Mr. Speaker, I would like to point out that my colleague worked very hard on the committee trying to get the legislation through and I certainly support and thank him for that.
When we talk about charities and solicitation, it is very important to understand the areas that we had to deal with when we were working on this legislation. We have registered charities and under the Income Tax Act, we can work with the revenues that are coming in. Under the Income Tax Act, we have a guide by which we can encourage everyone to move forward.
If we were to use that section in the Income Tax Act and encourage those people who are raising funds for charitable purposes to register under the act, and have a legitimate sponsor for those collections, then they would have the opportunity to do the calling and that type of work. However, if they are not within the sphere of the Income Tax Act, if they are just not for profit organizations, that would open up a very wide spectrum of organizations which quite frankly would have been very difficult to have any control over.
When we talk about non profit groups, and we can have a myriad of all kinds of organizations, whether it is the firemen or the police in a community, or whether it is the guys playing baseball at the corner, they could be part of that organization of non profit who are raising funds for different purposes. There is no way we could have discriminated the value to Canadians.
In order to set a guideline or a framework under which we could operate and ensure that any funds were legitimately collected, we used the basis of the Income Tax Act. This is relatively consistent with other jurisdictions which have imposed do not call lists as well.
The effort here is to ensure that we look after registered charitable organizations which would function appropriately in the system, but also to ensure we do not get a large, wide section of abuse that could potentially occur with many other organizations that could have been registered as non profit.