Mr. Speaker, I would first like to clarify that if the tax credit for volunteer firefighters had been introduced alone, not together with many other measures, I would have been happy to vote in favour of it. Given the opportunity to vote only on that measure, I would not have hesitated to support it.
The member knows how things work in Parliament: the government bundles good measures with plenty of bad ones. That is the problem.
Just to be clear, there is no way to get statistics on which employers do not let their employees respond to fires, but we know it happens.
A bill forcing employers to let volunteer firefighters respond has a specific goal: if there is a law, people will not hesitate to release an employee who has to respond to a fire. Employers will understand that legally, they are required to let the employee respond. They will therefore find a solution and work things out. Without that legal obligation, employers are less willing to find a solution, to find a way to let the employee respond.
That is all there is to it. In Quebec, there have been no complaints since the law came into force, or very few anyway. The legal obligation has made employers realize that they have to come up with a solution so they can let their employees respond.