Yes, Mr. Chairman.
I'd like to thank Mr. Ménard for his usual astute observations, but the reason he's opposing my amendment is one of the very reasons I made it, because the section says:
The Attorney General of a province, or the minister of justice of a territory, may serve a person with a notice in Form 54 only...that is, in the opinion of the Attorney General or minister of justice, equivalent to an offence...
This refers to provincial attorneys general. You could have the attorney general of every province of this country making a different determination of what an equivalent offence is. Now, I didn't say that in my original opening, but that's another reason not to have this. We shouldn't have political interpretations of what an equivalent offence is, because you build in legislation like this and it's basically unappealable, because the act itself says that it's the attorney general whose opinion matters. There should be an objective legal standard, so that if someone comes to this country and we want to have them registered because we consider them to have committed an equivalent offence abroad, and someone wants to challenge that because they disagree with that decision, the test shouldn't be whether an attorney general's opinion was the case.... I don't know how you would challenge that. It should be on whether or not the offence is an equivalent.
So the purpose of my amendment is twofold: one, it does provide an objective standard, and not that I imagine this would happen very often, but it could happen; and two, for the very reason Mr. Ménard said, you don't want attorneys general of the different provinces coming to different conclusions in this regard.