Mr. Speaker, after an impassioned plea by the hon. member for Kootenay West-Revelstoke I have to remind the House that on clause 27(2) and his Motion No. 6 there was a lot of testimony before the standing committee. There were a lot of deliberations. After much debate the committee came to a unanimous conclusion about the best way to amend this section.
It is incumbent on the government to respect the unanimous decision of that committee and to incorporate it in the bill. I think all of his concerns are already incorporated in the bill. Therefore the government will not support Motion No. 6.
On Motion No. 8, keeping in mind what I have already said, we are talking about an unnecessary expansion of detail. Three of the existing criteria well known in legislative language are taken verbatim from section 5, whereas these proposals have no history of court interpretation and therefore lead to introduced legal uncertainties.
Long lists of criteria tend to be treated as check lists and increase the likelihood of rejections simply on the basis that an applicant does not meet the majority of criteria. This is something that was discussed as well in committee.
The legal obligation then to put forward evidence against a long list of technical points as required by this motion can be both costly and burdensome to the applicant and in the end acting as, if I might use a phrase, a chill against the availability of relief. For those reasons we will not be supporting Motion No. 8.