Elizabeth May: Mr. Speaker, I particularly commend my hon. colleague from Bruce—Grey—Owen Sound for showing up earlier today to support a private member’s bill to give individual members of Parliament more power and the ability to better represent their constituents.
He has done a fine job in bringing forward his own bill to ban bulk water exports, and in that spirit I ask him if he feels like joining the opinion of the majority of us on the opposition benches, who find it regrettable that the good measures he mentioned in his speech are thrown into a omnibus budget bill that includes many different elements that really would have been better served by being studied separately. They include such things as changes to the Canada Labour Code, changes to our Immigration Act, changes to the Mackenzie gas pipeline fund, and changes to the treatment of the Dominion Coal lands—in fact, selling them without having a proper hearing in this place.
I wonder if he might agree that it would be better for democracy if proper bills came forward individually.
Larry Miller: Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for her fine comments and especially for pointing out the many good things that are in this Bill C-4 that we are talking about. I am not going to repeat them. They are almost too numerous to allow following up on all of them. However, I thank her for recognizing that.
Again, in the House we do not always get everything that we want, but she and every other member here, on all sides of the House, have a chance to debate what is in this bill. At the end of the day, with all of those good things that she herself mentioned, I look forward to her supporting the bill