Mr. Speaker, in fact enforcement provisions, inspection capabilities and surveillance were raised by the committee over and over again. We know that this bill, no matter how good it sounds on paper, is only as good as the active resources in the field monitoring and doing surveillance.
We were shocked that there is no real plan to ensure appropriate inspection staff or enforcement officers are in place. The government's budget allows for some increase in inspection officers, but only about 40 over the next 5 years. That is hardly commensurate with the general direction offered by this bill and the requirements of Bill C-6. It is based on the notion that we need to check things at the border, that we have to be able to do spot checks in manufacturing outlets in this country, that we have inspectors going into toy stores and other retail outlets. Yet, we do not have the capacity to do so.
This legislation could offer very little protection to Canadians, unless we can convince the government to add resources to it.
We tried very hard to get changes on a couple of issues, and we just could not. Before I get to that, let me say that with respect to workplace inspectors and surveillance, we had great presentations from the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada. We also had important representations from the United Food and Commercial Workers, in particular, Larry Stoffman, who brought us information, as well as the steelworkers. We will continue to be vigilant on that front.
There are two other issues of importance. One is with respect to tobacco.
Although we have other legislation coming forward that deals with flavoured tobacco products, which is good, we could not convince the government to include an amendment in this bill to ensure that it is also listed as an area where consumer safety and health protection laws would apply.
Although the officials were very helpful on many fronts, and I appreciate their help on this bill with the amendments and their explanations, we could not convince them or the government to include tobacco as a precautionary measure, to ensure that it has the double protection of our tobacco laws and our consumer protection laws. Why they could not do that, I do not know.
Finally, with respect to noisy toys, I want to give the government credit. It is an issue of mine. I have a private member's bill to ensure that we lower the decibel levels of toys allowed on the market. It did not get accepted as part of this bill, but the officials and the government made a clear commitment that they will be bringing in regulations to bring our standards up to the highest level anywhere in the world, to ensure that children are protected from very noisy toys and that their hearing is not hurt because of unacceptable levels of noise and unsafe toys.