Thanks for the great discussion, everyone. I just want to add really quickly that when we picked the wording for this amendment to the Health of Animals Act, we purposely tried to keep it consistent, which is one of the reasons “could” was put in there. The idea was that the purpose of the bill is to prevent the possibility of trespassers spreading disease, not to, in essence, create an offence with respect to trespassers who intend to spread a disease.
I thought Dr. Pritchard's testimony the other day was interesting too. When Mr. MacGregor was asking about “would” versus “could”, she was pretty adamant about the importance of “could”. I'll just quickly quote her: “I spend all day reading regulations and trying to figure out how to enforce [them]. Being reckless, as to whether entering such a place could result in the exposure of animals to a disease or toxic substance, to me, is that you're not following the protocols it could. I feel that the burden of proof is not to show that the disease was transmitted, but that it could have been transmitted. I feel that that bar for burden of proof is much lower.”
Maybe we can discuss Mr. Blois' amendment, but I just want to stress that we picked “could” to keep it consistent with the existing Health of Animals Act and I would just emphasize Dr. Pritchard's testimony from the other day as well.