Yes, Mr. Chair.
In that case, I will start by apologizing to our witnesses today for their cut time in the important testimony they had to provide for us today on this very important work that we are doing.
I would ask, through you, Mr. Chair, that if there any additional items that they would like to have highlighted based on the questioning and on what they've heard from each other and members today, then perhaps they could provide those in writing. We would greatly appreciate those submissions. We hope we can get back to this study in a reasonably quick fashion.
I will also say, Mr. Chair, that I am quite disappointed. As I said, these are literally, word for word, the exact same words that on December 13 were already voted on and defeated. We went on to study a lot more important things, as Mr. Fergus very clearly outlined. We are now back to square one. We will now be spending a lot of time, I think, debating the merits of a motion that we had already spent a lot of time debating the merits of.
I would hope that the committee would understand the importance of why we need to move on to this facial recognition study. We are a country that really needs to have strengthened privacy laws and laws around the regulation of industry taking advantage of the privacy of Canadians. We really need to reform PIPEDA. It was put in place a long time before facial recognition and artificial intelligence came into the picture.
I am hoping we'll get back to that and to studying more relevant issues that we haven't already rehashed. As Mr. Fergus said, we have been waiting to start this study for the past three years. I can't begin to really highlight how important it is that we continue to move forward with this study and that we put forward some serious, strong recommendations for reforming how industry and how technologies like artificial intelligence and facial recognition need to be curbed to make sure that we strike that balance. One of our witnesses, I believe it was Mr. Labonté, talked about the balance between privacy, social acceptance and societal benefits—