No. I have been here five. I was here one time before, way back in the 33rd Parliament. I was 16 years in another legislature. Second reading meant the same thing in both places, which is approval in principle, so when the Liberals voted for this legislation at second reading, they voted for approval in principle.
The principles that were there then are still there today. The Liberals offered no improvements, although there were a couple of substantial improvements, one of them about summary trials. Now that the bill has been improved, they do not like it and they are going to vote against it. I do not understand that. I will let the public and members of the military try to figure out why the Liberals have changed their minds on this bill.
There have been some improvements, although the system for grievances needs to be tightened up and we need to have more civilians on the board. We moved amendments to that effect. We are pleased that the act has been reviewed.
We also brought forward witnesses, probably some of the most eloquent witnesses that the committee has heard from, who talked about justice in general and military justice in particular. I am speaking of a retired justice of the Federal Court of Appeal who was the former commissioner of the Somalia commission. He has a great deal of knowledge about military justice in Canada and about the operation of the military. He had some very important things to say to the committee about what is really needed. He asked for a more comprehensive review of military justice, and we reiterated that in our request. That needs to be done.
I will read the suggestion from his evidence:
Hence, my first point is there is a need for a fundamental wall-to-wall review of the National Defence Act, a review that has to be conducted outside the control of the Department of National Defence so that Parliament can be provided with a legislative proposal that addresses not only the wishes of the military leadership but also, first and foremost, the expectations of our civil society, who demand that our soldiers who serve in uniform be afforded rights equal to those provided in the civilian penal system in Canada and other militaries abroad. This is currently not the case.
We knew that. We knew that going in. I suspect that if the Liberals had listened to our speeches during second reading, and God knows we made enough of them, they would have known it at second reading when they voted in favour of the legislation and when we voted against it.
We brought forward excellent, erudite, eloquent, experienced witnesses to bring home the point that there was a problem that needs to be solved. We did not expect all of the problems to be solved by amendments to the legislation; a number of the amendments we brought forward were ruled out of order, inadmissible, beyond the scope of the bill. We knew that. We brought them forward because they had to be brought forward. These were changes that had to be made.
We are committed to making changes to overhaul some of these problems when we form government, but that does not mean we are prepared to throw out the baby with the bath water when we have legislation before us that brings forward changes that we had a great deal of responsibility for in urging on the government back in 2010 when Bill C-41 was brought in. When those amendments were there, they were passed in committee; they did not get passed in the House because the bill was never called before the election took place.
I am here because I have devoted several years of work trying to get to where we are today. I am not going to turn my back on that progress and say to the men and women in uniform that although we got this far, we cannot support this legislation.
I talked about a backward step. I do not know how often it will be used, but we did not get convincing reasons for the Provost Marshal's investigations to be under the control of the VCDS. We are not satisfied with that. As I said, at the committee we had some very significant testimony from witnesses on the issue of making sure that our soldiers, sailors and airmen receive the same kind of standards of justice as exist elsewhere. This aspect has to be fixed and improved.
I only have a minute before we go to statements by members, but I believe I will be able to come back for eight minutes afterward, when I will conclude. However, I wanted to explain, in brief at least, why we are supporting this legislation today and why we see some progress being made, and to make the commitment to our soldiers, sailors and airmen that when we form government, we will go the distance and do the full job.