Mr. Speaker, let me say first of all that I think the events on Friday afternoon were quite unfortunate. I had mentioned in my remarks that it would improve the atmosphere in the House, if we did not have any more recourse by the government to that kind of devious tactic.
Obviously, it put the table and the Chair in a very difficult position, and I would like to join the hon. member in congratulating both the table and the Chair for dealing with that matter in accordance with the rules of the House, which solved a bit of a parliamentary crisis at the time.
On the issue of the justice bills, it is true that there has been an enormous number of one-off justice initiatives brought forward through this Parliament. I think 13 or 14 altogether. They had the potential of causing a backlog in the justice committee.
In light of that, we took the extraordinary step, we thought a very constructive step, last October to say that in order to save time in debate, save time in the justice committee, we were prepared to fast-track a number of those initiatives, to see the debate curtailed or focused, and in some cases passed through the entire parliamentary procedure without further debate.
If that offer from the official opposition had been taken up when it was first made in October last year, fully three-quarters of the government's justice agenda would presently be law in this country. It is just not available to the government to say that somehow the official opposition, at least, has been the cause of any delay with respect to the substance of what the government brought forward in its justice bills.
What we did say was that those bills in themselves were insufficient, that we needed to focus also on crime prevention, that we needed to focus also on more police officers on the street, and that we needed to focus also on more Crown prosecutors so that Crown prosecutions and the caseload could be handled in a timely manner.
We also said that we needed modern investigative techniques, and we had to have better coordination between different governments and different law enforcement agencies. We needed new laws to protect children against Internet luring and seniors against identity theft.
We made a whole variety of constructive suggestions about how to have a comprehensive justice agenda, but part of the proposal was to say that, insofar as the government had brought forward an agenda, we were prepared to fast-track three-quarters of that, and I think that was a constructive response.