Mr. Speaker, we do agree that we need to find limits on the misuse of omnibus legislation. It is not, as the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons would have it, a matter of procedure or political games. The motion before us today is, at its essence, about democracy. I commend to my hon. friend this quote from Professor Ned Franks, one of the leading political scientists in Canada, professor emeritus at Queen's University, who wrote that,
“...budget implementation acts...have morphed from short bills dealing with minor items...to enormous bills”.
He said:
These omnibus budget implementation bills subvert and evade the normal principles of parliamentary review of legislation.
As such, they are at the heart of respect for Westminster parliamentary tradition. I am not going to cite any specific examples of the misuse of an omnibus bill, of which there have been many, but most of them have been in recent years: the 700-page omnibus bill of 2009, the enormous omnibus bill of 2010 and, of course, the most recent one this spring.
I think my hon. friend's speech has already answered the question of whether we need to get this to a committee. How quickly can we get this to a committee? When can we set these limits?