Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for her excellent comments and all the important work she is doing here.
I will say, yes, it is fishy when we hear the government talk about consultation because it is very keen to use the word to pay lip service to consultation. However, in almost every case, it appears that, for the government, consultation means holding meetings and then doing what it wanted to do anyway. It talks about consultation in the context of the Air Canada Public Participation Act, yet it is proceeding on a course that is incredibly unpopular with almost everybody involved.
On pipelines, which is another example, the government talks about extending the consultation process, yet it wants cabinet to retain final approval. That is not meaningful consultation at all. There will be more meetings but still the government gets to do whatever it wants at the end.
Again, on electoral reform, it is similar. The government is talking about having this extended beautiful consultation, which will include Twitter and more Twitter, but at the end of the day, it seems dead set on doing exactly what it planned to do all along. That is not meaningful consultation.
I think Canadians need to ask, when the government talks about consulting people and about looking at the evidence, who it is going to consult and whether those consultations are actually going to inform the final product. Is it going to do more than just hold meetings? Is it going to listen to the concerns that are being raised?
I can say very clearly that in the legislation before us, there does not seem to be a lot of listening going on. We have concerns raised by the Government of Manitoba, by the Government of Quebec, by opposition parties, by the unions, by virtually everybody except Air Canada.
I asked the parliamentary secretary, who is in favour of this, then? She sort of alluded to the fact that there were others in favour of it but did not name a single stakeholder group that was in favour of it. That does not mean that there might not be some out there, but it is clear that the vast majority of those with the clearest stake in this issue are very concerned about what the government is doing here.