Mr. Speaker, one of the things I have noticed in my 12 years in the House of Commons is that everything is an emergency now. We have to get these bills through immediately or we are failing in our duty. The role of Parliament has become increasingly, as the present leader of the Conservative opposition says, an audience or a rubber stamp of bobble heads.
We are here to do due diligence. Therefore, when I hear the hon. member talk about responding to the court ruling on the rights of RCMP officers and yet I look at the bill and see what is taken out of the collective bargaining rights, I think there are serious concerns that have to be addressed here. The inability to bring forward issues of harassment allegations and the inability to talk about issues of staffing, whether or not a police officer has proper backup, are things that belong within the collective bargaining process. The hon. member tells us not to worry, that there are other manners within the civil service that work well. Well, no they do not work well.
The problems we have seen with the RCMP, such as fundamental harassment and backup, are issues that have not been dealt with. This is where the collective bargaining process is supposed to be in place. It seems to me that the government is stripping out all those rights in providing a Potemkin process for the RCMP to go through, while not giving it the tools it needs to be in conformity with the courts.
Why this rush to push this through, when we need to scrutinize the lack of credibility of key parts of the legislation?