That's exactly what I was going to say, Mr. Chair. In fact, I think we made several requests at the committee level to have them here, or at least the Government of Quebec, and they decided not to.
My biggest difficulty, just from having dealt with some legal issues before, is that if we are going to make a change like this and reflect the local needs--which primarily this bill deals with, on the grand scale of things--the consultation issue and the onerous nature of that, and the ability to make changes after this if we do put in law the consultation process.... From my perspective, the government doesn't have any problem with a public comment period and a provincial comment period, but “consultation”, which may mean the same thing in the normal English language, certainly does not mean the same thing in law. That's the difficulty. If we are going to make changes for the local level and we have to do so in a timely manner, it's going to be impossible.
I was wondering if we could hear from the officials in relation to the term “consultation” and what that means.