Mr. Speaker, the more the Minister of Health speaks, the more we understand the reason for this closure motion, which brings time allocation to the House for the 89th time.
The reality is that the government has refused to bring the legislation forward to the House for over a year simply because it was obvious after the first round of debates that there were many flaws in the bill.
The government has not been willing to accept amendments. There have been concerns raised about jurisdiction and about strangling the safe injection site and what that means for health. There was concern over a wide variety of community impacts as well. We have a government that brought forward a badly flawed bill last year and forced it through. Initial debates reflected very poorly on the government, so it hid the bill for a year and is now bringing it forward with closure, trying to ram it through the House with no due parliamentary consideration.
Is that not the real reason we are seeing closure today? Why did the government sit on the bill for over a year?