Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleagues on this side of the House have addressed the fact that this piece of legislation has come to the House extraordinarily and unacceptably late. This should have been presented a year ago. The fact that it was so clumsily assembled is reflected in the fact that the Liberal government put forward almost six dozen amendments of its own to try to correct this clumsily written piece of legislation. Now, after only two and a half speeches by members on the opposition side of the House on this deeply flawed bill, the government has imposed the legislative guillotine of time allocation, enabled by its parliamentary majority, to cut off debate.
I know that my hon. colleagues on the government side of the House love to invoke Peter Van Loan's name. However, when this same legislation was passed by the previous government, our Harper government, a very similar piece of legislation from which, regrettably, many elements have been stripped in Bill C-76, there were many more hours and days of debate than are being allowed here today. Only three opposition speakers have risen on this side of the House and, all of a sudden, time allocation has been imposed.
How can the current government possibly look Canadians in the face with any sort of respect and say that it is working to properly defend the Canadian electoral process?