Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I intervened at the beginning on the purpose of this, and those comments still stand, for sure. Mr. Davies' amendment, in my opinion, is getting better. We were initially looking at an advisory committee, and now, under Mr. Davies' amendment, it is in fact an inquiry. As I mentioned earlier in today's meeting, that's certainly what we were told. However, I'm under the impression that, under the Inquiries Act, there are a variety of different inquiries, and that can take on a meaning by itself.
The thing that stands out to me—going back to Mr. Davies' comments, I'd be curious to know whether he looked into this at all when he was drafting this amendment—is the ability of a royal commission inquiry to be called on this. I know that those have existed in the past. They haven't for a while.
I'll just quickly read the definition of a royal commission: “Royal commissions tend to be thought of as broader in scope than other public inquiries, often holding nationwide public hearings and publishing associated research reports, as well as their formal findings and recommendations.” These have looked at everything in scope, from the liquor traffic in Canada to the lobster industry to the tobacco trade. I certainly would think that something like the pandemic and its impact on Canadian citizens would be worthy of a royal commission.
I'll leave the royal commission piece there, but there's another thing I want to raise as well. If this doesn't happen, if this inquiry is simply made as an advisory committee, then I'll bet you that for sure you'll start to see a whole bunch of other provinces do their own inquiries. There's a case to be made for a national inquiry on something of this magnitude. To think that suddenly we're going to have a bunch of hearings across each province, which will probably generate some good information but ultimately use a plethora of resources that could be used elsewhere, I just think is....
Again, the risk of where this bill could take us in the scope of its work would be something that, again, I would just caution the committee on as we're about to consider voting on this.
I'll leave my comments there, Mr. Chair.