Mr. Speaker, it is interesting to hear the minister attempt to justify shutting down debate once again. As the member for Parkdale—High Park said, it has been 39 times that the government has limited the ability of parliamentarians to do their job. In this case, we have only had one hour of debate on the bill at this stage of its reading.
We are talking about a bill that is 115 pages long and amends 49 different pieces of legislation. When the bill had second reading, there was time allocation on that phase. Then it was referred to committees where people were unable to amend the bill. They had very limited time to call witnesses. In some cases, some committees only had one meeting on the legislation. Therefore, I hardly think we have had adequate time to give the bill the kind of study it requires. We saw this with the budget bill and now the budget implementation act.
As well, in this case, the government talks about how it needs to get this moving. Why did it not bring the bill forward earlier? The government controls the agenda for when a bill is called before the House for debate. It had ample opportunity to bring the bill forward so we would have the opportunity to study it in-depth and to call witnesses. Again, as the member for Parkdale—High Park pointed out, there are a number of different critical pieces of legislation that would be impacted by this, for example, the amalgamation of CIDA with foreign affairs and some changes to the way the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation would be able to operate.
Why does the minister think parliamentarians should not have the opportunity to provide due diligence for legislation that will have impact so many other pieces of legislation?