Mr. Speaker, the member and I have had lots of conversations about the Kurdish issue in the parliamentary friends of the Kurds group that we are in together.
I want to ask him about these late sittings that we have had. We are considering C-24, which is a bill that was introduced pretty much a year ago. Is this really the urgent matter that the government wanted to have debated in evening sittings, a salary increase for Liberal cabinet ministers? We could pretty much retitle this the pay raise for Liberal cabinet ministers.
Why is this such a critical, important issue for the government when we could be debating lowering taxes on small businesses, actually getting control of the budget and reducing the deficit down to zero, actually following through on infrastructure, or the completion of projects instead of just announcements and more press releases. Why are we having late sittings to debate Liberal cabinet pay increases?