Mr. Speaker, I suspect my colleague has some constituents who are connected to Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, the nuclear industry in Canada that is located in his riding.
I guess the confusion I have, and which I think many Canadians would share with me, is when my hon. colleague talked about how Bill C-9 contains 900 pages of everything, including the kitchen sink. Anything the government could not pass independently, it rammed into this bill, which is an omnibus bill, a Trojan horse, or we can call it what we want, but most people would call it a disaster.
The bill would also give permission for the government to sell Canada's largest crown corporation, AECL, with no public debate and no discussion, which by law was required. AECL was set up at the beginning so that if the government ever wanted to sell it off, it would need to bring a bill before Parliament for discussion and a debate about whether that was a good idea, how to do it and what the terms of sale were. Instead, the government has gone through the back door and rammed it into a budget bill with no debate at all.
My hon. colleague's recommendation was that the bill should be broken up into its parts so that we could debate the sale of AECL, debate the environmental watering down of regulations that are in this bill and debate what is happening to Canada Post, which is being stripped of its international mailing rights. We voted on those motions last night. New Democrats moved motions at the committee but the Liberals ducked out of the committee room in order to allow the vote to pass. We had votes in this House last night and the Liberals voted to keep all those things in the bill. We had a vote not more than 12 hours ago on the very thing he is asking for and he voted to keep it in rather than have it out in the light of day. I do not understand how he can stand today and say that this is what should happen, when we had the chance--