That is not a new question. It is a question that arises for any federal public servant at the Competition Bureau, Canada Revenue Agency, or the Canada Border Services Agency. These are regulatory agencies.
If you don't mind, I will continue in English.
A regulatory agency is exactly that. It administers and enforces a regulatory regime and that's what this is. Administration isn't just we promulgate it and if we happen to catch you, whether we blunder into it by error or accident, we enforce you, but it also involves administration of an act. When you talk about mandate it's important that.... And that's what I was complaining about; I was whining, to be honest, about my friends at Foreign Affairs who feel...it's not that they don't feel they have a mandate because their sister agency in the export controls understands that and deals with that. It's a resource problem. Every administrator, every agency that administers a law of Canada or of any of the provinces, understands that it needs to engage with the people the law impacts.
We're not asking for legal opinions, we're asking for guidance on how you do it, which links to the point I was trying to make earlier. It links to the objective of what you're trying to achieve and some of the objectives are extremely important. On proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, I'm hard pressed to think of a more important issue than that from a geopolitical perspective, but you can't deal with that by saying we're going to pass on that, now let's move on to pipelines, or let's move on to human rights and whatever, and you guys sort it out. You know what? Even the biggest multinational is doing the kinds of things Vince was talking about, trying to figure out what this is. The guidance from the administrators that Vince and others have talked about is fundamentally important.
There are public servants who can indeed give information, provide guidance, and administer the act.
The guidance is based on the objectives of the act and the objectives have to be tied to the kinds of things Professor Walsh was talking about.