Thank you, Madam Chair.
To the committee members who participated in last night's debate, I want to say thank you for the very important initiative that's now being undertaken in partnership with a number of agencies across the country as it relates to MS.
Going back to the question on Bill C-36, we have reintroduced that legislation, as we stated in the throne speech. In Bill C-36 there were four amendments made to further clarify the legislation and to address some of the questions that had been raised through stakeholders and the Senate. Basically, changing from Bill C-6 to Bill C-36 does not change the intent of the bill.
There are four areas where there were minor amendments made to further clarify a couple of points. The first is the further clarification of what we mean by personal property. That was a concern that had been raised by a number of stakeholders. The definition could be interpreted quite broadly, so we narrowed that. The legislation does not apply to individual personal property.
Another area in the legislation is that it was felt that the inspectors had too much power to initiate recalls. We made changes to that. The minister would be authorized to do recalls for any unsafe products that might be in the market.
Another area of change was related to trespassing and liability issues. Again, that was further clarified.
One more point was related to the timeframe in terms of investigating unsafe products. There was concern there would be prolonged delays that would not be useful to the retailers and manufacturers. So within that legislation, we've now included a timeline when we're doing an investigation to get back to the industry or the retailers within 30 days. Again, that's to further clarify and address the concerns that had been raised by stakeholders in December.
Thank you.