Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague from Tobique—Mactaquac for his speech. I invite him to pronounce the name of my riding in his reply.
I sit on the Standing Committee on Finance with the member, so we heard the same group of witnesses who appeared before the committee. I am going to speak to the tax agreement between the United States and Canada whose purpose was to provide an alternative to FATCA. What is clear, and I think the member can agree, given the complexity of the technical details he gave in his presentation, is that the agreement and the study of the agreement are extremely complex. This issue had to be negotiated as part of a collection of other measures that covered more than 60 acts.
He mentioned in his speech that we absolutely have to pass this treaty now and that we have no time to lose. If we look at what is going on in the United States, it is clear that the process for getting compliance is under way. Countries involved in such a process can have 18 months to comply. There was no urgent need to negotiate the treaty in an omnibus bill. There was no urgent need to address this matter and all of the related issues. There are a lot of privacy issues here. The interim privacy commissioner told us about several of those issues, and she was not the only one.
I would like to know why the government could not split the bill and remove the part about this tax treaty from the omnibus bill so that we could use our time to identify its strengths and weaknesses and deal with the privacy issues that were raised in committee.