Mr. Speaker, I have a good record. In 15 years, I have never heckled in this place, but I had a very strong temptation to respond and to encourage the member for Kamloops—Thompson—Nicola, to inject levity, and say, “Hello, hello, hello” back to him when he made the Grand Canyon comment, which may go down in the annals of parliamentary history as a good way of not breaking our rule of not pointing out who may or may not be present in the Chamber.
The member asked what kind of failure I thought Bill C-2 was. It was a catastrophic failure. It was a bill I never saw over the course of the summer. It was tabled in June. Over the course of last summer, I think 400 different organizations from various points of view, from refugee rights and civil liberties to how to control the Internet and rights to privacy, had a breadth of pulling together a massive coalition to oppose the bill.
On that ground alone, perhaps the Liberal government should be congratulated for never before having launched a bill so bad that 400 civil society groups banded together to stop it. The government, while stopping Bill C-2, never admitted it had made a mistake, again, by using a novel method of ignoring the opposition, except to table in September 2025 Bill C-12 and then to table Bill C-22. They all dealt with largely the same subject matter.