I appreciate the sentiments Mr. Martin expressed as they pertain to the objective of his amendment. The difficulty I personally have is that I actually do believe that if one is going to change the rules that affect an entity, whether it be a crown corporation or an individual, those parties should be heard, and we should actively seek out their views on a potential amendment.
I applaud the government in the sense that notwithstanding that we did not necessarily hear from all of the witnesses that we, the Liberals, wished to hear from, I believe we heard from a sufficiently broad base so we got a fairly decent understanding—not as extensive or as profound as I would have liked—from the various parties who were going to be affected by Bill C-2 in its current written stage on how it was going to affect them. Those who felt it was going to affect them negatively actually made recommendations and proposed amendments.
Therefore, given that the aim of the amendment NDP-9.2 is to change the regime--of which certain entities who will be affected by it were not consulted or did not have an opportunity to come before the committee--I do believe this should be in the domain of the access to information, privacy and ethics committee, in its review subsequent to the tabling of the government's paper on the reform of access to information.
Therefore I won't be supporting amendment NDP-9.2.