Mr. Speaker, that is the elastic piece in this legislation, without a doubt. I think with all the other pieces we probably are in agreement. The difficulty is with the term “what a reasonable person would do”, which is used quite often.
In fact, in unemployment insurance case law, when we go before the board of referees at the Employment Insurance Commission to defend someone, they will talk about what a reasonable person would do. Even at that level, as much as it is not judicial, they face the same issues.
I think, ultimately, what it is going to take is a good definition. Hopefully, the committee will work hard at this. Otherwise, we are going to turn that term of “reasonableness” over to the courts and they are going to define it for us. If one judge defines it more loosely and one defines it more succinctly and in a more refined way, we will end up back in the Supreme Court with muddied waters again, the very thing we are trying to avoid. What is good law and how can we actually apply it?
I think my colleague is absolutely correct. One could say that the Achilles heel in this bill is the definition of “reasonable”. As this is going to be codified in law, we need to find a way to draw the parameters of the definition, so that we would all agree that is what we want citizens to do, not more than that. We could take the action that the law would allow us to take and people would understand the definition, rather than being at wit's end on either side of the definition of a “reasonable” act.