Madam Speaker, I do not claim any great expertise in parliamentary history as to where and when bills originate from and what the problems are.
I will say this. There seems to have been a growing trend, particularly in the last Parliament, of clear government legislation being written and sent from the Senate. The legislation is drafted by the government, not by the Senate.
I do not know the intricacies of this particular bill and, as the member said, of the messages back and forth. When a government needs to bring forward legislation, no government should want to pat itself on the back and say “Look how wonderful we are”, when the Superior Court in Quebec demanded that it draft the legislation.
The idea of bills coming through the Senate seems to me, as a democrat, a problem. The government is pretending to originate its legislation with unelected and fundamentally unaccountable legislators, the senators. They are not elected by anyone. They cannot be fired by anyone, really. As it turns out, that it is very hard to do.
It is the House's duty, the government's duty, to author legislation for which it is responsible, not to pass the buck to the Senate and have it do it for the government.