Mr. Speaker, I listened with great interest to the interventions from the member for Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine. I know she cares deeply about integrity in politics in the governmental process. She mentioned a number of issues.
One of the things I dislike about this Parliament is if there is any difference of opinion on facts, the accusation of liar, liar goes back and forth. In fairness, it probably exists on both sides of the House. No party in the House, least of which me, can claim innocence on that. However, people can have different opinions. No presentation of the facts are indisputable. Two different people might reasonably come to two different solutions.
The member opposite has said that many of the Senate amendments are excellent. I take no fault with the Senate wanting to take a reasonable period of time. There was some suggestion it should pass this immediately in July. In fact, we said that if it wanted to take three months to review the bill, in addition to the 72 days the House took in addition to the 58 day election campaign, by all means take it.
I was scheduled to be the last witness with the Attorney General at the end of September, but then things changed. They thought they had an agreement and that fell apart, and that is unfortunate.
I do not take issue with wanting to sit 120 hours. What I did take issue with was the amount of time it cumulatively took. The Senate took one week in the end of June. It took off for seven seeks. Then it came back for a week. Then it took off. We expected it would have looked at the amount of time all members of Parliament in the House took to deal with the bill. The bill is not perfect. It was not perfect coming out of the House and it is not perfect coming out of the Senate, but it is important.
Another issue the member raised was Bill C-11. The Liberal government was the first to bring in a whistleblower bill. I will concede that Bill C-11 was better than nothing. There are those of us who represent ridings in the national capital.
Like many of my colleagues, including the members for Gatineau, Ottawa Centre, Nepean—Carleton and Ottawa—Orléans, as well as official opposition members, I know that a lot of public servants say they are still afraid to blow the whistle.
Many public servants still remain concerned and worried that if they stand up and speak out, they will be hurt. We wanted a system that was tougher and stronger. I think all parties contributed to that and this is what is before us today.
I noticed, though, when the Liberal senators on the committee put forward a press release talking about the amendments they were presenting, they left off a lot of them. They left off the fact that they were doubling the amount of money people could donate to political parties. They left off the fact that they were going to allow political staffers to go into the non-partisan public service. They left off many of the amendments which would be considered as gutting the bill.
Could the member for Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine enlighten us as as to why they would not have been proud of those amendments?