Mr. Speaker, I am very grateful to my colleague for this question, but I must tell him that what is now going on in the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics is distressing. It is distressing for the public, because what they are seeing there is not committee members who genuinely want to work, to bring forward a genuine access to information act.
Yesterday, for example, we had one of the rare meetings that have been held since the last election, and all the stops were pulled out, particularly by the Conservative Party members, to ensure that we did not adopt a work plan that would have allowed us to ask the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada to come before us with an access to information bill.
Could anyone imagine the Conservative members throwing up roadblocks to prevent their Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada from bringing us, the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics, an access to information bill? Is this not the biggest and best evidence that the Conservative government has made only cosmetic changes in Bill C-2, but does not want a genuine, modernized, strengthened access to information act?
This makes the partisan motives behind C-2 even plainer. Certainly it has a few small good points, and so it is a step in the right direction, and so, will we vote for it? Bill C-2 is still also a partisan bill, and what it does is throw up roadblocks for the Liberal leadership race. It also coincides with an opportunistic, partisan reason, so that they can go into the next election campaign, which may happen sooner than later, this being a minority government, with an accountability bill, and can tell their voters to look at this lovely little Accountability Act. Except that this bill does not contain the important part: the transparency component, the access to information component. And so this bill will not have all the teeth it should, in order for the people of Quebec and of Canada to feel comfortable in a democratic country.