Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague, who is also the chair of the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights.
In my opinion, he is taking offence at very little; we are not criticizing him for the number of meetings that were held or the quality of the witnesses. However, we asked some witnesses whether it would not be more prudent to wait for the Supreme Court's ruling, which was handed down just a few hours after the time provided for the clause-by-clause review had ended.
On one hand, I agree with my colleague that this is an important issue and that we want to help the victims, parents, families and everyone involved so that they can rest easy. On the other hand, I want to be able to guarantee them that the work we are doing here will not be dismissed out of hand by an impending ruling.
It would have been wiser to wait for the ruling. That was certainly a valid request. It is impossible to conduct a study without knowing the outcome of the ruling. We cannot ask constitutional experts questions about a ruling that has not yet been issued. There is no need to take offence to that. In this case, we did not feel as rushed as we did in other cases, but it certainly would have been better to wait until the ruling was handed down.
I would like to hear my colleague's comments on that. How could the witnesses share their opinions on a ruling that had not yet been issued?