Justice  Mr. Speaker, at no point have I been pressured or directed by the Prime Minister or the Prime Minister's Office to make any decision on this or any other matter. As the Attorney General of Canada, I am the government's senior legal advisor. I provide legal advice to the government and must act in the public interest.

Divorce Act  Madam Speaker, indeed the bill places the best interests of the child first, and one of the criteria is maximal contact time with each parent. This was felt to be a better criterion than an equal parenting presumption, which has been tried and has failed in a number of other jurisdictions.

Divorce Act  Madam Speaker, I once again thank my hon. colleague for his question. I want to point out that members have had ample time to debate this bill in the House of Commons at first and second reading, and a lot of work was done in committee. Members had ample opportunity to participate in this process, either here in the House or in committee.

Divorce Act  Madam Speaker, one of the very important elements of this bill is to provide help to families in situations of family violence, and particularly to help protect the children and help the spouse or married partner who is perhaps the victim of that family violence. There are important measures contained in this bill to help move that situation forward progressively and protectively.

Divorce Act  Madam Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for his question. I said that because we have had nearly eight hours of debate in the House, on top of the work done in committee and the speeches made before the committee. During this process, MPs have had a chance to consult their constituents.

Divorce Act  Madam Speaker, I thank the hon. member for his good wishes. His points are well taken. In an ideal world we would be able to have debates which would last forever and in which every member who wanted to speak, at the time they wanted to speak, would be able speak. The practical reality is that this is an important bill.

Divorce Act  Madam Speaker, the intellectual coherence around the bill, the intellectual importance and the practical and ethical importance of the bill is about the best interests of the child and about the benefits that it would bring to families by protecting the best interests of the child, by protecting the ability in many cases of a spouse, who often happens to be the female in a traditional relationship, to get access to resources on settlement.

Divorce Act  Madam Speaker, I thank the hon. member for his good wishes. I have enjoyed our exchanges under past guises. I will do two things. First, I readily admit that Concordia has a much better football team now than McGill, which has not been good, frankly, since I was a law student, and that was a long time ago.

Divorce Act  Madam Speaker, I thank the member for Mount Royal for his leadership on the committee. A number of important amendments were brought forward at the committee stage. One of them was directly the result of interventions from the hon. member for Mount Royal, introducing official language rights, which was an additional engagement that I made when I presented the bill at third reading.

Divorce Act  Madam Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for his question. Of course we want to work with the other parties in the House, and that is what we have done. Many speeches have been made at each stage so far, and many reports were studied in committee. I want to share a quote from the testimony of the National Association of Women and the Law: NAWL fully supports the exclusion from this bill of any presumptions of shared parenting.

Divorce Act  Madam Speaker, I appreciate the comments from the hon. member of the Green Party, as I always do. I appreciate their sincerity. I share generally the member's concern for using time allocation. In this case, we have very important legislation that will greatly benefit Canadians, in particular Canadian children, at a time in their lives which is particularly difficult.

Divorce Act  Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for her question. She is right that there is a consensus. Canadian stakeholders and experts agree that this is a good bill and that we should move forward. I will quote Ms. Siham Haddadi of the Barreau du Québec. ...the Barreau du Québec would like to welcome the reform of the Divorce Act, which puts the child at the heart of deliberations, adapts terminology to soften conflicts and, above all, modernizes the Divorce Act, which had its last major reform in 1997, to make it more relevant to today's family realities.

Divorce Act  Madam Speaker, that is effectively what I am saying. I appreciate the hon. member's question, but there is a large degree of consensus in the House and across Canada. The experts are weighing in and the voices are fairly unanimous, that this is an excellent piece of legislation.

Divorce Act  Madam Speaker, our government wants to work co-operatively with all members of the House to advance, through Parliament, a bill that is quite frankly 20 years overdue. At second reading, 32 members of the House rose to speak on the bill or to ask a question: 15 members from the Conservative Party, seven members from the NDP, the member from the Green Party and nine Liberal members.

Ethics  Mr. Speaker, the case in question is being prosecuted by the Public Prosecution Service of Canada, which operates independently from the Department of Justice and my office. Lawyers with the Attorney General of Canada are meeting all their obligations to the court regarding the lawyers' request for publication of third-party files.