Madam Speaker, I think the member would agree with me that increasing the penalties is a positive element in the bill, but that the real flaw in the bill going forward is basically the privatization of the inspection services.
I mentioned before that for many years Manitoba had a government run inspection service for vehicle safety. Vehicle owners would get a letter in the mail on a random basis. They would be called in for a safety inspection and a government inspector would fill out a safety report on their car and the people would go to a garage of their choice to get the repairs done.
Around 11 or 12 years ago the Conservative government in Manitoba, under the guise of consumer protection that basically was under pressure from the motor dealers association, decided to make the vehicle inspections mandatory when new cars were purchased.
There were no more government random inspections. They were mandatory inspections. They had to be done by local garages. Guess what? The price of used cars went up considerably when this took effect. There was rampant abuse of the program because the same garages that were inspecting the cars were also the garages where the cars were being fixed.
Therefore, there was incentive to find a lot of things wrong with these cars. As a matter of fact, we had the CBC go into different garages basically on a ghost car basis to find these abuses. It found lots of them. It went back another year to the same garages and found the abuses had not gone away.
Does the member agree with me that the penalties are not the big flaw in the bill? We agree with the increased penalties. However, the fact is that the government is going to basically privatize the inspections. Small businesses in northern Ontario are going to have to shop around to find an inspector to inspect their pumps, when a random inspection done by a government inspector is the way to handle this by hiring a few government inspectors. Perhaps that is the way to go.