It is so, but given the knowledge on the other side of the Chamber, Mr. Speaker, I should ignore them.
There is one more point that Mr. Manning made, and I want to go back and acknowledge the work he has done, which I think is very helpful to this discussion. He did look around the globe. He looked at some other countries that have looked at this in their court systems. Specifically, although he said they were not the only ones, he drew to our attention both the Philippines and Hungary, which have taken the issue of a national identity card all the way up to their supreme courts, their courts of final decision making. In both of those cases they were found to be unconstitutional. My question was why not, and this, I believe, will not survive a challenge under the charter. We cannot impose this on our system.
My final point is that both England and the United States have given consideration to this. England is currently looking at it and, as Canada is so far, is getting very negative reactions to the concept. The U.S., as we heard in one of the earlier commentaries, has in fact rejected it. It attempted a few years ago to expand its driver's licence system into a national identity card. It was shot down overwhelmingly in that country. The countries that we are most close to in terms of our jurisprudence and our legislation have rejected it or are about to do so.