Mr. Speaker, the hon. member for Saint-Jean said that the government could have introduced this bill much sooner and that the parliamentary secretary's explanation for this was that the Conservatives did not have a majority government at the time. Those are excuses. There were times when the NDP held the balance of power under the minority governments.
If a similar bill to ratify these conventions had been introduced earlier by the government, would the NDP have supported it, thereby allowing this bill to be passed a long time ago?