Mr. Speaker, this approach of having an omnibus budget bill is not a one-off; this has happened before. The last time around, the budget bill was about 500 pages long, and this time it is about 400 pages long. The government, of course, adopts the same approach as the Harper government, which is to put bills that should have been stand-alone bills into the budget bill for the explicit purpose of hiding them from Canadians. It flies in the face of democracy. We parliamentarians cannot have the ability to fully debate the matter and study the matter with expert witnesses.
In this budget bill, the government is trying to ram through significant changes to the refugee determination process. The finance committee was not even going to refer the matter to the immigration committee. Yesterday I had to fight tooth and nail to get that done. Even that is limited in terms of the scope and our ability to do that work because of the time restrictions and the limited number of meetings we would have on this bill.
This bill is being opposed by a significant number of organizations that work on this issue. As well, some 2,600 individuals have written to parliamentarians to oppose it. They crashed our system as emails came in at such a fast and furious pace.
When Faith Goldy is aligned with the government in support of this change, we know that it is on the wrong side of history. Why is the government bringing forward these kind of draconian changes that would absolutely put refugees at risk? Why would the government, which promised sunny ways, be doing this in a budget bill?