Mr. Speaker, I do not want to belabour the point for the hon. member as I know she has put a lot of time into this. However, it is always beneficial to have a member of Parliament sitting on the committee to know exactly what has happened. I understand the philosophy and the importance of what is being provided here.
There appears to be several amendments that her party proposed at committee which were accepted and were not in essence redundant. I am looking at dozens that were supplied by her party. Some are extremely important to address the concerns of the NDP and to express the concerns that might have some relationship to what we were trying to accomplish here. As much as the government and the opposition have been flexible in this regard, there comes a point where philosophy obscures one's vision of the facts.
I do not blame the hon. member because she never sat on the committee. Perhaps she was there for only a moment or two. She is relying on the good work done by the hon. member for Halifax for whom I have great respect and who has done a lot of work on this issue.
As much as I understand the correspondence between herself and the member who sat on the committee, something has become lost. Not withstanding the objections, in my view there was an emergence on the committee of general consensus that this was not the great satellite detection system that would be used for military purposes in terms of the ballistic missile defence.
Surely the hon. member and her party are not saying now that they are opposing the bill because it could have positive implications for our troops around the world and for people who find themselves in positions of disaster. Surely the NDP is not saying that Bill C-25 should not pass and allow the kind of technology that helps Canadians abroad.
I want to hear it from the NDP. Are those members opposing the legislation because they have some philosophical differences or are they opposing it because they have some kind of reticence to protecting Canadians abroad?