We're speaking just briefly to this amendment. We think this is a key amendment because, as you can see in the sections that follow, Bill C-2 speaks repeatedly to the opinions of various officials. Originally we were thinking that each one should be amended, but what we came up with was an amendment that says:
For the purpose of this section, any opinion must be evidence-based.
This is certainly a very strong underpinning of the whole debate we're having. I don't think we should be interested in people's opinions. Certainly, public consultation concerns people's opinions, but when we're talking about public health officials, police, provincial authorities, and so on, we believe very strongly that we should be focusing on evidence as opposed to someone's “opinion”.
What does that mean? This particular amendment, if it were approved, would make it clear that in the following clauses where the bill speaks about opinions, we're saying that the definition would be “opinion [that] must be evidence-based”. It's really a clarification.