Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the member for his question, for the nature of our fairly regular conversations on a number of issues, and for the candour and thoughtfulness with which he puts questions to me. I hope my responses live up to that standard.
I can say that we also deal with continual attempts by the opposition to delay and obstruct certain bills, this one in particular. Further to his more substantive question, beyond time allocation but sort of addressing it, I can tell him that as he will well know, this bill was studied at the Standing Committee on Natural Resources for an amount of time that was agreed to by all members. Furthermore, I would suggest to the member that if he reflected on the testimony contained in those processes, he would see that there was input from a broad group of witnesses, including department officials, industry, and environmental groups, including testimony from Greenpeace and Ecojustice.
In particular, the nuclear portion of this bill has been studied extensively in past Parliaments. That should not get in the way of an absolutely modern, up-to-the-minute debate about this issue, and that debate has taken place quite recently. It is time to move forward with this modern piece of legislation.