I made my full point on the matter of procedure. But to direct to Mr. Telegdi's point, certainly you can do it if you want to amend the other act or incidentally amend it through this legislation. But at this stage, that's not something we can do, because the bill came forward to this House with a main purpose and a main intention, and the main purpose and intention was not to provide an appeal process in a substantive form. Now, we may want to do that, but the government didn't present the bill in that way, nor are we able to amend another act to make an allowance for it.
The fact is that the judicial review process is always available to everyone, not by statute, but by other means. People can appeal on an administrative basis or on another basis to the Federal Court for a judicial review, and they do, in many cases, when an appeal is not provided. But that is a procedural matter. It's not a substantive appeal, as is suggested here, where you have a hearing de novo where you actually represent the evidence and so on.
While I'm on that point, if you were going to amend this act at this stage to have a substantive appeal process, as was discussed by the Canadian Bar Association, where you would actually have another hearing or a re-hearing of the matter, it would require additional expenditures and additional administrative personnel. And I think it would obviously constitute an expenditure of funds, and it's something this bill has not provided for and has not contemplated. As I read Marleau and Montpetit, if it's going to require an additional expenditure of funds or is going to become a charge in the public treasury, that amendment would not be allowable at this stage, after second reading, before we put it to the House.
There is no question; the kind of appeal we're talking about is a substantive one. It's one that actually would allow for lawyers and others to appear and present the evidence and new evidence--it's called trial de novo--so it's quite a substantive change to the way the process works and would involve additional people, additional facilities, and quite a new view.
And if you were going to do that in this area of the act, for this particular situation, you would have to ask what we are going to do for parents and grandparents. And what are we going to do for others who say, “If you're going to provide a level of appeal with a re-hearing in this case, how are we different, and why shouldn't we have the same process?” Then we're looking beyond the context of this bill, and we're looking at something far more major.
It's easy to make an amendment, but we need to think this thing through. My sense is that at this stage of the game, we're changing the very purpose and essence and context of this act in a way we never envisioned or thought to in the first place, and I say it can't be done.
From a point of procedure, I'm saying that this would be inappropriate at this time, not that it can't be done. It can be done under different circumstances, in a different way, and at a different time. If we want to get this legislation we've put forward through, then we should do it in the fashion it is in now. If we want to do something very different, then there is another time and hour and day for that, but not here, at this stage.
The government has the option of deciding if it wants to change the appeal procedure, of course. It can amend the act, or it can consequentially do it, but it needs to present the bill in that fashion here and now. It hasn't done that. This is so substantive that I think it's inappropriate, and on a point of order, I would ask that the amendment not be allowed as it stands in this case.
I can caution this committee that if it is allowed, it's a dead-end street. Who are you going to appeal to? Who is going to hear this? Who is going to provide the facilities? Who is going to provide the judges? Who is going to provide the hearing officers? Because there is no mechanism and no act that allows for that. That act is somewhere else.