I want to thank my colleague for the history lesson. It's always good.
The reason for moving this amendment is that the landscape has changed. In Bill C-11, it was a panel of experts, an advisory committee that would look at criteria and would be doing the designation. Our concern is that now it's going to be the minister doing the designations. A lot of that may be there in the regulations when they come down the road later, but right now we do not have them and they're not part of this legislation. Because of that, we want to clarify in the legislation and send the message out that this is not the unintended consequence that could result.
Just as we saw the unintended consequence that was realized when we looked at the deletion of (e) in an earlier motion...that's all we're trying to address here. It's not a clever move to sidestep or to get any further rights. It's basically looking for something explicit that would give the kind of protection that used to exist there, which was much more transparent than the future is going to be.
It's very hard, quite honestly, for me as a parliamentarian, to sit here passing a law, going through a law, where so much of the stuff is going to be in regulations and we don't know what's going to be in those regulations yet. I don't know what's going to be written in there. This is why, if the regulations were written and were brought here and we could vote on them...then I can just imagine that we might see all of this spelled out and we may not have had a need to move this amendment.
Mr. Dykstra, with that motivation, I hope you will see why it is so important for you to support this and to give us that unanimous support, so we get an amendment passed. This one, actually, absolutely is needed to give many communities out there that sense of assurance they are looking for.
Thank you.