Mr. Speaker, let me begin by acknowledging and thanking my colleague, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Finance. I have often enjoyed serving and crossing swords with her at the finance committee. I imagine we will have the pleasure of debating many economic issues over the next few weeks and months, and obviously during the election campaign.
I want to mention at the outset that our party, the official opposition, supports this bill. We support any and all measures to help combat tax evasion and ensure greater flexibility to facilitate trade between Canada and countries around the world. We will have another chance to talk about that later.
I would like to point something out, however. The bill was introduced, yes, and while we recognize this is an important bill, a number of important aspects could not be debated properly here in the House.
For example, let us not forget Bill C-74, which was more than 800 pages long. Technically that bill would implement the budget passed by the House of Commons. However, there were clauses slipped into that omnibus bill, clauses 715.3 to 715.37, that were on everything but the budget. We call that an omnibus bill with clauses slipped in for the purpose of passing something without properly debating it in the House of Commons.
Bill C-74 and the clauses I mentioned included content on the remediation agreements, the very topic at the heart of the Liberal government scandal involving SNC-Lavalin.
If the government had acted as swiftly on Bill S-6 as it did on the very important issue of remediation agreements, things might be different—but they are not.
I have a very simple question for the parliamentary secretary: does she believe that Bill C-74 could have been split to allow for a fair and equitable debate on the issue of remediation agreements, as we are currently doing with the Canada-Madagascar tax agreement?