I'm a little leery about the suggestion that the proposed reduced penalties for people handling level 2s will never be used except in extreme cases, and of course it has to go through the courts and a judgment has to be made, blah, blah, blah.
It seems to me that just the threat of it being there is the problem, that this has the impact on the scientific and research community. Even if one argues it will never be used, it is, as was just said, like giving a blank cheque.
Again, the more we talk about this, the more I'm wondering about why we would even go this route. Maybe we should actually look at getting rid of level 2s for now, as Mr. Singer said, and get on with 3s and 4s. Leave it the way it is; have your regulations that deal with 3 and 4. They'll come to this committee and we'll have some oversight, but keep in mind that we don't get a chance to change the regulations. It is a blank cheque. We can review them with the amendment I proposed, we can comment on them, we can consult on them, but if the government insists, we can't change them. It's only a little bit of a check and balance in place.
Given all of that, can we revisit this once more, everybody together, and say, what's wrong with just deleting level 2s for now?
In fact, I originally had an amendment to do just that, to change clause 7, amend it after line 22 on page 5, saying that the subsection does not apply to any activity involving a micro-organism, nucleic acid or protein that is listed in schedule 2. What's wrong with that?