Yes, Monsieur Simard, there were a number of things that added up. The end result is that I'm not terribly happy with the fact that it has taken this long, and again, I'm grateful to everyone here and to all parties for understanding the weight of the issue. The co-operation that we've seen is something Canadians should know about, because you don't hear often enough what happens when we all agree on something. I think that's important and agree that something needs to be improved, i.e., the timeline of this important measure. To revisit some of the numbers, we are talking of 173 domestic and international standards and some 15,000 pages, and we wanted to make sure that we got it right. Again, some of these reasons I will brook, but others don't seem to add up, obviously, and that is why I wanted to make this work as quickly as possible. That relied heavily on you, on this committee and on our respective parties and, again, I'm very grateful for that.
When you look at the next 12 months, again, there will be no shortcuts then either when it comes to the health and safety of workers on our offshore, and no shortcuts when it comes to keeping them safe. While the bill before senators may only have three clauses, the regulations they address were far more substantial, and we have a detailed implementation schedule in place with the Department of Justice and with our provincial partners.
As I've noted, there are a number of statutory requirements as well as stakeholder engagement and provincial coordination that have to happen. Particularly in the current environment, it's not something that we can take shortcuts on; we need to get these regulations right. Workers definitely deserve no less than that, and they certainly deserve the commitment of so many members of this committee and our respective parties, and I'm delighted to bear witness to that.