Mr. Speaker, the bill is far reaching in its effect and its impact across our country for Canadians. I will just go over it quickly.
The amendments to the act would clarify that a standard can be established for classes of products, not just individual products. That would improve the administration of the act. It would expand the scope of products that would be covered by authorizing the development of standards for those products, and that covers everything that affects energy use, not just those who use energy or produce it. It would more closely control interprovincial shipments once standards are enacted and it would certainly lay out energy efficiency labelling in a new way that has not been laid out in the past.
The bill is far-reaching. We think it would do the job in terms of bringing energy efficiency even more strongly to Canada than the original act did. I should maybe mentioned that the objective of the original Energy Efficiency Act was to try to eliminate the least efficient energy using products on the market, and it seems to have worked very well. It has had a direct impact on the reduction of atmospheric emissions and certainly we continue to move forward in that direction.