Thank you.
Since we're here to decide whether or not to enact this amendment, we need to be very clear about the consequences of not enacting it. If we do not approve this amendment, then it means, in this case for the Antarctic Environmental Protection Act, that a court will have no explicit ability to direct money for scholarships. The wording of the Antarctic Environmental Protection Act will then be out of sync in terms of enforcement with all the other acts we're amending, or at least with the three that have been mentioned, which already contain this or a similar provision. I don't see any reason in the world why we would not want to give at least some ability to a judge to order scholarships, although I take some of the comments that perhaps on another day, if we did a comprehensive study of all the environmental enforcements that have occurred in Canada, we could get a notion of what kinds of scholarships might be useful, to whom, and where. I don't think it's our job as legislators to try to do that, quite frankly.
That leads me to my second point, which is that what we're trying to do here is enable or empower the court to find creative applications for this law. It was mentioned by the officials that we're trying to give them a suite of creative powers. We are not trying to lay down in tracks every detail of what they must do. I'm happy to say that in Kitchener some of the most creative judicial solutions have been crafted by judges acting under these kinds of general provisions. I think we should empower the court to do that and then we'll come back and see.
The alternative measures we have now in our Criminal Code and Youth Criminal Justice Act originally were the result of creative judicial work, and after 10 years of practice and working out the details they were codified. Maybe we'll come back and codify some of this, but right now we're just giving judges a little more free rein.