Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise this morning and add a few comments on Bill C-19, an act to amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act and the Criminal Code of Canada.
I could basically sum up my approach to this bill by saying that it is about time. It is about time that the Liberal government has seen fit to finally act some four years after the subcommittee of the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights put together a list of recommendations on how to improve the whole business of corrections, conditional release, and parole in our prison system in Canada.
Here we are, almost four years later, and the government is finally bringing forward this bill again.
Canadians have the right to ask why it has taken four years to act upon the recommendations of this subcommittee. One of the reasons, and I hope it is becoming increasingly evident to Canadians, is the fact that the government has been embroiled for the past number of years, certainly the last four years since this subcommittee reported, in a clandestine leadership race that was prompted by the now Prime Minister. Because he was wheeling and dealing and operating behind the scenes to overthrow Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, these types of things fell off the table.
It is not only this, of course. The nation at the moment is seized by the scandalous misspending of some quarter of a billion dollars through the sponsorship program in Quebec. This happened as well on the Prime Minister's watch when he was finance minister, and he cannot distance himself from that.
Increasingly, Canadians are coming to realize that a lot of this important business of the nation was not put forward, was not passed, was not debated, was not amended, and was not ultimately passed into law to improve the system. In this case, it is Bill C-19. It was Bill C-40 in the last session, before the Liberals prorogued Parliament unnecessarily and all the legislation died. Now we have to start all over again.
Now it is rumoured that there will be an unnecessary early election called as soon as early April, a little more than a month from now. What will happen to this legislation then? It will die again, so then we will be four and a half or five years down the road. Maybe next fall it will be brought back. It will have a different number, but it will be the same legislation as Bill C-40.