Thank you very much for inviting me to speak today.
I'm also here to advocate in favour of this particular piece of legislation, not unlike my counterpart from Canada Goose. I.E.Canada represents a number of different Canadian companies, in fact over 500 companies, and I'm hearing the same sorts of stories. Counterfeit involves everything from Christmas lights to clothing, handbags and apparel, which of course we're all familiar with, and entertainment.
One of the issues, though, that I would have to caution about is not so much some of the things that have been heard in the mainstream media and that sort of thing, about giving customs officers powers to determine and trying to turn them into trademark experts. My members are not concerned about that sort of thing. What we are concerned about, however, is the slowing down of legitimate trade in an attempt to try to capture illegitimate trade.
I think the easiest way to highlight our concerns would be to say that while we are fully in support of this particular piece of legislation, and I think members of I.E.Canada share exactly the same concerns that Canada Goose just expressed so well, the devil's in the details: the issues are with the regulatory infrastructure that's going to be put in place and the boots on the ground, what's actually going to happen at the border.
CBSA, like other agencies right now of the Canadian government, faces financial cutbacks and whatever else. I can tell you that they don't have a lot of infrastructure in place that could easily handle doing this.
That being said, I'm not saying that CBSA would not be willing or capable of handling it. I'm just a little bit concerned, because they're dealing with very antiquated tools when it comes to software and that sort of thing. I'm a little bit worried about how they would handle this on a shipment-by-shipment basis so that a legitimate Canada Goose shipment, for example, coming into the country would not be held up and would not incur any supply chain delays where illegitimate trade would be captured.
That is probably the crux of my comments.
I now welcome any questions.