I want to thank Mr. Kirkup and Ms. Ka Hon Chu for their plea for evidence-based public policy. We'd like to see more of that around here.
In fact, give the government credit. In the course of putting together this legislation, they actually did some scientific research in the form of a poll that they paid $175,000 for. We'd like to have that poll before we do a clause-by-clause examination, but the minister won't let us see it and the committee has voted against asking for it. I asked for the author of the poll to appear. He's not coming.
So, given your plea and your support for evidence-based public policy, given that the bureaucrats, the lawyers within the Department of Justice, said that they found this poll to be useful information in the course of putting together the legislation, I wonder, first, Mr. Kirkup, and then I'll come to you, Ms. Ka Hon Chu, what value a scientifically performed poll such as this might add for us in the course of reviewing this legislation line by line.