Mr. Speaker, I am sure it will come as no surprise to the member for Toronto—Danforth that he is indeed correct. Any lawyer knows that one needs to know the answer to the question before posing the question.
What the statute proposes to do is make incorporation by reference a principle of general application. It would also retroactively validate all those documents that have been incorporated by reference by regulation. That, of course, is a concern.
The government would say that this is simply codifying the existing practice, but quite frankly, for the reasons I enunciated earlier, that is not quite good enough. There ought to be better oversight in place.
One of the big problems with oversight is that where a regulation-making authority has control and custody of the process, only static incorporation by reference is available. However, where it does not, ambulatory incorporation by reference is available. Ambulatory incorporation by reference means that there can be changes made without parliamentary oversight as the documents are amended from time to time. My concern is that if the government puts people on the panel who are able to avail themselves of ambulatory incorporation by reference, they can then do indirectly what they cannot do directly.
We heard at committee that this is very common. There are Canadian government officials and bureaucrats on these international tribunals who are able to amend these documents in this way.