Hon. Paula Simons: Senator Harder, the bill we have before us today is not the same bill that was originally presented before the Christmas break, and it’s important that people understand the change wasn’t a mere technicality; it wasn’t a question of a sentence fragment or a semicolon. The bill that was first presented to us contained an amendment that required a company that accepted one of these agreements to have rules about the kinds of speech that appeared in print and to deal with misinformation. That amendment was defeated at committee on the House side by a vote of 10 to 1, and yet the text of that very significant and controversial amendment was placed into the bill that was voted on in the House of Commons.

Can you enlighten us — maybe this is more a question for Senator Gold — how it was that such an extraordinary and important error was made in the bill? If the bill that was voted on in the House had such a large error in it, how do we unscramble that omelette? Does the House have to vote again?

Senator Harder: Senator, that was the matter the Speaker spoke to last week. He was quoting the Speaker in the other place, who described the process that had taken place.

That was not a government error; it was an administrative error by the officers dealing with the parchment and the delivery of the bill as passed in the other chamber. So it is really a non sequitur to the discussion. I didn’t reference it, frankly, because the Speaker had adequately dealt with that situation.

You said that this bill is not the original bill. Most of my speech dealt with the amendments in the other place, which I think make this a better bill and certainly bring a broader set of stakeholders to both the negotiations and, I would expect, the benefits of this bill. But I don’t think we need to belabour the mistakes that were made — inadvertently, I’m sure — by the clerks attending to the disposition of the bill and transferring it to this chamber.