Thank you, Madam Chair.
I would like to speak in support of this amendment, and I thank Mr. Manly for bringing it forward.
To me, it simply isn't the same. In practice, if one reflects—others may agree with me—it's not the same to have implementation in regulations as having it as a requirement in legislation. The whole point of this amendment, as I read it, is to make sure this is being done.
Right now we're going through this bill, but we already know that we will be going through a study, which should have been commenced in June and wasn't because of prorogation.
We're here dealing with a bill when, in many ways, we don't have sufficient data: data is inconsistent between provinces; certain data is coming from some provinces and no data from others. To my mind, that's partly because there is no requirement within the legislation that this data be collected. This would be very informative.
Here we're dealing with a bill that four years ago looked very different, when it was first passed. This is a revision of an earlier piece of legislation, and we're doing it without sufficient data, in my view.
This would be very helpful. If you look at the specifics of this amendment, you see that it speaks exactly to who is choosing this, why they may be choosing this, what resources were available to them and how this came about. It's exactly the sort of thing we should be looking at in a review now, and any review in the future.
That next review is going to be very important. There is already signalling by the Liberal government that, in that review, they intend to pursue an expansion from where we are now. It seems pretty basic to me that we should have the kind of data spoken to in this amendment, so as to have a fulsome discussion and really understand what we're talking about and what the real, lived experience is of those who have decided to access this, as well as those who decided to access it and then perhaps changed their mind at some point, because we've heard that this happens as well.
I'm in support of this amendment, and I thank Mr. Manly for bringing it forward.