Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak to the bill at report stage, an important bill about reforming military justice in Canada.
The parliamentary secretary talked about the changes that arose since Somalia. One of them was the document I have in front of me called the “Accountability Framework Between the Vice Chief of the Defence Staff and the Canadian Forces Provost Marshal”. It was the Somalia inquiry that brought to light the need for a review of these matters, and there have been some iterations of change since then.
The amendment before us now is a backward step. Most of what is in the bill is positive. We spent considerable time in the House debating what needs to be done to fix it, particularly with respect to the issue of criminal records, to which the parliamentary secretary referred.
We do not believe, as a matter of principle, that individuals going before a military tribunal, who do not have access to the full rights that any defendants in a civil criminal trial in civil society has, should, if convicted, end up with a criminal record. We fought to change that. We argued in the House for many days about that. We argued in the House in the last Parliament to seek to change that. We in fact changed it in committee in the last Parliament, but it never got through because an election was called. There has been a whole process going on to seek to reform the legislation. Our position is that the bill does not go far enough.
This is report stage. We brought forth 19 amendments at committee stage to seek improvements to the bill. One of them involved the removal of this—