Mr. Speaker, I rise today with mixed emotions. On the one hand, I am almost looking forward to the opportunity Bill C-13 gives me to attack the government and the other chamber for their misconduct, if I can put it that way. That is the emotion on one side, which is a positive one in terms of getting my adrenalin flowing.
However, on the other hand, I feel some significant regret because Bill C-13 and its prior incarnation in the form of C-23 is badly needed to be law, not to be deemed played with as a political toy, which both the government and the Senate are doing.
The history of the bill is that it was first brought before the House by the government in 2006. It went to the justice committee where a number of amendments were made that improved the bill. The bill addressed points of issue in a number of areas, particularly our police but also our prosecutors and the judiciary to more efficiently administer our criminal justice system.
A number of these amendments had been needed for quite some time. The Liberal administration, prior to the Conservative one, had allowed a number of these points to go unaddressed, some of which are as old as two decades and needed to be addressed. Requests had been coming from the police, the prosecutors and our judiciary over that period of time looking for these amendments and they just were not addressed.
The Conservatives came forward in their administration, packaged a number of them into one bill and sent them to the justice committee. We made further amendments that improved the bill. We sent it back to the House and it went through the House with all party support. It went to the Senate around the time the government decided, because it did not have enough of an agenda and did not know what it would do when it returned in the fall of 2007, to prorogue Parliament. The end result was that Bill C-23 died on the order paper in the Senate and had to be brought back.
It came back as Bill C-13 in the new House in the fall of 2007. It did not go to the justice committee. We just passed it and sent it over to the Senate because we had already done all the work that we wanted to do on it in the House.
What happened? The Senate decided that it would stick its fingers, as an unelected, non-responsive, I would say, irresponsible body--