Mr. Speaker, Bill C-22 is like so many other bills that show good promise and strong potential to be shaped into good policy in committee. It is right here in second reading that the problems with Bill C-22 are initially identified, and that is what my colleagues on this side of the chamber have been doing: probing, asking questions and identifying weak spots that could be eliminated or good points that could be strengthened. If after this debate the House agrees, Bill C-22 would go to committee stage where it would be debate and have amendments introduced, and then the amendments would be voted on.
Committees are an exceptional tool in which all parties can take a mediocre bill and shape it into good policy, or they can take a good bill and make it even better. We conduct witness interviews, and we incorporate the concerns of everyone until we have a bill that works for all parties, and by extension, for all Canadians. Unfortunately, this is what the Liberals have recently taken to calling obstruction, but it is not. This is how our Canadian parliamentary democracy is supposed to work. I want to address this manufactured Liberal claim of obstruction, because with the compliant media out there, if I do not tell Canadians in the House, they are not going to find out.
Contrary to the narrative of obstruction the Liberals are trying to create, we Conservatives truly did hope that the Prime Minister would steal another of our platform promises and build the so-called energy corridor he promised. We believed him when he said he would make Canada an energy superpower. We hoped he would move quickly and decisively to get our clean Canadian energy to an energy-starved world. That is why we Conservatives voted for Bill C-5 early in the Prime Minister's tenure, and with it gave him more power than any previous prime minister has ever had to achieve those goals.
The Prime Minister has more jurisdictional power than Prime Minister John A. Macdonald had when he built thousands of miles of continental railway through some of the most inhospitable terrain imaginable. The Prime Minister has technologies that would leave Macdonald in shock. We can do in a day what it took a year to do in Macdonald's day.
The Prime Minister can look down in real time from 100 kilometres above and see right into the earth with lidar. He can view the route. He can model a pipeline. He can even watch it in real time as it is built from the comfort of his airplane seat. He could have a pipeline built in two years if he wanted to, yet a year after Bill C-5, he does not even have a pipeline started. He does not have a plan to build one. He does not have a route, not even a gleam in a surveyor's eye. What would a rational person think about this?
The Prime Minister promised grand projects of great national importance. He promised a deal with the Americans by this time last year. He promised to move at speeds not seen in generations to unleash our Canadian economy. However, he has not landed in Canada long enough to move anything. Instead of an energy corridor, we have silence. Instead of housing, we have an enormously expensive bureaucracy and empty props that are taken down as soon as the photo op is over. Instead of a continental railway from coast to coast, we have a $90-billion boondoggle between two eastern cities that will likely never get built, and even that is mired in scandal and controversy before the land snatch even begins.
Unfortunately, our Prime Minister is usually absent from Ottawa, flitting about the world here and there in no particular direction, at enormous taxpayer expense and with a catering budget that would make Emperor Nero blush, all apparently to avoid hard questions in question period, since nothing much has been produced except an undergrad international relations term paper at Davos.
The reason I bring this up is that there is a problem, and I am troubled by it. If we send Bill C-22 to committee by voting for the legislation, how can we be confident the Liberals will respect the committee process and not try to do an end run around Canadians? Can we be sure that our efforts in committee will be respected by the Liberals? What is supposed to happen is all-party input, all-party witnesses, all-party debate and amendments put forward and voted on, and ultimately the result is a bill modified by the people of Canada through the process of representative democracy. That is what is supposed to happen. It is not what is actually happening, and I want to talk for a minute about what is happening.
I want to talk about a troubling tactic the Liberals are using to subvert that process. I am fearful that what happened to Bill C-11 is going to happen to Bill C-22. I am a member of the national defence committee. We recently studied Bill C-11, a bill whose central purpose is to transfer sexual assault cases from the military to the civilian justice system. I assumed, probably like most of us here, that after listening to the horror stories in the media, this would be a rubber stamp, and we would simply transfer the authority to the civilian system. However, all of us at committee were surprised.
We listened to the defence and the prosecution teams from the military argue that the studies the bill was responding to were a decade old and no longer applied to the current military culture. They argued that they had both the capability and the capacity to address the cases, and that the culture within the CAF had radically changed in those 10 years.
We listened to the civilian police, who told us that, although they had the capability, they no longer had the capacity to absorb yet more work, especially in locations with military bases close by.
Then we listened to victim after victim of sexual assault in the military. It was really the victims who surprised me and I think most of us at committee, the people I thought would have the strongest desire to move out of the military justice system. I thought perhaps one or two might say they would like to have a choice, but it turned out that just about every single witness we talked to wanted a choice between the military justice system and the civilian system.
After numerous victims spoke, it became obvious that the bill needed to be modified, so, with the support of the Bloc member on the committee, we co-operated to amend an outdated Liberal motion into one that every stakeholder, from victim to investigator, wanted. We gave the victims a choice. So far, so good. We took a bill that was okay and made it into a good bill. Late this Friday afternoon, the Minister of National Defence, in defiance of civilian and military lawyers, civilian and military police, and even the victims themselves, came into the House and tabled Bill C-11 at report stage.
He is trying to strip our amendments from the bill. Why are the Liberals doing this? We had a decent bill that we turned into a much better bill. There seems to be no explanation for it at all. Why would the Liberals defy both the military and civilian justice systems and the victims?
There is a reason. The Prime Minister has not, will not and cannot fulfill his campaign promises. The cracks in our economy have become chasms, and he needs an election before Canadians feel the full brunt of his purposeful inaction. He knows Canadians are going to start to notice the growing divide between these grandiose announcements and the cold, grey reality of their pocketbooks, so he needs a majority government, and fast. He trolled the opposition benches and, yes, sure enough, an artificial majority did manage to slither across the aisle, but the Prime Minister is afraid that his majority will unravel, since he now has both far right and far left members in his caucus. He has called this a big tent, but it has become more like a circus tent, so he needs an election.
However, the Prime Minister does not want to be blamed for calling an election, so the Liberals are banging on about obstruction to make it look like the normal processes of Parliament are somehow wrong. If he employs tactics like this now that he has a majority government, he knows it is to create the kinds of division within Parliament that he can point to and claim are obstruction. Bill C-22 may have the potential to be a good bill, if it makes it past second reading and goes to committee. My fear is that it will meet the fate of Bill C-11, be subjected to the scrutiny of experts, be modified into a much clearer, better bill, and then have all the positive changes stripped out once it hits report stage. This is obstruction, to be sure, but not by Conservatives.
Conservatives are doing what we are supposed to be doing for the benefit of Canadians. The Prime Minister and the Liberal Party, on the other hand, are acting on behalf of the Liberal Party. They are attempting to fabricate another election that no one wants by trying to make it look like it is not their fault. This is not order and good government, but devious arrogance by the Liberals. Canadians had better brace themselves.