Mr. Speaker, here we are considering one of the last bills of this Parliament, judging from the atmosphere and the number of members in this House. The bill before us is C-67, an act to amend the Competition Act.
In the speech from the throne on February 27, 1996, the Liberal government announced a reform of the Competition Act as follows:
The Government will introduce proposals to strengthen the economic framework with legislative improvements in the areas of competition, bankruptcy and copyright.
Consultations followed, and then a document setting out the proposed amendments to the Competition Act was released. The Competition Act was updated in the summer of 1994.
After that, an advisory committee looked at all the proposals gathered, but the competition bureau continued parallel consultations on specific points in the law. This is the report the minister used to draft Bill C-67 aimed at modernizing the Competition Act. This bill, being debated this morning at second reading, will likely not reach the end of the process, if rumours of an upcoming election call are true, because the work will have to be done all over again.
This is not a total disappointment, because we feel the bill lacks certain major elements, and, moreover, contains a number of instances of legal overlap-in which the federal government intrudes in matters of provincial civil law, as we are constantly pointing out. The principle is always the same: Ottawa knows better than anyone else what is good for Canadians. This endless paternalism rears its ugly head in many laws. Yesterday, I had the opportunity to discuss the consideration of a private member's bill from the Reform Party.
Ottawa's centralizing influence is clear. Having arrived here three and a half years ago, the Reform Party has now adopted Ottawa's style of demanding and centralizing all sorts of powers.
What does this bill contain? Based on the legislative summary, I can tell you what the main changes proposed are.
Obviously, the merger notification process is to be improved and the regulatory burden on business lightened.
It is designed to ensure quicker and more efficient action against misleading advertising and deceptive marketing practices. I will come back to this, because we must not think that this is something new, that we have just found out about or thought of. There are already guidelines governing misleading advertising and deceptive marketing practices. It is also designed to amend and clarify the law applicable to sales price advertising by retailers.
The fourth point is to provide the courts with new means of dealing with crime, through orders on consent and orders including prescriptive terms upon conviction.
It is also designed to address the recent proliferation of misleading telemarketing practices that consumers have been subjected to and which undermine the value of telemarketing as a legitimate marketing tool. Telemarketing is a booming industry these days, as we all know, for probably having been solicited on a number of occasions for various things.
It is true that the Competition Act had not been amended since 1986 and that some updating is always useful-several of the provisions seem quite legitimate and appropriate, and will indeed help modernize the act to some extent-but there is a problem.
There is a major problem with the number of new civil provisions concerning misleading advertising and deceptive marketing practices. This is a clear invasion of a provincial jurisdiction, namely local trade. I mentioned earlier that we keep hearing nice arguments like: "It is in the best interest of the people. In
principle, this is a good thing". But the government is taking advantage of the situation to invade a provincial jurisdiction. Editor's Note: The fire alarm having sounded :]