Mr. Speaker, I thank all hon. members for their kindness.
I want to raise one issue with the House. In providing report stage motions to the House, the mover of those motions has an obligation not simply to identify those motions but also to explain to the House, for the benefit of all members, as to why those motions are there and what information they should have to assess whether a report stage motion should be considered and passed by this place and become part of the bill.
Probably the one motion that is most significant in the group of motions I put forward, to which I did not speak to very long, was the motion that dealt with regulations. The bill would provide that all regulations associated with it would be reviewed by Parliament, and I believe that is most appropriate.
However members should also know that the experts, the health and justice officials, confirmed before committee on more than a couple of occasions that it would take about two years before the reproductive agency and the regulations could be set up and promulgated. Therefore, half of the bill, particularly the controlled activities, would not be in place and enforced until after these regulations were in place.
The other aspect is that a qualifier is in virtually every clause in the controlled activity section stating that it would be subject to the regulations or as in accordance with the regulations, and it probably occurs more than any other statement in the entire bill. In fact public policy positions on key elements of the bill are buried in the regulations.
My specific point of which I ask members to please take note is that there is another clause in the bill which states that any new regulations, after the initial wave of regulations, or any amendments to existing regulations need not come before Parliament. As a consequence, the bill currently states that we could put forward only a handful of housekeeping regulations in the first wave, and then immediately thereafter come forward with substantive regulations which would change fundamentally the purpose and the public policy statements of the bill.
I am urging members to look carefully at this. If there are to be regulations in which public policy will be buried, in other words trying to get through the back door through order in council that which we cannot get through the front door, being Parliament, then I believe that motion would change the bill to ensure that all regulations on the bill, no matter when they occur, would properly come before Parliament.