Mr. Speaker, as always, it is an honour to represent the citizens of Surrey North and to speak on their behalf on this particular bill, Bill C-44, which makes some amendments to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service Act.
Basically, this bill would broaden the powers of our intelligence agencies, CSIS and others, so that they have additional powers to carry out their work.
Defending public safety and civil liberties are key responsibilities of any government. I hope the Conservative government will take these responsibilities seriously when it comes to Canadians' safety and, equally, will carefully examine the civil liberties we have as Canadians.
Moving forward, we must do the hard work of ensuring Canadians' safety while guarding our values of freedom, tolerance, and inclusive democracy. As parliamentarians, as elected officials from our communities, we also have an equal responsibility to carefully review laws, security procedures, and legislation to make sure that we get them right the first time.
However, we have seen the government rush things through a number of times. This particular bill is under time allocation, and I will talk about that in a second.
The government tries to rush these things through, but as representatives of Canadian citizens, we have a responsibility to ensure that we go through any legislation that passes through this House with a fine-toothed comb. We are going to make sure the work is done responsibly and that there is careful study and evidence-based decision-making.
My friends across the aisle do not like to make evidence-based policy. We have seen that over and over. It is not only that a number of court cases and legislation have been thrown out by the Supreme Court, but sometimes the government picks numbers out of the air. We have seen the census eliminated by the government because it does not believe in actual numbers that will show Canadians what is happening.
The Minister of Employment and Social Development and his department have used numbers from Kijiji. For those who may not be familiar with Kijiji, it is—