Mr. Speaker, this did elicit a fair amount of debate in committee exactly along the lines that he suggested. Why is it necessary? If in so many other areas the accused person is entitled to the material in writing, then why here would the accused have to make a special application?
We ended up leaving it alone because the limited information we could get our hands on at the time was that it would impose an onerous responsibility. My colleague from Yukon and I had some doubts about that, but rather than impose further responsibility on the provincial governments to respond to this, we left it alone at that point, expecting at some point in the future we would revisit it and perhaps at that time have more information as to whether this would impose an onerous duty on the provinces.
We have seen more than enough downloading by the present government and the previous Liberal government on the provinces in terms of shifting responsibility to them without providing additional financial resources to meet that responsibility. Overall, the committee felt it was simply not prepared to do that in this case without having more specific information.