Mr. Speaker, I welcome the opportunity to raise a question with the member. I agreed with many of his comments, not all of them, but that will not surprise anybody.
As one of several foreign affairs critics in the House, I was extremely disappointed that the government chose to introduce Bill C-31 and Bill C-32 while not only the Minister of Foreign Affairs was abroad on an exceedingly important and sensitive mission to the Middle East, but all of the foreign affairs critics were away as well. Although I do not think the Conservative foreign affairs critic accompanied the mission, it is true that the former foreign affairs critic for the Conservative Party acquitted himself extremely well as a member of that mission.
I am disappointed not to have heard the previous debate in the House. I have not been able to fully catch up with what other points of view were presented in debate having just come home yesterday from the Middle East.
I was interested in hearing the wrap up comments from the Conservative member who just spoke, in which, if I understood correctly, he suggested that perhaps Bill C-31 and Bill C-32 were good bills in that they would give us a chance to look at how the foreign affairs' functions of the government were discharged and in what ways it may make sense for us to introduce improvements.
If I understood his comments correctly, I wonder if the member could address two questions. Does he not find it troublesome that we now find ourselves with after the fact legislation in front of us? It is now close to two years since the government separated foreign affairs and international trade. Those two departments have been functioning under that new arrangement pretty much ever since because of an order in council that allowed the government to do that before any such debate took place in the House.
We now find ourselves basically being asked to rubber stamp something that has already happened. If we stand in the way of this, it will be suggested that we are being obstructionists and that we do not get it. It will ask us why we do not just get with its program. The government has done this without any parliamentary authority and it wants us to put up or shut up.
Is it not also equally problematic that, at the very time the government purports to be in the process of launching a major review of Canada's foreign policy, we are faced with such legislation? At the very least one could say that the government appears to have put the cart before the horse when it went ahead and separated these two departments without allowing the rationale for doing so to be fully divulged and fully understood, let alone the opportunity for there to be meaningful input from the Canadian people who are about to be invited, which is what we have been told, to give meaningful input into Canada's future foreign policy for the country.