Thank you, Chair.
Indeed, we are here for the day to provide technical information to the committee as required on the amendments being proposed.
Mr. Bittle, if I understand Monsieur Champoux's reason for bringing this forward, it's to provide a greater latitude to make petitions to cabinet on certain decisions that the CRTC makes. Right now there is no definition of “decision” in the bill or the act as it currently stands. It would be generally understood in the ordinary use of language. Here the definition that is being proposed, as Monsieur Champoux said, is quite broad.
The bill does not currently suggest that stakeholders should have an ability to petition every single decision that the CRTC makes to cabinet. That is limited to the issuance, primarily, of licences. That's to avoid a situation in which cabinet could begin to substitute itself as the decision-maker for the regulator. If there's a situation in which every single decision that the CRTC makes could be petitioned to cabinet, it certainly creates risks, creating a lot more avenues for those decisions to be overturned politically.