Mr. Speaker, of course, all of this is relevant to the behaviour of the Conservatives in the heritage committee, but I will continue because it is important to have these timelines to explain why we have come to the debate today.
Subsequent to that, we saw the Conservatives become the second block party in the House of Commons. We have the Bloc Québécois, and now we have the block-everything party. Subsequent to the “freedom convoy”, every single piece of legislation has been blocked in the House of Commons. No matter what good it would do for people and no matter what things it would change, the Conservatives have blocked everything.
This, of course, brings us to the heritage committee. I will pay tribute to the member for Perth—Wellington, who is the moderate within the Conservative caucus. Despite the fact that he had the more extremist members represented in the committee not allowing him to do this good work, we did, in the end, agree to the equivalent of five weeks of hearings at the heritage committee around Bill C-11. It made sense. The Conservatives raised at the end of it that perhaps we could hear from further witnesses. There were a couple of witnesses I thought it would be wise to hear from, yet the Conservatives blocked, through filibuster, hearing from the witnesses whom they said they wanted to hear from.
They also blocked at the heritage committee, unbelievably, the ability of the CRTC chair to come and answer questions from members of Parliament. We all had questions, and we had this surreal committee hearing where Conservatives were filibustering as the chair of the CRTC and members of the CRTC were outside the room. While we were all wishing to ask questions of the CRTC, the Conservatives were trying to block that. Eventually, we were able to break that filibuster.
There was another filibuster that stopped the Minister of Canadian Heritage from coming to answer questions on Bill C-11. We had to break that filibuster as well. It has just been an exercise in chaos at the heritage committee, provoked by the Conservatives and their block-everything philosophy.
It is fair to say that, when five weeks of hearings is not sufficient and when there is no attempt by the Conservatives to actually work out a schedule, because it is important in this place that we work out a schedule, the dysfunction that the Conservatives were bringing to the heritage committee then extended to the issue of amendments. The vast majority of witnesses whom we heard from over that five-week equivalent time period were witnesses who were endorsing Bill C-11, but many of the witnesses had clear improvements that they wanted to see to the legislation. Members of all of the other parties understood that.
We tried for two weeks to have an amendment deadline, which makes sense. We want to make sure that, in the administration of the House, timelines are respected. Conservatives categorically refused to set a deadline. Last Friday, all the other members of Parliament from the other parties on the Canadian heritage committee submitted their amendments. We had received texts. We had received a series of interventions and memoirs. We had also heard from witnesses for the equivalent of five weeks, so we knew. The three other parties, the parties that are taking a more adult—