Public Safety (Bill C-51) - Adjournment Proceedings with Elizabeth May

Mr. Speaker, I rise on adjournment proceedings to pursue a question I asked the Prime Minister on February 18. The response came from the Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness. The response was not responsive.

On February 18, having been opposing Bill C-51 in this place since February 2, I welcomed with open arms the decision of the official opposition to join me in opposing this quite terrible piece of legislation. I also rose to defend the official opposition, as I discovered through question period that every question was premised on the notion that if a member opposed Bill C-51, he or she was one of two things, either someone who had not read the bill or someone who was ideologically opposed to everything the Conservative Party stood for.

My point on February 18 was how the Conservative Party would reconcile the notion that people who opposed Bill C-51 had not read it or were ideologically opposed to the Conservative Party, when at that point, the editorial position of The Globe and Mail, based on having read the bill, based on the detail that was found in their editorials, and also as a newspaper that generally has endorsed the current leader of the Conservative Party, the Prime Minister, time and time again, did not seem to fit the talking points.

Since that time, the National Post editorial board has also come out against Bill C-51 as rushed and dangerous. Voices, hardly of the left, such as Conrad Black, on the pages of the National Post, said that if Bill C-51 was passed, this country would become, in his words, “an unrecognizable despotism”.

There have also been voices of caution from people such as Rex Murphy. Then, in a more non-partisan sense, we have had the warnings of four former prime ministers, five former Supreme Court justices, and over 100 legal scholars.

In the face of all that opposition, and more, such as the Canadian Bar Association and others, we had the travesty of what was considered a hearings process for Bill C-51. Witness after witness was pushed through quickly.

I would remind the House that back in 2001, when the first anti-terrorism legislation was passed, we certainly did not take a long time to do it after 9/11, but there were witnesses, and they were not insulted. There were witnesses, and they were heard. There were questions from parliamentarians, who were actually interested in the information, not in just shutting down debate, as the parliamentary secretary did over and over again, talking through the time when she might have asked a question to instead attack the people in the room or to presume that she could explain the bill away, explain the problems away.

[justfix]

I had thought about my comment I made earlier, and clued in that the NDP is the official opposition in Canada and they need the praise for opposing bill C-51 along with the Green party not the Liberals, I guess it's a sign that the NDP have not made any memorable actions in Parliament. Lets hope the Liberals will think over their support of the bill.