Mr. Chair, I want to thank my colleague for this question.
Always, the risk of starting something, especially if you're calling it a pilot but you're also saying it's policy, is that you're going to come upon things you hadn't expected. Being open about that, we're saying this is incremental improvement.
I think the gentleman you're talking about is David Eaves, from Vancouver, who helped do some analysis and let us know how he thought things were developing. He said very clearly that he was very enthusiastic about the approach, but he pointed out that the licensing agreement had terminology in it that said--and I can give it to you verbatim--basically that nobody could use this, especially media, if it was going to in any way reflect poorly on government. Well, to tell you the truth, we had not analysed that licensing protection in light of a possible media request. It was advice that was given to us by justice lawyers and others to protect against information being released, which then we could have been libellous for.
I sat down with Mr. Eaves right after that—as a matter of fact, the same day—and he gave us some advice. We looked at what other countries were doing in that regard. We saw that ours was far more restricted, and we ran it by the lawyers, and in the space of about two to three hours we made the decision. Why should we be the most restrictive? Other countries are doing this. We revoked that particular clause, so that impediment is no longer there.
In fairness also to Mr. Eaves, there are a couple of other things he talked about on the commercial side that I've also said to our legal officials. Other countries seem to be able to handle this; we should be able to also. So we're looking at these other ones, but this was the big one, this restriction on the licensing part. We moved quickly to revoke that.
