Mr. Speaker, again I rise with great sadness that for the 30th time, the government has decided to enact closure to ram through one of its pieces of legislation, and not just any legislation, but very important technical tax changes, almost 1,000 pages, affecting more than 100 tax laws that are very important to all Canadians.
We have heard a lot of testimony from tax practitioners in this country about the importance of the timely resolution of these technical tax changes. Let me say that if this bill is so urgent on the part of the government, why did it take it 11 long years to bring this bill before Parliament and to get us to this point?
Second, if the government introduced the bill 100 days ago, what has it been doing? We have only just been able to get this on our agenda for debate.
While many of the changes themselves may not be controversial, the process, whereby the government has waited 11 years to enact technical tax changes that have already been announced, is the issue we need to debate.
We have no other opportunity to debate this. It creates confusion among Canadians and creates confusion among tax professionals. It creates a drag on our GDP because businesses do not know which set of rules they are playing by, the ones that have been announced or the ones that were formerly in place. We deserve a full and thorough debate of the process by which these tax changes get made. Will she answer that?