Madam Speaker, the argument of the Conservatives to this point is that there is a great need for urgency. This is why they are doing this super closure motion that denies all debate. It does not allow parliamentarians to do the very thing we are in the House to do, which is to scrutinize laws and try to understand their implications.
When we have asked government members for evidence on costing, on how many criminals we are talking about and who they are, they come back with PMO spin lines, which is not very much of a debate at all.
The other argument is the government blames the opposition for any delays that may have happened. However, the bill was killed twice at the government's own hands. Every time it kills it, it adds another 6, 12, 18 months to the whole process. Yet the government pretends that those prorogations, that shutting down and locking of the doors of Parliament, never happened. On the argument of urgency, obviously this was not urgent for the government because it killed it twice.
The argument of efficacy is that this will do something to better Canadians and stop the Earl Joneses of the world. It is too late to stop Lacroix because he has already been released. The Conservatives say that the effectiveness of this bill will somehow be everything that Canadians need with respect to white-collar crime.
On both of those arguments, we have asked the government members time and again to give us some shred of evidence that the urgency is needed now, that we must ram this through without debate, or that when this does come into law, it will actually do what the government promises to do.
My colleague sits on the committee. Has evidence been brought forward that proves this must happen now? If the bill does come into law, because of the new coalition arrangement between the Bloc and the Conservatives, will it somehow stop the Earl Joneses of the future from doing what he did to our pensioners?