Mr. Speaker, very briefly, I am a bit dismayed that my colleague across the way seems to have missed the part that I said for emphasis about the concern that we have around the committee. He suggested in his last point about the moot nature of amendments coming from committees. Some of the committees were given one committee meeting to hear from a couple of witnesses, view all of the clauses of the bill that were proposed, somehow formulate those amendments in the committee, and then vet those amendments and pass them on. Some committees did in fact move amendments.
My point is that in the instruction that came from the finance committee, it says quite explicitly in section (c), “any amendments suggested by the other Standing Committees, in the recommendations conveyed pursuant to paragraph (b),” which was all of the sections before, “shall be deemed to be proposed during the clause-by-clause consideration of Bill C-45”. It is a committee instructing a whole set of other committees to move clauses that were then deemed to be accepted as if they were moved at that committee. Committees do not have the power to do this. Only the House of Commons can convey this power upon a committee.
I would argue that this has been a disaster from the start. Initially the government said it would not split any of the bill. Then it split off MP and senators' pensions. Then, by a mistake of the Liberals, it threw 450,000 public pensioners into that submission as well, which was then changed again. We created a whole new Bill C-46, which was then passed on through the Senate for royal recommendation.
The finance minister said we were not splitting the bill. Then we get to committee and they have this cockamamie motion that sends all sorts of instructions to other committees and asks them to move amendments to clauses of the bill that they were not given time to study, with a minimal number of witnesses, and then to move those amendments back to the committee as if they had existed there, as if somehow the House of Commons had instructed them to do that.
We gave the Conservatives that option. We gave them the option to move the bill through in a timely fashion. The member talks about some sort of congressional system in the U.S. where budget bills go to the eleventh hour. We gave the government assurance of a timeline. We gave it a section of the bill to be carved out and studied properly because that is the whole function of Parliament, to hold the government to account. The government refused it and said that instead we would have this system in which we endow the finance committee with far more powers than anyone ever imagined.
If this is allowed to go on, in the future we could then say that committees are allowed to take far greater instruction, to break all of the precedents that this place guides itself by and to start instructing amendments to come from different places, instructing committees to study bills whether they want to or not, and then that all comes back to one committee, which somehow has become powerful.
In terms of the last point, that every bill, every consideration of this place has to do with the economy and therefore the finance committee, under some perverse notion by the House leader of the government, would then have to study every bill brought forward. Of course that is not what we are talking about. It is appropriate for Bill S-8 to go to the Indian affairs committee. It is appropriate for bills that have something to do with the environment to go to the environment committee, which was our point from the beginning.
The problem with the omnibus bill is that it crowded together so many various issues, which Conservatives used to say was a bad idea when they were in opposition. Now suddenly they are in government and they think omnibus bills are the best thing and start to create the largest ones in Canadian history and jam everything together. It does not work. It does not allow Parliament to perform its function for the people that we represent.
Clearly, there is a great deal of detail and procedural orientation to this, but if the government House leader chooses to ignore the most fundamental and foundational point of this point of order, then he is choosing to be blind to the fact of what his government and the finance minister created when they made this mess of a monster omnibus bill.