Senator Housakos: Including with an often-repeated announcement of impending and upcoming public consultations.

I understand that online consultations are under way and that Minister Mendicino did meet with a group of people in British Columbia last week. Even then, members of the diaspora communities were afraid to be found out and to participate.

It doesn’t help when your government is raising the spectre of impending internment. It just completely creates an atmosphere of fear amongst Canadians in various diasporas.

Regardless, I’m looking for a straightforward answer here because surely they have a process in place, but my question is this: What happens after this consultative process wraps up on May 9? What are the next steps? Will you commit to tabling in this chamber before May 9 the actual steps that will be taken following consultations on the foreign agent registry and with a specific timeline?

Senator Housakos: These announcements were made a year ago. This problem that has now arisen because of courage on the part of CSIS officials who obviously were exasperated by the Prime Minister — and they had to go to the media to get this out in the public — is that they have no faith in this government. There is a bill before this chamber that sets out the implementation of a foreign agent registry. It mirrors a bill that had been tabled in the other place in the previous Parliament and ignored then by the government as well.

Both were drafted with wide consultation from the diaspora and the very communities that are being intimidated. It has been a full year that this bill has been sitting here, and Mr. Trudeau, senators, could not be bothered to speak once on this issue. There has been one speech, no follow-up except procrastination on it. It is the job of parliamentarians to study such things. That is what the public expects us to do. It is our role and our obligation.

Why don’t we do our job? Why doesn’t your government embrace Bill S-237, send it to committee for study, for review and get it past this place quickly as we have done with other bills that we think are of public importance? We’ve seen how we come together quickly on issues of public importance and get bills over to the other side quickly. We can do that with Bill S-237 and get the ball rolling instead of wasting another year in consultations and maybe have another election before we get anything done.