Your Honour, I find this frustrating beyond all measure. This is an embarrassment again to this government.

I’m standing on a point of order right now, Your Honour, because it is embarrassing. It is an insult to this chamber to ask us to vote on something that somebody with the expertise of Senator Marshall has not been able to determine what we’re voting on, and here we’re being asked by this incompetent government — who themselves obviously don’t know what’s in the bill or they would send it to us — to vote on something.

Your Honour, my point of order is this: I think we need to suspend, and we need to get a copy of the bill so that we know what we’re voting on and we need some time to read this bill. So unless the government has that bill, Your Honour, I move that we suspend until we have a copy of this bill.

I first want to thank Senator Marshall for her speech. I’m grateful to be working with you on these bills.

I would like to point out that the government would have sent it to LEGISinfo days ago. It’s a matter of process that happened days ago. This is really a House of Commons problem for not posting it on LEGISinfo. However, as we were speaking, from Senator Gold’s email, you will receive the text. We have scanned it and are sending it out to you. I hope that during our bell — we had talked about having a 15-minute bell —

No, longer.

Well, that’s interesting. I guess we can see what happens. We will have an opportunity to read this bill and — as Senator Marshall says — compare and make sure that it is the same amount of money that is in the back of Supplementary Estimates (C), which was made available to everyone on April 15. That is a little bit of clarification of what happened.

Let us all agree that it’s regrettable that it was not posted in time, but I would like to underline for the benefit of all colleagues that, in fact, the government did submit the bill to the appropriate institution and agency in the House of Commons in a timely fashion. The responsibility to post it is not that of the government but of the House of Commons, and it is regrettable that it was not. My office, upon being made aware of this — and thank you, Senator Marshall for that — has moved with dispatch to make this available to all senators.

Once again, while it’s not the government’s responsibility to have posted it, we’re taking the measures necessary so all senators have access to it as quickly as we can.

Honourable colleagues, government executive branch has tremendous privileges in Parliament, in the House of Commons and in the Senate — budgets, tools and everything — at their discretion to make sure that bills are stewarded through these institutions in an appropriate fashion. So the government does have full responsibility in making sure that bills are posted, that colleagues in this place have access to all the information.

The only thing I also want to add to Senator LaBoucane-Benson’s comments, I think it’s also inappropriate during a bill to expect senators at that particular moment to have access to the bill and the information we’re voting on. Bells are put into place in order to give senators the opportunity to get to the chamber in order to vote. Bells of 15 minutes or an hour are not in place in order for senators to review legislation. It’s incumbent on us to do that way in advance from that particular bell.

I do thank the government for taking the steps to email us the bill; we’re all looking forward to. Once we make sure our due diligence has been done, then I think we can call a bell and only then.

I think it would be quite helpful then, why don’t we get the bill either read to us or distributed to us right in here?

I also want to bring up a little bit of history. This is not the first time that this sort of thing has happened with the Trudeau government. In fact, at the very start of the Trudeau government’s tenure at the end of 2015, we had a situation where actually Senator Day noticed that there wasn’t the necessary scheduled attached to, I believe, a supply bill at that time, and there was great calamity. Luckily, the Senate did its work and recognized the major error that existed there.

This is just time and again with this Trudeau government. It’s unbelievable that they expect us to do this.

Just to maybe close off the debate, maybe not, first of all, it would be entirely inappropriate for the government to send us a bill during bells. Debate is closed during bells. They are going to send us a bill during bells while debate is closed, when we cannot amend or change it. The question has been put, and we’re going to have a bell. Senator LaBoucane-Benson suggests 15 minutes on something when we don’t even know what we’re voting on. It’s highly, highly inappropriate.

The Leader of the Government is trying to blame somebody other than the government for this complete sham. It’s beyond the pale that he would not simply accept responsibility and say, “We messed up. We will try to fix it. Let’s suspend. Let’s get the bill. Let’s read the bill.”

We don’t know how we’re going to vote. Now we’re being asked to call a bell, have a vote and decide whether we will have a standing vote. Then, while the debate is closed, we will have the bill sent to us and read and then try to determine how we’re going to vote when we come back.

I can’t get my mind around the silliness of this supposedly professional government even suggesting that.

Your Honour, I have made a suggestion that I think is appropriate: We simply suspend. We get the bill, as we certainly want to read it. We want to have our finance critic, who, quite frankly, would be a much better Minister of Finance than the one we have. Maybe then we wouldn’t have the sham that we have now. We want her and our caucus to look at it to determine how we want to vote.

We don’t have a bill before us, Your Honour. We cannot call the question until we have the bill before us. Again, I implore you, Your Honour — after we have suspended and when we have had time, we can look at it. Who knows whether we will get time today? Maybe we’ll get it sometime over the weekend. But that’s my suggestion, Your Honour.

With regard to the point of order that was raised, I want to ask the following question to either the Government Representative or the chair of the National Finance Committee, but I don’t think he’s here. From what I understand, the National Finance Committee examined the bill, had access to the blue book that we talked about earlier and was able to review it.

Can someone confirm that the committee did in fact receive the blue book and review it? If I understand the point of order correctly, the point is to ensure that the blue book that was reviewed is the one that is included as a schedule to the bill before us.

Your Honour, we just received an electronic copy of the bill. Again, I ask that we suspend to the call of the chair so we can have a look at it, then come back here and vote.

I thank Senator Plett for raising that question.

Thank you to all senators who intervened on the point of order. I will suspend the Senate until we get copies of the bill, and there will be a 15-minute bell to call in the senators.

Sorry, Your Honour. A 15-minute bell doesn’t necessarily mean that we will only have 15 minutes to study the bill, correct? Thank you.

We will give you time to study the bill.