Thank you very much for the question.
The proposed legislation that is before you for consideration would essentially create two separate exemption regimes: one for licit substances, which are defined as substances obtained in a manner authorized by the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act or its regulations, and a second for illicit substances, generally street drugs.
The new regimes will strengthen the safety and security provisions for licit substances—the authorized uses—as they would obviously be for medical and scientific research and other things that are in the public interest. For activities involving licit substances, the categories under which applications would be considered would be medical, law enforcement, or prescribed purpose.
As I'm sure you and members are aware, there was a Supreme Court decision around some of these issues that set some broad principles and categories of things that would be taken into account in assessing applications, and those are set out and expanded upon in the proposed legislation.
The other significant piece is that the proposed legislation would authorize the minister to publicly post a notice of application for an exemption for a supervised consumption site and invite comments from the public on that application for a period of time. The purpose of that is to ensure that the broader community has an opportunity to express its views on an application as obviously it would be affected by the outcome.