Mr. Speaker, it will be my pleasure, in the next 20 minutes, for this is in a way the mandate I have set for myself, to speak to you about this exciting Bill C-12, the first version of which had been introduced by the minister of Foreign Affairs and used to be known as Bill C-36. Our television viewers—and we know that there are many at this hour—will no doubt be happy to learn that the number attached to bills corresponds to the order in which they are introduced in this House. So that means that this is the 36th bill being introduced by the government.
Those clarifications having been made, let us talk about the Standing Committee on Health. And I will take the opportunity here to thank my party for entrusting me with responsibility for health. After all these years, I derive a certain satisfaction from being the dean of the Standing Committee on Health. I believe I am the youngest in terms of age, but the dean in terms of seniority, since I have been there since 1999. As the hon. member for Longueuil—Pierre-Boucher knows, I have been through the great debates on labelling, tobacco products and so forth. So I have some experience, let us admit, on health issues.
The quarantine bill is rather technical, and we might think that it does not have much to do with human rights. But that would be wrong for, as I will show, the committee wanted to amend some 30 clauses—now I am getting the attention of the member for Marc-Aurèle-Fortin—to introduce a concept that has a very specific legal meaning, namely reasonable doubt.
The member for Marc-Aurèle-Fortin used to be a penal law professor at the Université de Montréal. I know that his courses were popular: just one exam, no term papers, reasonable jurisprudence. He was a sought-after professor and he also served Quebec well in his various ministerial capacities.
That said, in regard to the quarantine bill, legislation from the 19th century—I think that only the member for Glengarry—Prescott—Russell could actually refer to this period from memory—the legislation has not been reviewed very often. The way diseases are spread is no longer the same. We will remember that ships were the main means of transportation in the 19th century. Now, as our transport critic knows, people travel by plane. There are trains, too, maybe, in some places, but the main means of transportation remains—