Mr. Speaker, let us indeed put this in context, as the minister responsible for the Treasury Board said.
The context here is that the government is going to extraordinary lengths to ram through a bill that is quite clearly and factually much more than a budget bill. It is a bill that has almost 900 pages and has many other provisions in terms of deregulation, privatization and many major significant public policy issues.
I am proud of the fact that New Democrats have tried to hold up this bill. We are prepared to debate a budget bill but we are not prepared to have a bill that becomes a Trojan horse for many other issues that the Conservative government does not have the guts to put forward in legislation on its own merit that we can debate in this House.
We have had 60 amendments to this bill to delete those clauses that we believe are beyond the scope of what a budget implementation bill should be about. I would like to ask the minister why the government does not have the courage to actually deal with all of these other matters, such as environmental regulations and assessment or privatization, as individual legislation, as it should be, so it can be the proper debate in this House, as opposed to ramming through this massive bill under the guise that it is budget implementation.
If there are provisions in there that the government says have deadlines, then it could have ensured that this bill was truly a budget implementation bill and we would have considered that and ensured that it had a timely passage. However, it has set this environment for this bill, which is why it is now being held up.