It had to be dealt with immediately for the reason that literally tens of thousands of people were, for a variety of reasons, not able to comply with the law as we have it now. My feeling is that it's an untenable situation when you require people to comply, yet you don't allow the provision for them to do that. In a country like Canada, which believes in the rule of law, that is an untenable situation.
So first what we had to do—we took the lead from the previous government—was put an amnesty in place. As you know, an amnesty does not say you can avoid the law; it says you must comply with the law. We hope that by next May 17, people will be complying with the law that will be there. Time will tell if it's the new law or the old one.
We just felt it was an untenable situation to require citizens to do something that so many sources were indicating was not effective. The Auditor General raised great concerns. There were so many questions being raised. There was the whole issue of the separate 25-page report related to funding that wasn't booked in the right year. To have all that confusion out there about the efficacy of the law itself was just not tenable.
That's why the amnesty was put in place.