Mr. Speaker, there is a balance required between delay and having a fulsome discussion and study. This was introduced in the last Parliament. I do not have any advice as to why the bill was not brought forward. The technical procedural elements and those kinds of delays are different from spending time looking at the legislation and hearing from witnesses with respect to it.
I do appreciate that the member brought up the point that we have signed this international obligation and that it is important for us to have domestic legislation. I do wish those requirements would have been asked with respect to other pieces of international treaties, such as the international convention on social and economic rights, which we signed in 1970. It states that there is a right to housing in Canada; yet we do not have any domestic legislation with respect to that. Therefore, I wish that in some of those other treaties we had the requirement to bring forward domestic legislation in order to ratify those treaties.