I will quickly confess that I am not a constitutional expert. I think that question should be addressed to Mr. Hogg and Professor Ryder when they're here. My understanding from my reading and my consultations with those and other officials and the Senate legal counsel is that—and Mr. Nicholson alluded to this—there is a federal power to legislate against bad behaviour. If Parliament decides that discrimination is something that it wishes to discourage or to prohibit, it can use the federal criminal law power to penalize.
As long as it is not identifying and targeting any particular segment, any particular industry, or any particular actor in society, then that is a legitimate use of the federal power. There are legion examples that can be provided to show where Parliament has done that, has stepped in to deem a particular type of behaviour to be unacceptable, and has used its power under the criminal law to legislate against that.
There is no mention of insurance at all in this bill. There was mention of it. In an earlier version of the bill, I had a provision that was intended to provide protection to the insurers who at that point were concerned that people would take genetic tests and then run out and get millions of dollars' worth of insurance, something that has not happened in any other jurisdiction around the world. For some reason they believed that might happen here in Canada.
We built a protection in to say that if the provinces, which have the responsibility to regulate the insurance industry, wished to provide this protection for high-end policies, they could ask for genetic information. It was intended to be a help to the insurance industry, and they turned it around and said it was all about them. As you'll note, that provision was taken out in the version that I tabled in the Senate after the last election, and it's the one before us now. There's no mention of insurance.
This bill does not target any particular actor, any particular player, or any particular industry. It targets unacceptable behaviour no matter who does it. It just happens that we know from the research and from the anecdotal evidence that we've heard—and that you will hear—that the biggest users and abusers of this information are the insurance companies and, to a less extent, employers. This is not and could not be about any particular sector. If it were, then it would cross that line. In my view and in my opinion, it does not cross the line.