The House leader calls them legislative improvements. Sometimes they are euphemistically referred to as housekeeping amendments. It just sounds so pleasant.
The real ugly face of it is legislative incompetence on the part of the government. The House leader is the first, whenever the opposition drags out debate on a bill as we occasionally do, to raise the alarm about the cost to parliament and the value of debating time in this place.
We spend hours, days and weeks in every session debating bills such as this one, which are, in substance, corrections to legislative errors that the government made in the first place. If the government got these things right in the first place, we would not be spending scarce parliamentary time debating legislative errors such as those contained in Bill C-17.
Sometimes these errors are not just of a minor, technical or dilatory nature. Sometimes they are very serious and grave mistakes. The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board is a good example. In the immediate past parliament, the government introduced Bill C-2 in order to make some major changes to the Canada pension plan and to authorize and introduce the single largest tax increase in Canadian history. My colleagues will recall that massive tax grab that will cost tens of billions of dollars. They brought—