Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to say in the House that we will bring forward a bill in the next Parliament. If the opposition does not preempt this Parliament and allows the election to go ahead in the time that it was intended, we will even bring it forward in this Parliament.
I want to also add that that I find the timing of the opposition motion quite surprising. It is on a par with a lot of other things. This opposition motion is being presented today on the very day that former Supreme Court Justice Gérard LaForest, who appeared before the committee, is to tender his report to me on the issue we asked him to address on the matter of the merits of a merger of the Information Commissioner and the Privacy Commissioner.
As the committee members know, and as he testified, I gave him no recommendation or suggestion as to how he was to perform that task. I await his report which he will be tendering to me today, and we will make it public. My question is, why did the opposition members not await the report, so that they could have been as informed as I will be after his report with regard to what we want to do?
Justice Gomery has said that he will deal with access to information in his second report. Why did they not wait for Justice Gomery to tender his second report, so that we all could have benefited from that as well?
This has the appearance, if not the intention, of being a kind of opportunistic critique that has been put forward by a wave of emotion without taking into account two distinguished reports from Justice LaForest and Justice Gomery which could have assisted them, assisted us as well as Canadians.