I'm going to further the comments made by Mr. Wallace.
First of all, in terms of looking at the amendment itself, I don't even think grammatically it makes any sense. In the way it's worded right now, it's just a throw-on at the end of a paragraph in a place that doesn't make any sense, so it would have to be reworked even to make sense within the original amendment. I still don't think it adds anything to the amendment.
I do think what we've seen so far is an argument for more bureaucracy. All this does is adds more bureaucracy, as Mike mentioned. It's funny, we didn't compare notes or anything but I had written down, more red tape, more cost, more bureaucracy. That's all we're talking about here. Even the mover of the original amendment, Mr. McTeague, did acknowledge that it may be redundant, which is the definition of “red tape”.
We have heard from the expert witness who has nothing to gain from this. He's not in a partisan position in any way. These are experts who have worked under governments of different stripes, and he's giving his honest feedback that this adds nothing to the legislation. It seems like we're throwing in a kind of random or ad hoc amendment to a bill here that doesn't add anything to it. I don't think I've heard one bit of rationale that makes sense. I haven't heard an argument for it. We certainly didn't have any witnesses come before the committee actually arguing for this, so I'm not sure why we're going through this exercise. It doesn't make any sense to me.
Maybe we could have Mr. McTeague actually tell us about the witnesses he has heard from. Whether he heard from them at committee or whether he heard from them in his office, name the people who have come to him saying they need this change, because we haven't heard that yet.