Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the parliamentary secretary's efforts to vainly defend the indefensible, which is this badly botched deal and this badly flawed bill.
What is interesting, in the exchange with the Liberal member opposite, is that it is quite clear that there was even more botching in the process of drafting the amendments that were supposed to fix the first draft of botches that came in Bill C-24.
The parliamentary secretary said that Canadians needed to think about what life was like before the softwood sellout. The answer to that is very simple: the 4,000 people who had jobs then do not have them now after the signing of the agreement. In the last four weeks, 4,000 jobs have evaporated into thin air. Canadians who think about what life was like before the softwood sellout can think of the thousands of people who are no longer working and the thousands of families that have lost their breadwinner because of the appalling incompetence of the government.
The parliamentary secretary referred to some repairs that were made to this badly flawed bill, Bill C-24. We only heard two witnesses at the standing committee. A number of errors were identified. Why were other clauses, like clause 6, clause 25 and clause 18, not repaired?