Madam Speaker, it is a distinct pleasure to rise on a Friday afternoon to direct some comments on such an important and momentous bill as Bill C-43. To the hon. NDP member who just spoke, I would like to say at the outset that I do believe there is nobody further to the left of him other than perhaps the heritage minister. I would like to clear that up right at the beginning of my remarks. Although we are physically located to the left of him, we certainly do not believe on the political spectrum that we are.
This is quite an issue that has seized the House this afternoon. As has already been noted, Bill C-43, an act to amend certain acts and instruments and to repeal the Fisheries Prices Support Act, is an omnibus bill, perhaps a bit like so many others in the sense that it addresses many different issues all in one bill. As has been noted by the hon. government House leader and the House leader for the official opposition and other members before me, primarily it brings about technical amendments to a number of acts. The list is quite long.
The bill affects the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency Act, the Canadian Film Development Corporation Act, the Energy Monitoring Act, the National Energy Board Act, and on and on it goes. Bill C-43 is quite comprehensive and makes what has been referred to as minor housekeeping amendments.
The issue I want to address in my remarks on Bill C-43 stems from how we got to this point with this piece of legislation being brought forward by the government. It might interest members and the viewing public to know that amendments similar to these were contained in a previous bill, Bill C-40, which passed through the House. However, because quite a number of concerns were raised by opposition members at the justice committee, these particular amendments were dropped out of Bill C-40. That bill then progressed through the House and went on to the Senate. To my knowledge, Bill C-40 is still currently before the other place.
One of the things that is of interest, and I just say one, is that both the House and the Senate committees raised concerns, not specifically to the amendments themselves in some cases, but to the lack of background information being provided for the rationale for the amendments themselves. During his brief remarks the hon. government House leader referred to that. He duly noted that this time around when Bill C-43 was brought forward, additional information and material was provided to parliamentarians to support the necessity for some of these amendments.
The one amendment I wish to pick up on in the bill deals with clauses 17 and 18. Clause 17 is an amendment to the Lieutenant Governors Superannuation Act which is just one of the myriad of acts Bill C-43 addresses. Clause 17 states:
The definition “deferred pension” in section 2 of the Lieutenant Governors Superannuation Act is replaced by the following:
“deferred pension” means a pension that becomes payable to a person at the time he or she reaches sixty years of age.
What is interesting to note in this regard is that the Senate committee on legal and constitutional affairs in its report on Bill C-40, the forerunner to Bill C-43, raised a concern. It asked why in clauses 17 and 18 the government decided to lower the age from 65 to 60 for a deferred pension for lieutenant governors.
It believed it might be a minor change, but it behooves all of us to understand the rationale behind that. Is it to bring it into line with other pensions and if so, did there at least appear to be a reluctance on the part of the government to provide that rationale? Would it not have been appropriate to have that brought forward at that time?
I picked that one example because clearly what the committees in both houses have targeted in this type of legislation is that to do a proper job of overseeing these types of amendments, they clearly want to understand exactly the rationale and perhaps from time to time have an expert witness come before the committee to provide testimony. For example, when a particular clause is being dropped from an act, they want to make sure that is an appropriate thing to do.
In the time I have remaining I want to refer to the whole issue of why we are debating this bill today. Yesterday, as the House leader for the Canadian Alliance noted, the House rose with two hours of time remaining for debate. We could have been debating legislation, Bill C-43 which we are debating today or other bills.