Mr. Speaker, the reason that the NDP amendments were not accepted was because they were not very good. They would have watered down the provisions of the bill. They would have left us with an inferior processing model for citizenship. They would have left us with backlogs and long processing times.
Most crucially, they would have failed to address the issue of those who violated their allegiance to Canada, but somehow in the view of the NDP currently could continue along with their Canadian citizenship. We do not think that should be the case in future for dual nationals. That is why we have a fundamental difference of opinion with the NDP members who have no trouble defending these spies, traitors and terrorists and their right to continue to be Canadian citizens even after committing such gross acts of disloyalty.
There are serious improvements in the bill. They go in the same direction as that debate 100 years ago on the Naturalization Act, which happened in only one month. No one on the opposition benches repeated themselves in that debate. The quote I just gave from Mr. Diefenbaker was from the 1946 debate on the Citizenship Act. That too was a fast debate on a historic bill, with rich contributions from all sides of the House. We have not seen that from the NDP in this debate.