Mr. Speaker, earlier I spoke about the comments by the Minister of Canadian Heritage when the Liberal leader was talking about the bill. Basically, he said that the committee had hearings on the bill, that it heard from 142 witnesses and that it received 167 submissions during 2010-11, before the last election. The minister and the government did not listen and brought back the exact same bill. That was when the minister said, “I'll bet $10,000 that there'll be substantive and real amendments”. In fact, we have not seen the amendments.
The point is that the government did not listen. The minister talked about all the witnesses that were heard as if that meant something. How can it means something if what they said is ignored?
We had a situation in committee where the Conservative members were obviously ordered to reject anything from the opposition, even the most innocuous amendments. For example, one amendment would have allowed a company that was building anti-virus software to break a digital lock in order to get at the software and examine whether it could be breached and so forth to ensure t their software would work properly.
Why would the minister muzzle his own members in that way? Why would he and the government insist that they would not be open to no amendments whatsoever, even the most mild and minor of amendments?