Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Mr. Lemire, for such kind comments. This is a great committee to spend a lot of time on. It's very good. It's also in really good hands right now. For all of the time I've been here, the last number of years we've had in this committee, this has been a lot of fun. I just wanted to say that, because there are times when Parliament doesn't seem to be working, but it's really working well here. My thanks to Mr. Lemire and the rest of the committee here.
I'm going to move to Mr. Leal and Mr. Champagne, because we're talking about a lot of issues here, about shortages in labour and otherwise. Twelve years ago, I introduced a private member's bill on the right to repair. It eventually became a voluntary agreement. It did actually pass through Parliament to the final stages and then it was withdrawn. At that time Mr. Clement was working together with the industry and the association, and we created a voluntary agreement, but it's 12 years old. It also had the weakness in it that EVs and digital data were just emerging at that time. We kind of knew that the agreement would have to have some type of modernization and that there would be challenges with the digital work.
What gets lost a little bit in the discussion is that people view it as just personal vehicle fixing, which is obviously paramount to consumer choice and all of the labour you mentioned. However, it also involves other vehicles, like ambulances, police cars, fire trucks and other equipment that's necessary for our economy to function. If we lose some of the service providers we have, we're going to have massive gaps that will cause further labour instability and labour market inactivity, because there won't be those professionals around to work on those vehicles.
Perhaps you can touch on that, because I don't think it gets a lot of attention.