Madam Speaker, as Yogi Berra once said, “It's déjà vu all over again”. We are back with this bill that the House has seen a few times.
I am a bit surprised in a sense to be speaking to this bill today. Six months ago I was under the impression, at least as far as the House was concerned, and I do not want to speak for the other place of course, that it was a fait accompli. Once the committee had worked out amendments to the bill and agreed to pass it in committee, I thought the chances were very good that it would come back and pass at report stage and third reading and then go off to the Senate.
However, we had something called prorogation as members may recall. For some reason the Prime Minister decided he was not that keen on too much democracy, that the House should not sit for a while and Parliament should be prorogued.
It is becoming clear that while the Conservatives want us to believe this bill is a priority, their actions make a mockery of that kind of assertion. After all this is the third time they have tried to update Canada's Nuclear Liability Act and they do not seem to be in that much of a hurry. The first time was a few years ago with Bill C-5, and we heard how important it was.