Mr. Speaker, I am not a great advocate of censorship, but I do think there are many ways in which the public can bring pressure on advertisers, for instance, and on the people who produce movies and television and those kinds of things.
I do not believe we should institute laws that say they cannot show a speeding car, for instance, but I think there have been instances where public campaigns have been held to draw advertisers' attention to the fact that the way they are portraying a certain product or a certain activity is not the way a society believes they should be, and I believe they can have a real effect. I think that kind of pressure is most important.
I think we should be putting pressure on vehicle manufacturers to stop stressing speed when it comes to the advertising of vehicles. There are other reasons why we want to buy cars. Maybe we need to ask those questions when we go out to purchase a vehicle, questions about how it performs in terms of safety and so on. We should make those questions more of a priority.
In terms of requiring manufacturers to make sure vehicles are not capable of those speeds, I actually would be interested in considering that. I think it is one that we might want to look into. Certainly the amount of research and development work that goes into speed on the part of the automotive industry is significant. We see it all over the place in high performance racing.
Probably not enough goes into the other end of things, which are the kinds of vehicles most of use every single day. I would think that there might be some interesting possibilities for research about perfecting vehicles that do not need those speeds, research about how they can be manufactured and sold to the public in a way that makes them popular and also perhaps helpful to our environment. I do think these are possibilities that are worth considering.
