Madam Speaker, I would like to point out to my friend that in a letter to the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans on April 14 of this year, the committee noted that the proposals in Bill C-52 were essentially the same proposals that were included in Bill C-43 a year ago.
The committee made it clear in that letter, when it said:
To deprive a citizen of his liberty on the ground that the citizen has failed to abide by requirement imposed by a public official in the exercise of an administrative power, such as a term or condition of licence, could be thought undesirable as a matter of legislative policy.
The committee then made it quite clear that penalizing someone and putting someone in jail based on violating a policy that was put forward by a bureaucrat as opposed to Parliament was rather unseemly and unprecedented. The committee unanimously sent that letter to the minister. Now the member seems to think that this is okay.
As well, the minister himself quoted from a letter from the Ontario minister of natural resources. I will not read the quote again, but the response of the committee was:
To the extent this comment suggests that disallowance of section 36(2) would impair the ability to impose terms and conditions of licences, it does not reflect a clear understanding of the nature of section 36(2). Disallowance of that section may change the manner of enforcing compliance with terms and conditions of licences, but would certainly not affect in any way the ability to impose such terms and conditions.