the member would abhor the belief that in any way, shape or form we would want to turn Canada into a police state. No one wants that. However in certain quarters there are those concerns, particularly among the anti-globalization crowds he referred to.
Our responsibility is to make sure that those people, and indeed all Canadians, are well aware, in a transparent fashion, of the kinds of powers that this bill would represent within the statutes of our country, and we will not simply say that this is some housekeeping bill that we will slide in through the back door. That is the problem our party has with it. We want to make sure that there is a transparent and public debate so that all Canadians will know what is in the bill.