Thank you very much for being here.
I won't speak at length about Bill C-50 because the Bloc Québécois isn't in favour of its immigration provisions and will vote against it. The NDP will do the same.
I find it somewhat curious that the Liberals are so scandalized by those provisions. If they find them so scandalous, they should merely vote against them, and we wouldn't need to debate this in committee. We would simply reject the negative provisions and we could move on to something more constructive.
At some point, being political men and women, we have to go beyond political show and be consistent with our convictions. When the time comes to rise in the House, let's rise and say that these provisions are unacceptable, and then live with the consequences of our actions. Politics is more than show.
That said, I want to go back to your address. Mr. Rico-Martinez mentioned the Canadian Society of Immigration Consultants. He said that, for the moment, it wasn't easy to exercise real control over immigration consultants. That's not the case of all immigration consultants, but some of them, who are not very scrupulous, simply exploit individuals who are fighting for survival or, at least, to improve their lot.
I'm an engineer, and I belong to the Ordre des ingénieurs du Québec, a professional association regulated in Quebec. It doesn't have a mandate to see to the welfare of engineers, but rather to that of the public. Above the Ordre des ingénieurs du Québec is the Office des professions du Québec, which oversees all professional associations and intervenes when an engineer is at fault. However, there is no structure of that kind for immigration consultants.
Would the public be better served if the profession of immigration consultant were regulated by provincial governments, which already know how to go about ensuring that the professions regulate themselves properly, instead of leaving that up to the federal government, which clearly has neither the jurisdiction nor the knowledge, nor even the desire to intervene in this field in order to establish truly effective regulation?