Mr. Speaker, I wish to thank the two justice critics in the House for the work they did on the bill. Our own justice critic, who is the leader of the PC Party, the member for Pictou—Antigonish—Guysborough and the Canadian Alliance member for Provencher did a tremendous job on the bill to improve it.
The fundamental question in terms of protecting our children goes right back to the inability of the government to do anything. It is a habit it has developed over the 10 years it has been in power. There is no question that because of some of the things that previous governments did--and I was a member and sat on the government side on some of the big initiatives that we took to get the economic house in order--the current government has coasted on those over the years. I am talking about such things as free trade and the GST. In fact, it did have money to do things but did not have to pay any attention to detail.
Assuming and accepting that argument, we would expect that. It is what most governments do when the economy is sorrowfully chugging along and going fairly nicely without any major initiatives, in other words, when it is not taking up a lot of its time. I challenge any member on that side of the House to get up and tell me any big economic initiative, trade or taxation policy that the government had to bring in to deal with fiscal difficulties it was facing. The fact of the matter is that it had to do nothing, just keep house and allow the machinery of government to run. And run it did.
The fact is the government had time to pay attention to social and justice issues and it has not done that. In fact, Bill C-20 has practically no support anywhere on this side of the House and very little support on that side of the House. Bill C-20 will never be passed in the life of this Parliament.
When the new leader comes in, the Martinites will take over. I hate to use the term Martinites. I would like to call them termites because they have secretly eroded the foundation of government for the last year and a half to two years.
Now we have a government that is moribund. It does not know how to do anything and there are many examples of that. It is not just Bill C-20. We can look at the fiasco that is taking place with the $700 million announced for rail service on the trade corridor between Windsor and Montreal. There is no clear indication that it will ever happen because the termites, the Martinites, are secretly undermining the government. In fact, we have a justice minister who has been caught up in that as well.
How would you like to have a record like his coming to the House, Mr. Speaker? He is sitting on a bill that could do something, but will do absolutely nothing. He will be sitting there for a long time before that bill is passed in this House simply because there is no will on the part of the government to pass it. In the meantime our children will suffer.
We saw last night the police chief of the City of Toronto, and the pain and hurt that police officers see every day of their lives. How the Government of Canada could miss that message is beyond my belief.