Madam Speaker, I thank my colleagues for their generous support of the bill. They supported it through first reading and second reading, at the committee stage and were very helpful in getting it out of the committee unanimously. Their remarks today were quite generous and I appreciate each and every one of them.
I also want to thank the minister who has been very supportive in the process. I hope that at the end of the day between her and her department we will have leading edge regulations.
If I may make a comment, New York State is the only state in the United States that has ignition standards, and I am not even sure that they are proclaimed at this point. This would put Canada at the leading edge of fire safe cigarettes and setting standards for cigarettes.
We had quite a number of people who were very supportive of this. The Canada Safety Council immediately jumped on it and said it was an initiative that we should take. Physicians for a Smoke-Free Canada were also very supportive at the outset.
There are a great number of people to thank but I want to pay tribute to the Ragoonanans in Brampton who tragically lost two members of their family when their townhouse burned to the ground. That is what precipitated the bill in 1999. Believe it or not, it has been four years to get to this stage where the bill is at third reading in the House of Commons. Their lawyer, Doug Lennox, came to me and described the situation where he was trying to start a class action on so-called careless smoking.
Like a lot of other Canadians, I thought that careless smoking was just that, careless smoking. In fact there have been patented technologies available to cigarette companies for years that could have addressed the rash of fires.
Mr. Lennox described the situation and asked if there was anything that I could do. Frankly, my reaction was that I did not think there was anything that could be done, but upon subsequent research and discussions with the folks at the Library of Parliament and elsewhere, we felt that this was the way to go, compelling the minister to proclaim draft regulations under the Hazardous Products Act.
Whether the regulations are proclaimed under the Hazardous Products Act or are proclaimed under the Tobacco Act is no never mind. One way or another Canada will end up with leading edge regulations with respect to fire safe cigarettes. That is the goal of the bill.
I thank all of my colleagues for their support and ask that they continue to support it through a vote.