Mr. Speaker, with all due respect, my friend's comments were even more ridiculous than usual.
When the government insists on debasing our institutions through its corruption, we will hold it to account, whether it is budget day or any other day. That is exactly what we did and what we will continue to do. Canadians expect us to defend the integrity of their institutions, whatever the issue of the day is.
I want to respond to some of the things the member said about Bill C-81. I think he should know better than to present misleading information about what actually took place with this bill.
The government waited until very late in the life of this Parliament to bring this bill forward. It rejected multiple opposition amendments at committee that would have strengthened this bill. The government therefore sent a flawed bill to the Senate, which necessitated amendments to be proposed by the Senate, which meant that after amendments were proposed, the bill would have to come back to the House.
Still, when the bill came back to the House, the government did not bring the bill forward at the earliest opportunity. It could have been brought forward last week. The government could have used Standing Order 53 to try to expedite it. I suspect there would have been interest in doing that from this side of the House.
However, to expedite the debate beginning, because the debate has to take place, the government chose, after all these mistakes, to bring this bill forward for the first time this morning. Absolutely, the opposition is prepared to debate and highlight the areas in which the government has fallen short, and ultimately to support the bill's passage. That is a certainty.
The member accused me of filibustering, but I think he knows that if I was trying to filibuster something, I would still be talking on it right now. I gave a speech. I delivered important points about the government's failures on the bill. Why is the government so upset? It did not want the bill to be criticized.
We support the bill but there are things that the stakeholder community believes needed to be included in it that were not included. The importance of the topic is precisely why these points have to be made. If it was not an important topic, we would not need to talk about it. However, given the critical importance of the topic, we needed to talk about it.
Could the member tell us why the government failed to bring forward this bill yesterday or last week? Why did it fail to bring forward the bill at the earliest opportunity it could?