Thanks, Mr. Chair.
Thank you very much for coming, ladies and gentlemen.
We have in front of us here on this bill probably a hundred pages of conflicting testimony and evidence. We had Health Canada come here some weeks ago to speak to us about this bill. I think for most Canadians Health Canada has the referee's role, the broker's role, between industrial interests, health interests, and obviously health care interests, in this case.
It's placing us in a very difficult situation, because while we here in the official opposition support the notion that we ought to examine these chemical compounds, we're not in a situation, I think, to recommend to Canadian health care providers that they ought not to be using products that play an indispensable role in health care or in pandemic preparation.
So please help us understand here. How can this bill be amended so that it actually meets the primary interests of this committee and parliamentarians, which is to put the health of Canadians and the safety of Canadians first? I know it's an emotional issue. In part it has been cast as an emotional issue because the bill has been presented as something that talks about things that go in children's mouths. As a father of four children, I'm concerned about what they put in their mouths. Now, as teenagers particularly, other things go in their mouths.
I'm just trying to get a sense here of how this can be amended so that we achieve what the French would call le juste milieu, the proper balance. We're not out to commit economic hara-kiri with industries in this product business. We want to see health care go forward, but we want to see health and safety here properly reflected. Can you help us understand, what do we have to do to this two-page bill to make it right?