Thank you, Madam Speaker, for clearing up that confusing situation. I am sure when hon. colleagues from all parties have an opportunity to check Hansard they will see that indeed my colleague from Cumberland--Colchester clearly stated that he wished to split his time with the distinguished member, as I understand he put it. We even have confirmation from the government side of the House. I would like to thank all colleagues from all parties in the House who are present for allowing that to happen and allowing me to say a few words on Bill C-35.
At the outset I ask what Bill C-35, an act to amend the Foreign Missions and International Organizations Act, does, just so that people watching in the real world, if anyone is watching the debate today, might be better able to understand it. Its purpose is to broaden the scope of the Foreign Missions and International Organizations Act. It expands and further defines the privileges and immunities granted to international organizations. It defines the capacity of the RCMP to provide security for intergovernmental conferences which are held in Canada.
Very clearly, as is often the case with legislation presented in the House by the government, the opposition parties and indeed I think government members from time to time are torn because of conflict contained within legislation. Some of it is good. Some of it is not so good. In some cases some of it is bloody awful, I would suggest. That is the case here.
My colleague, our critic for foreign affairs, the member for Cumberland--Colchester, stood in the House and repeatedly spoke to Bill C-35, laying out our concerns and those parts of the bill that we support. Clearly we recognize there is a need to more clearly identify and clarify the role of the RCMP in providing security for these conferences which are increasingly held on Canadian soil.
He has also spoken on a number of occasions about what we perceive could be a problem in the future with extending the diplomatic immunity to other individuals and to a large extent to who knows whom. Very clearly he presented an amendment at committee that would have become part of the legislation and constricted the government or held the government more accountable as to who is accessing the immunity so that Canadians would know when someone was using this new loophole to circumvent the laws of Canada. I think that is of great concern.
The real irony is that it is simply quite unbelievable and in fact quite galling that the government on one hand would pass Bill C-35 through this place. Presumably it will be enacted into law once it passes through the Senate and receives royal assent. This will extend the immunity to who knows whom. We are not allowed to even know. It will not be put into law to force the government to always reveal the names and organizations accessing this immunity.
At the same time the government is very clearly moving with Bill C-36 to restrict the rights and civil liberties of Canadians. It is quite unbelievable why the government cannot see the contradiction in that.
On the issue of the closure of the debate after one day of debate the government tried to say there was more than one day of debate on Bill C-36, the anti-terrorist legislation. Somewhere in the neighbourhood of 100 amendments to that legislation were brought forward. Most of them were from the government. It came forward on Monday of this week and the government used time allocation to ram it through the House.
Given the seriousness of what has taken place this week in parliament on the one year anniversary of the last election when unfortunately the Liberal government was yet again elected with a majority government, basically we have the same situation as the past two parliaments with an elected dictatorship.
A fellow by the name of Andrew Coyne wrote a column in the National Post yesterday entitled “The Death of Parliament”. I want to read into the record some of his comments, given the seriousness of this situation. Referring to Bill C-36 he wrote:
--this is a much different bill than it was. The Commons justice committee adopted more than 100 amendments--themselves rammed through in the space of an evening. Ordinary members of parliament, unless they were around over the weekend, would barely have seen a copy of the committee's report. And any chance they might have had to propose amendments of their own expired with the Saturday evening deadline. Not that it matters, I suppose. They'd never have passed.
He continued:
Closure and party-line voting are objectionable at the best of times. But to apply these parliamentary tourniquets to legislation such as this--hasty in drafting but permanent in effect, with all manner of implications for the rights of citizens and all sorts of potential for abuse--is simply beyond belief.
Further in the column he wrote:
If ever there were a time in which the legislature ought to play a leading role in the making of law--to air concerns, suggest improvements, and shape a consensus--it is now. And if ever there were any doubt that parliament has ceased to play that role, there is no more. As a watchdog on the executive, as a guardian of the public purse, as a house of deliberation, it is, as the constitutional scholars say, a dead letter.
I wish I had the time to read the remainder of the column into the record because it is incredibly appropriate. On the front page of today's Ottawa Citizen there is an article by Susan Delacourt. In it she also points to the problems inherent in legislation that the government is intent on ramming through the House. She wrote in part:
--there's always a reason for this Liberal government to find parliament inconvenient. Closure is more of a parliamentary rule than an exception now. It's the opposition's fault. It's obstructionism. It's our international obligations. It's just the way things are.
The use of closure on this bill, though, is particularly galling. For six weeks the most senior ministers of the Prime Minister's government assured critics and even their own Liberal MPs that parliament would be a check on any excesses within Bill C-36.
Further in the column she continued:
“Trust-us justice,” the critics called it, and now, with the use of closure, their skepticism seems appropriate.
These are just two articles that have been printed in the last 24 hours about the use of closure and ramming through Bill C-36. As I said, the debate on Bill C-36 unfortunately is over. Although many of us would have liked to have continued the debate on Bill C-36 and on the amendments, some of which never got to be aired--