Great.
The first thing I would say is that the reason the preamble has been coming up so much in the discussions is because the government knows that the section 7 analysis is very much about proportionality. So what we're supposed to be doing is looking at the purpose of the legislation and then weighing it against what the legislation is going to do when it goes out into the world.
In Bedford, one of the problems identified by the court was that you had this purpose that was kind of weak, a public nuisance purpose, going up against very real harm and death to sex workers. I would argue that the constitutional problem we now see is that even though there's a stronger preamble in place, we're now into the terrain of what section 7 calls arbitrariness. The purpose of the legislation is to protect vulnerable members of Canadian society, but when you think about what Bill C-36 will do when it goes out into the world as legislation, it will actually be counterintuitive to its stated goal of protecting vulnerable women from exploitation.
To answer the first question about why the preamble keeps coming up—and while Minister Peter MacKay has not released the legal opinion, I would encourage him to do so; I think that would be an important contribution to this debate—it's because for section 7 in particular, when you're weighing that purpose against the effect, it's a really important provision. I take your point, and the point that you've made throughout the week, that the legislation ultimately won't hold the preamble. I think that's also why you're seeing the new legislation shifting old provisions into offences against the person. It's again part of this story of trying to recast this legislation as something new, something new for the first time.
In my respectful submission, I would say that it largely feels like window dressing. You move different provisions to different sections of the Criminal Code. You amp up the preamble—