Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you to our witnesses.
Mr. Geist, I'm going to continue. One of the things I was hoping the Americans would have put on the table for us is Crown copyright. They don't have Crown copyright, but now we're in a situation that we're looking at either we accept this deal—there have been some improvements from the Democrats in Congress from the original one that was drafted—or we continue under status quo.
The status quo is what we have now. Really there is quite a debate about whether Trump could even pull out on his own, and then we would reverse to the free trade agreement. There's a whole process in place. There's quite a legal debate about how that would go, but we're left with the choice now as to whether we go ahead, or not.
Looking at the two options, I find going ahead is preferable, but also looking at ways we can ameliorate some of the damages we have.
Would Crown copyright be one of those small things that we can do? This is the elimination—I have tabled that again in the House of Commons—so that public information data, all our studies that are done here that are now restricted.... Canada is the only country that does that, which I'm aware of. Our law is based from 1909 from the United Kingdom and has been updated in 1911.
If we were to abolish Crown copyright to provide more public access to research and other government documents, would that be a thing that at least would have a small benefit to deal with some of the restrictions we have on information and changes we might get here?