Mr. Speaker, once again, the New Democrats support, and have always supported, this legislation. This legislation would give important tools to police to help protect the public in cases of, as my friend properly said, the heinous crimes of a sexual nature committed against people.
However, my friend misses the point on the disrespect argument. The statute, as I will repeat again for him, has a statutory review built into it. That means when Parliament passed this legislation in 2004 it put in a provision that said this House should review this legislation two years later. Because of the minority government situation, that got delayed somewhat, I am told, but in February our committee started reviewing this legislation. The reason we reviewed it is Parliament said we should review it. While we were doing this important work and hearing from witnesses, the government jumped the gun and did not wait until the valuable testimony of this committee was completed so that we could give the minister the benefit of what we heard, and that is disrespectful.