Madam Speaker, my colleague is a very hard-working member of the industry committee and I commend him on his work. All members of that committee worked quite diligently to amend this bill for the better.
He is very correct in that the bill was really inspired by concern about the calls that we and our constituents receive, which we perhaps find to be increasingly annoying or come at times of the day or evening when we would not like to receive them. It is a desire for Canadians to have a registry on which they could put their name to not receive those types of calls. As my colleague pointed out, there were reasons to provide exemptions to charities or other organizations and businesses with which there is an existing relationship.
In response to his specific concern about the newspapers, we did agree to a motion and the government put it forward, to its credit. My understanding is the Speaker felt that the amendment could have been moved at committee. I would take the liberty of saying to the Chair that this is in fact true, but one of the issues was that the people who wanted the amendment put forward for one reason or another were not able to put it forward at committee. Therefore, the government has moved Motion No. 7, which reads:
That Bill C-37, in Clause 1, be amended by replacing lines 23 to 26 on page 3 with the following:
“(c) for an electoral district;
(f) made for the sole purpose of collecting information for a survey of members of the public; or
(g) made for the sole purpose of soliciting a subscription for a newspaper of general circulation”.
In response to my colleague's question, if we could seek unanimous consent to allow this motion to be debated, I think there would be unanimous consent to debate it and then to pass it. I would certainly support the motion. I think all members of the House would support it. If that is the proper course, I would seek unanimous consent to debate and pass this amendment and thus improve the bill even more.