Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I'm following up a little on the discussion we've just been having here. There have been some discussions on analogies to four-lane highways and so on. The bills are, I would think, closer in kind to each other than a two-lane highway is to a four-lane highway. It seems that analogy is clearly out there in the minds of some people. I just want to talk a little about that without regard to the merits of drawing one from Bathurst to Cambridge. I'm not sure that would ever make sense, unless it went through Carleton Place and Perth first.
There actually is a four-lane highway being built right now from Kanata to....
The point is that the analogy is being made about how, essentially, a four-lane highway and a two-lane highway are similar enough. First of all, I don't agree that the destinations being the same amounts to similarity. The building of a four-lane highway, in the case of the one to Carleton Place, because there had been a number of fatalities on the two-lane highway that already exists, serves a very significant and different purpose from the two-lane highway. The two-lane highway is to get you from point A to point B. The four-lane highway is not only to get you from point A to point B, but also to ensure that the fatalities will go down. We've had a large number of these fatalities. This is the very first issue I addressed as a member of Parliament. I was elected on November 27 and on November 28 I was talking about this in the early morning with the CBC about the four-laning of Highway 7 to Carleton Place.
If you take that analogy and you go back to the bill, what you see is that the two-lane highway and the four-lane highway are, in many respects, quite different in what they're trying to achieve. This bill is trying to achieve the same thing. It's just trying to achieve it as a slight problem dealt with. It feels like a burr that was under the saddle dealt with, but it's still a saddle on the horse. That's just an analogy to keep in mind right now. It's still, essentially, the same thing, which is a bill to ban replacement workers.
As I went through the bill and demonstrated in my references earlier, they really are very, very similar--a good deal more similar than, frankly, a four-lane highway is to a two-lane highway. I can get from Carleton Place to Ottawa by a variety of different methods. Every so often, when there's been one of these crashes, I have had to take detours. You go off the Cemetery side road and you come along through to Ashton and then turn north and drive up onto Highway 7, missing the spot where the accident has been. Sometimes, when Highway 7 is jammed up, what I've done is I've taken Highway 29 up to Almonte and driven along March Road and come in through Kanata.
My point is that you can get to the same place by things that are similar. These things are, of course, less similar than these two bills. These two bills are really the same thing with the same objective. They're not different things.
With regard to the issue that Mrs. Redman had raised, and Mr. Godin had also.... We seem to have lost both Mr. Godin and Mrs. Redman. It's too bad, because what I'm going to say is, I think, very germane to what they are raising. They are both quite right to raise the concerns they have, that we would never want a decision made by a subsidiary body to effectively be seen as binding on the body that gave it power. Just as we would never want to say, well, the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs has ruled, therefore the House has no business overturning that decision, overruling it, changing it. By the same token, that's even more true for a subcommittee.
I was just involved last week.... In fact, I missed this meeting on Thursday of last week because I was--