Mr. Speaker, “earned parole” is throwing a new legal term into the debate, which is interesting because it does not exist in the legislation before us.
By the government's own hands, this bill has been killed twice already. That is a fact and no one disputes it. No one from the Conservative government disputes the fact that twice the Prime Minister made a decision that killed this bill.
The argument in front of us now is on the urgency required to get it done. After having killed it twice and delayed it more than a year and half already, the government needs to go into backroom negotiations with the Bloc. I say “back room” because they were never public. We do not know the terms. We do not know what was traded off or what modifications were made to the bill.
The House leader stood in this place before the weekend and said that negotiations were going on with the parties, but that was not true at all. The government was not, in fact, willing to work with us. It never called, never asked for suggestions and never asked if there was room to move. The New Democrats are interested in this question of these automatic paroles.
The challenge for my colleague is that a piece of legislation, a law that will affect more than 1,400 people a year according to Statistics Canada and the justice department, is being designed to go after one person. When we did this around the Homolka release, we were able to modify what the Parliament did to directly affect Karla Homolka's potential release. I am sure my colleague remembers. However, that is not what is happening here.
We have asked the government for basic costing. It is a fair question in this time of running government debt. Could my hon. colleague give us any sense of what the government's own numbers are on the cost of the bill?