Mr. Speaker, I would simply like to say that we agree entirely with the hon. member for Joliette and the Bloc Québécois on this. We believe this situation constitutes a fundamentally unfair contempt of Parliament, and we would ask you to rule on this very serious matter.
The parliamentary secretary referred to the minister's comments to the media about the bill. We perhaps have to wonder if it was the first, second, third or fourth news conference the minister had before the bill was tabled in the House of Commons.
The notion that the minister in his comments to the media spoke in generalities and not in specifics about what was contained in the bill, as the parliamentary secretary just asserted, unfortunately is not accurate at all.
Before the opposition received an embargoed copy or before the bill was actually tabled in the House of Commons, some of us were responding to very specific media questions following the minister's news conference at the Lord Elgin Hotel where he discussed mandatory minimum sentences of two years, prohibition orders, restitution orders, victim impact statements and community impact statements.
Mr. Speaker, I know you were busy last evening at an important event, but once you have had time to study this bill yourself, you will see every one of those elements in the bill that we were discussing the day before the bill was tabled in news reports because the minister had made them public at a news conference off Parliament Hill.
Finally, I think the parliamentary secretary misrepresented the facts when he said that the minister made no comments to the media before the embargoed copy of the bill was given to opposition members. Again, we got the embargoed copy after the minister's news conference, the following day. By then we did not even need to read the embargoed copy, because we could have read any one of a number of daily newspapers that covered all of the details in the bill, which was released the following day.