Mr. Speaker, the reality is that we have been trying for well over a year, since Bill C-21 was first introduced, to get agreement from both opposition parties. We had agreement from the official opposition for many months. It wanted Bill C-21 to go forward.
The difficulty was trying to get agreement from the Liberal Party. I do not know the rationale behind why the Liberal Party did not want Bill C-21 to come forward for further debate but that is the reality. Finally, as I mentioned two days ago, the Liberals indicated to us that they would be willing to support Bill C-21 to at least send it to committee.
We would have had Bill C-21 at committee many months ago if we had agreement from the opposition parties that they would support it. Even though we have a majority, the reason their support is necessary is that House time is very valuable and we do not want to introduce bills that will be delayed unnecessarily by filibusters, amendments and hoists, all of which are available technically and from a procedural standpoint to the opposition parties to delay passage of a bill.
Rather than trying to delay House proceedings by introducing Bill C-21 when it would not get support from the opposition parties, we kept trying to negotiate behind the scenes with them, to ask them to let us know when they were finally ready to offer their support. We got that acceptance on Bill C-21 two days ago. It is introduced today. I fully expect debate to conclude today, which means we will probably be voting at second reading next week.
We want Bill C-21 to be passed. We have wanted it since we introduced it. Now that we finally have support from the opposition parties it will go forward.