Madam Speaker, it is a great pleasure for me to address the topic of right to repair. My colleague for Winnipeg North took us down memory lane, sharing his own experiences of working on cars growing up.
This bill brings a certain degree of nostalgia for me as well. I fondly remember, about 10 years ago, working as a staffer in the office of the member for Edmonton—Wetaskiwin, as we responded to the issue that had been brought forward by the member for Windsor West as a private member's bill in the auto sector. Those were great days. I was 22 years old. I owned one suit that I bought second-hand. I wore it every day to the office and dry cleaned it when there were parliamentary recesses. It was a great time, and the member for Edmonton—Wetaskiwin did not tease me too much about my limited attire. I learned all about right to repair as a university student who had never owned a vehicle.
The member for Windsor West had brought forward at this time legislation that proposed bringing in a right to repair for vehicles. It was a contentious issue, with different stakeholders bringing forward different concerns. It was the kind of issue that was non-partisan, but not in the sense that everybody exactly agreed about where we should go with it. There were different points of view, intentions and debates within all of the major parties, certainly within the Conservatives and the Liberals, about the best way forward. There were legitimate competing considerations with the issue of right to repair at the time, recognizing that if people owned a vehicle they should be able to repair it. Today we are talking about other devices. It can be a major challenge for people if they cannot access, or get a reasonable price to access, the support they need in their community to repair their property.
On the other hand, there was a great deal of concern about legislatively mandating the handing over of certain material. There were fears that access to manuals could lead to reverse engineering, which could undermine important aspects of intellectual property protection and could undermine the rights of creators and the importance of innovation.
At the time, we were able to work toward an important solution, which was to have a voluntary agreement among different parts of the sector. I think a combination of a discussion of the issue of pressure, but also the real desire of stakeholders to work together, led to a resolution in the form of a voluntary agreement. There was a framework put in place for the sharing of information.
I appreciated hearing the member for Windsor West talk about the experience of working toward a voluntary agreement, because it created a framework in which everybody's concerns could be respected, and the goal was certainly that people would be able to access the repairs they needed for their vehicles, so that there would be a transfer of information as appropriate in those cases and that there would be compensation. Of course, we do not always have cases where things work out that way, but that was the result in that case. It was a great opportunity for a young staffer, as I was at the time, to have a ringside seat to these conversations that were going on.
The work of different members and the conversations around it were a part of the process because, in the end, the bill was supported by a majority of members of all parties at the second reading stage. It went to committee, and it was at that point that everything was kind of finalized around the voluntary agreement—