Mr. Speaker, I am more than pleased to address you directly, sir. I know that you would never take the opportunity to single me out. You do as you have always done and remind us all to participate in a way that we know we should. I appreciate that reminder.
Clearly, when we look at Bill C-15, we see it is about bringing justice to our brave men and women in the military for whom all in this House have the greatest of admiration and respect. I genuinely believe that. We, as a Parliament, ask them to serve Canada and they come to us voluntarily to serve.
As parliamentarians, we can disagree on what the missions are, but when a decision is ultimately taken in this House, members of the Canadian Forces serve this House and Canadians in general. This legislation should have been about ensuring that their justice system is as robust and as good as we can possibly make it. However, that is where we have let them down.
The reason we are bringing this to the government's attention is that we have such a high regard for the members of the military and hold them in such high esteem because of the service they give to all of us regardless of what role they take on here at home or abroad. We want them to have the most robust system of justice, which we know they deserve, and we should not provide anything less than that.
We have had reports that have been named many times, whether it be the Lamer report, the committee's report or the previous bill, which have been in this House before. We have had all of these things already, not necessarily in this session of the House, but certainly in other sessions. I was here last session of the House, and there was a bill here before that.
We have had all of that information, which has been studied to a certain degree, but where has it disappeared to? What happened to those pieces of legislation that folks agreed were good? Why would we lose those bits and pieces? Why would we not just say, yes, we disagree on certain aspects, but in the end, why would we not look at the pieces that are here?
There are concerns around the complaints commission. For example, a soldier who logs a grievance ends up in front of his or her commanding officer. That is the way the system works in this process. If one does not come out the other side of the process thinking one was treated fairly, then the system does not work.
The issue is not about the decision. Grievers can file grievances and not win, but if they think that the system works, then they just do not like the decision at the end of it, which is fair. Grievers quite often do not like the decision if they do not win. However, if a griever does not think the process is fair, then regardless of what happens in the decision, it is the process that is the annoyance.
I think we need to look at the grievance procedure and ask how we can make it a fair system. How do we make it a system so that those who have to enter it can say to themselves that the system works? They may not like the decision, but they would not complain that the system was unfair. This is much different from thinking that the reason they got a bad decision was that the process does not work, which ends up with two negatives and that just does not work for everyone involved. It does not work for the military as a whole or its sense of what it wants to do in making sure that justice seems fair. It is not a question of justice being done, but about justice seeming fair as well.
Ultimately, that is what we needed Bill C-15 to do, and it started down the path of taking it to a better place. However, the issue for me is: Why did we not go down the path a little farther? There is some suggestion that maybe it will happen later on. Why do we not do it now? If we were starting from scratch, I guess we might think this is a great start, but the problem is that we are not. We have started from other places. We could have built that into the bill, which is what we find disappointing on this side.