Mr. Speaker, I was responding to a question by the Conservatives about not holding up Parliament.
As members know, Elections Canada is looking into the actions of a number of Conservative members regarding illegally transferred funds. The Conservative members have stonewalled the committee that wants to look at this matter, and have tied up hundreds of thousands of Canadian taxpayers' dollars by carrying on and babbling about that.
Another good example is the Cadman affair. There was an indication that there may have been an offer made to a member of Parliament to vote a certain way, which of course is a criminal offence and is totally illegal. Once again the Conservative members of Parliament have made it impossible for Parliament to debate that matter. The committee chair ran out, totally breaking the rules of Parliament, which are that one must call the vote on a challenge to the chair.
Another example is holding up many justice bills for months before bringing them before Parliament for debate.
Part of the problem of getting things done in Parliament is the process used to develop bills. A witness told me when the justice committee was in Toronto that the normal process in developing bills was that experts would work on them for years, would make recommendations to the government, and vast consultations to deal with all the problems would be done, but that was not being done with those justice bills.
As a result, we have all sorts of witnesses to give all sorts of reasons as to why a bill is either totally wrong or requires all sorts of amendments to be fixed. A perfect example of that is related to the aboriginal human rights bill, which is only a dozen words long. It is written so badly and there was such poor consultation, it took the government over a year to get it partly through the process.
The Conservatives have now withdrawn the bill because they cannot get it through at all. Everyone in Parliament wants it and it could be done very simply. The government should have simply consulted and put in the five or six items that aboriginal people across Canada mentioned were needed in those consultations.