Thank you, Mr. Chair.
In respect to Mr. Theriault and his comments, part of the rationale for bringing forward the amendment actually had to do with the points that were raised by Mr. Theriault at our last session.
Just as a point of clarification, the language that I have proposed here for the amendment is directly from the Conflict of Interest Act.
The purpose of the act is set out in 3(d) and 3(e) of the act, as follows:
(d) encourage experienced and competent persons to seek and accept public office; and
(e) facilitate interchange between the private and public sector.
Part of why I believe that this actually is in scope and is an important part of the review is that these are delineated objectives of the act that we are seeking to review here. If we look at Mr. Barrett's motion, we see that he set out in his third sub—(a)(iii)—that all of the pieces of the review that in his view we should actually be reviewing as a committee, which are within the scope of the act currently as well—blind trusts and such, how we deal with ownerships and how we deal with conflicts of interest—are elements in the act currently.
Mr. Theriault, I appreciate how you've set out your intention to vote against the amendment, but I just wanted to be extremely clear that my intention here was to pull language from the act itself, just as in the preceding subparagraph of Mr. Barrett's motion, to emphasize the areas that we should be looking at as parliamentarians when we are reviewing the act.