Mr. Speaker, I never miss an opportunity to give the public another opportunity to understand what we are debating.
The bill is about aviation safety. I note the NDP members have focused as much attention on railway safety as they have on everything else.
Whenever members of Parliament are concerned with the security and safety of the travelling public, it is always to be commended. This is why the committee members should be commended. They studied a bill for more than six months.
It is true that we brought an exhaustive list of people before the committee, an exhaustive list of interested industry operators, of union representatives, of professional organizations and of interested third parties. It is true that many of them said they liked the bill. Some of them even said they wanted to add some more. Others even said that we could improve the legislation by doing certain things. Everyone of them was listened to with deference and respect, and their input was incorporated in the amendments, now the bill. They are all in the bill.
It is verging on the dishonest, but I do not want to use that word too heavily, to suggest that the input people had as witnesses in the committee, before the committee members looked at the amendments, is the view that should prevail today.
For example, referring to Judge Moshansky is not very direct or honest. Judge Moshansky said he thought we should do the following. We did what he suggested. It is in the bill.
It is unfortunate and verging on the dishonest to refer to the lack of inspectors when we have amendments in the bill that must ensure the financing, the training and the deployment of inspectors to guarantee the safety mechanisms that we propose as standards. The members have already acknowledged they are there. The standards have been upgraded. The resources to ensure they be in place and supervised appropriately are there. That is in the bill.
It is verging on the dishonest to suggest that we are now talking about a bill that would impose extra work on professionals. They are governed by collective agreements. They are governed by their own professional code of conduct. They are governed by the Canada Labour Code, which is not superceded by any proposed amendment.
If NDP members want to kill a bill in which they participated in shaping for six months, then they should say to the general public that they want to be obstructionists, that they should give themselves a different name. They can do that. It is okay. I do not have any problem with it. However, it is verging on the dishonest for the members of the NDP to make the suggestions they have about the members of the Bloc and the Liberal Party, who believe in making Parliament work, who listen to the general public and who take into consideration the voice of experts in the field and then structure legislation.
Yes, it was with the cooperation of the government members. I know there are those who think we should take partisanship to the extreme and say that everything the Conservatives do is bad. I commiserate with them because it is as a result of the NDP manoeuvring in the last Parliament that we have the government we have today. However, I will not fall into the temptation of getting into partisanship by believing that.
I only say that it is absolutely crucial, when members of Parliament gather together for more than six months and iron out all the difficulties, whether they are real or perceived, that we present the bill to the House and give it at least one more chance. We went through this, it is called report stage. The amendments that members did not like or did not think they could put forward, could have been brought in a committee of the whole to get support of other members of Parliament to give it one last chance. We did that.
This bill sailed through at report stage. Now we have all those complaints from members of the NDP, the new whine party. They are saying that notwithstanding everything the rest of the general public represented by legitimately elected individuals think, it does not matter. They want to hold up the bill. They want to ensure the bill does not get approval of the House. That is okay.
If members have a firm ideological position based either on a good solid footing or on whatever comes up on the day, that is okay too. However, we should not try to project it as being something more than that. It is nothing more than obstructionism and it cannot be thought of as anything else.
The NDP is not interested in aviation safety. It is not interested in the security and the job security of those people working in the aerospace and aviation industry. It is not interested in the business interests of Canadian enterprises, be they big or small. If it were, the bill would have passed the House last June. If it were, this bill would have passed last week when it was reintroduced as part of the negotiation to bring back bills at the same stages when the House last adjourned.
Members of the House can disagree with each other. It is unfortunate that we have come to a stage where we want to express our differences by calling others liars. We are not. It is verging on dishonesty to suggest implicitly or explicitly that there was collusion, in private, in secrecy, on this bill. The minister who brought the bill forward appeared before the committee two or three times. I enjoyed giving him a hard time, but that is what the process is for. Therefore, if anyone had a problem with the minister's bill, we brought him and his officials before the committee over and over again. There was no secrecy.
The plan was to have members of Parliament structure this bill. Members of Parliament have structured the bill. The NDP, while it takes great credit for having done great work, has just said, with the last several interventions, that it is not part of the process. It certainly is not an honest part of the process. I wonder whether the members of the NDP will wake up and decide to make the House work. If they do not want to do that, perhaps they should all resign en masse and do the Canadian public a favour.