Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I suspect this is going to be ruled out of order and not in scope. However, I think it is important to consider. If the chair would hopefully look at this as a potential...it goes with regard to the annual meetings of the shareholders and what constitutes the makeup of a corporation, whether female or male. It requires a 70% mix within a five-year period.
By the way, Mr. Chair, we did receive excellent support from legal on this to make sure this was in order. It's something that deals potentially with some charter issues and so forth. At the end of the day, it is compliant with all those things.
Basically it calls for us to have a minimum of 30% women on a board of directors, which I think is very modest, to say the least, in a country that's split around 50%. That's basically the minimum of where progressive countries are going. It's important to note the slide that has taken place in Canada for women on boards of directors. This would prescribe some flexibility. Again, with the penalties removed from this bill, it was only going to provide advice to the minister. It's not going to make significant threats to the corporations, but it's going to be a powerful statement of what we expect.
I would hope that we would consider this. It's obvious that corporate Canada is not compliant with the rest of the population with regard to gender equality. We've heard through testimony, as well, about the difficulty that Canada has. We have others who have moved to a quota system. We heard testimony that maybe a hybrid system—and this is what this is—is something we could look at and have very good results with. Some have moved towards that.
This is again a modest step forward to guaranteeing at least some focus and lens on the issue of gender equality in the boardrooms, and hopefully breaking some ground here with expectations.
With that, I propose the motion to amend.