Madam Speaker, I appreciate the member raising that bill. He would probably know that former NDP finance critic Guy Caron was the original drafter and champion of that bill. It was a bill I was very happy to support in the last Parliament.
It is generally understood, when legislators here make amendments to legislation or when we present a bill and the bill passes, that we expect it to come into force. It is not up the government to decide willy-nilly when certain things are going to come into effect. There is a great amendment in this bill. It is not retroactive, in the way that it was okay for the government to have a retroactive clawback of seniors' benefits, which is too bad. When it came to clawing back dividend payments from companies that did not need them, members should have heard the people at the finance committee: It was a big to-do about how terrible it would be to have retroactive clawbacks. I thought that was funny. Maybe if seniors could call their wealth dividends, the government would care.
I did suggest that the finance committee have a look at how we label seniors' wealth dividends, so they could get more champions around the committee table. I hope we will do that. I certainly hope the amendments that have been made to this legislation will be considered in effect, along with the rest of the bill, once it passes.