Mr. Speaker, I would like to begin by acknowledging my colleague, Benoît Sauvageau. I worked with him on Bill C-2 and assisted him throughout the process. I want to make sure everyone knows what extraordinary work he did. We must all recognize that.
All parties in this House worked very hard on this. Never before has a committee sat for so many hours and so many days in so few weeks to produce a bill of great importance about accountability.
We all gained something; some of us lost something. Some of the things we wanted to see in the bill are not there, but I want to emphasize that we did gain some ground.
Among other things, we, the members of the Bloc Québécois, succeeded in getting an independent appointment process for Elections Canada returning officers. This is very important. Such a process has already been in place in Quebec for a number of years, and now we have it at the federal level.
In fact, consultation has already been undertaken to find out if returning officers in each riding were competent, if their work was well done, if there was any partisanship, and if they had the necessary qualifications to do the job. All parliamentarians were consulted and a report was tabled. That was a huge step forward. I would like to congratulate the committee on its support for this part of the bill.
We also succeeded in eliminating rewards for whistleblowers. We found that proposal completely unacceptable. It might even have prompted some people to make false accusations in order to receive the reward. That provision was removed from the bill. I would like to thank the secretary of the Treasury Board because we discussed this and he agreed to make the change.
The parties worked together on this, in a fairly respectful manner. We also obtained the assurance that this legislation will be reviewed in five years. Typically, legislation is reviewed every 10 years. We asked that this be reviewed after five years, because the legislation is so complex that we are not entirely sure how it will be implemented. It affects so many other acts that our concern regarding the implementation of Bill C-2 has to do with the time frame and costs of its implementation.
As we know, this bill amends several other acts, but we do not know how long this will all take. Over time, we will see how this bill moves forward.
We needed an accountability act. Given the sponsorship scandal and the Gomery Commission, this House needed legislation to ensure the probity of parliamentarians. We are all honest people. We all want to represent our constituents well. There can be temptations, however, through bad influences, to act dishonestly. We saw this with the sponsorship scandal. Bill C-2 corrects part of the problem.
However, we deplore the Conservative government's decision to give in to the ultimatum given by the Senate, in order to stop the constant back and forth between the House of Commons and the Senate, and to ensure that Bill C-2 is passed quickly.
We rejected the idea of a separate Senate ethics officer, because such an officer would not be as effective as Bill C-2 could have allowed. However, as I mentioned, there has been some give and take.
The Bloc Québécois made concessions and compromises; the Liberal Party made compromises; the NDP did so as well, and the government made many compromises, to our great surprise. We always said that we would not delay the committee's work unduly, and we kept our promise by making solid proposals. But we regret that many people who would have liked to testify and submit briefs to the committee were unable to do so because of impossible time constraints. They were given barely 24 hours to write a brief and come to testify. It is very unfortunate that witnesses often had just two minutes to speak. This is unreasonable, and the work suffered as a result. When seven or eight witnesses take the time to travel together and only one or two have the chance to testify before the committee for two minutes, and when the question period is also limited to two or three minutes, this does not promote very good relations. In that sense, it was very difficult.
Many Quebeckers would have liked to testify before the committee, but were unable to do so. However, some people later testified before the Senate committee, which was a good thing. But it was also difficult in the Senate, because the hearing process moved along very quickly there as well. A bill was needed and, in my opinion, it will be passed on division. We will monitor the application of the legislation very closely, because it affects many other existing laws and makes significant changes.
We do not know whether it will be possible to make improvements to certain laws. It may be that a bill to amend each law will have to be introduced in the House of Commons. But we do not know how much time, energy and money that will involve. We hope that there will be as much collegiality among the parties and that the work will be as well done as when Bill C-2 was drafted. As I said at the start, we never held up the process. We will therefore support the bill, but we hope that this bill will truly make a difference and not just be a bogus bill.
Do hon. members recall Bill C-11, Public Servants Disclosure Protection Act? From the outset, we called for Bill C-11 to be implemented immediately since it was ready, having gone through the Senate and received royal assent. Still, approval was denied supposedly because Bill C-2 was about to be introduced. Nine months were wasted with that. Because they had no protection, whistleblowers were not able to make the disclosures they wanted to make or should have made. Moreover, Bill C-11 was not in conflict with Bill C-2, not at all. In fact, once Bill C-2 was in effect, Bill C-11 would have been complementary.
We in the Bloc Québécois cannot understand why the government would not implement Bill C-11. It would not have cost the government anything, yet protection would have been afforded to whistleblowers, allowing them to start immediately doing their jobs. Of course, that is unfortunate, but now we are at the stage of implementing Bill C-2. This will ensure that we can count on our civil servants being able to do their jobs. If disclosures have to be made, they will be made honestly. That is actually a job requirement. They will not get paid for making disclosures. That would be unthinkable. It is the duty of civil servants to report on what is not working in their departments and on any wrongdoers who are up to no good. This marks an important victory for us.
I thank all my colleagues on the legislative committee on Bill C-2, both from the government side and the opposition. I think we did good work together, and my wish is that the legislation will be effective and will come into force as soon as possible.