Bill C-8 (Historical)

Combating Counterfeit Products Act

An Act to amend the Copyright Act and the Trade-marks Act and to make consequential amendments to other Acts

This enactment amends the Copyright Act and the Trade-marks Act to add new civil and criminal remedies and new border measures in both Acts, in order to strengthen the enforcement of copyright and trade-mark rights and to curtail commercial activity involving infringing copies and counterfeit trade-marked goods. More specifically, the enactment
(a) creates new civil causes of action with respect to activities that sustain commercial activity in infringing copies and counterfeit trade-marked goods;
(b) creates new criminal offences for trade-mark counterfeiting that are analogous to existing offences in the Copyright Act;
(c) creates new criminal offences prohibiting the possession or export of infringing copies or counterfeit trade-marked goods, packaging or labels;
(d) enacts new border enforcement measures enabling customs officers to detain goods that they suspect infringe copyright or trade-mark rights and allowing them to share information relating to the detained goods with rights owners who have filed a request for assistance, in order to give the rights owners a reasonable opportunity to pursue a remedy in court;
(e) exempts the importation and exportation of copies and goods by an individual for their personal use from the application of the border measures; and
(f) adds the offences set out in the Copyright Act and the Trade-marks Act to the list of offences set out in the Criminal Code for the investigation of which police may seek judicial authorization to use a wiretap.
The enactment also amends the Trade-marks Act to, among other things, expand the scope of what can be registered as a trade-mark, allow the Registrar of Trade-marks to correct errors that appear in the trade-mark register, and streamline and modernize the trade-mark application and opposition process.

Combating Counterfeit Products Act

[Guy Caron, NDP, Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC]

Mr. Speaker, this bill touches on relatively complex issues such as copyright, intellectual property, trademark rights and the ethical and legal challenges related to Internet regulations. There are many types of counterfeit products, and depending on the case, Canadians can suffer very different consequences. As with the Criminal Code, some infractions could endanger peoples' lives or safety, while others have economic consequences. When it comes right down to it, counterfeiting is a form of fraud and, like all fraud, sooner or later it will affect Canadians' quality of life.

The International Chamber of Commerce “puts the cost of lost tax revenue and additional welfare spending due to counterfeit goods up to USD 125 billion in developed countries alone. And 2.5 million jobs have been lost as a result of fake products.”

Globalization makes it easier for countries to engage in trade, thus considerably increasing the opportunities for this type of activity. The counterfeit products intercepted in Canada in 2012 and seized by the RCMP were worth nearly $40 million a year. That number has increased more than fivefold in the past 10 years, from $7.6 million in 2005 to $38 million in 2012.

By 2015, the International Chamber of Commerce expects the value of counterfeit goods globally to exceed $1.7 billion U.S. That is over 2% of the world's total current economic output.

The government introduced this bill on March 1, 2013, as Bill C-56. Interestingly, that very same day, the U.S. International Trade Administration published a report asking Canada to adopt specific measures in line with the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement to combat counterfeiting in Canada. Specifically, it recommended that customs officers be given the necessary authority to intercept suspicious goods.

The problem is that Canada has not yet ratified the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement despite the fact that it signed the agreement on October 1, 2011. For its part, the European Parliament rejected the agreement, which means that neither the European Union nor any of its member states will be able to ratify the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. Stuck between a rock and a hard place, the United States and Europe, Canada seems to want to have its cake and eat it too by taking a vague position on the importance of combating this phenomenon without talking about the agreement specifically.

The American authorities can certainly suggest that the Canadian government improve its customs services and give them the authority they need to seize or at least intercept products that they suspect are counterfeit, but nothing can force the government to allocate the necessary resources. Without adequate training for officers and additional resources for inspection services, especially the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and customs, they can write whatever they want.

Not only do officers have to know all of the laws in addition to the Customs Act and details about trade agreements that have a bearing on these issues, they also have to have the expertise to recognize problematic situations and counterfeit goods. However, the government is cutting jobs and the agency's budget the same way it is cutting other departments and organizations.

We always get the same answer: the cuts are not affecting services. However, we must not kid ourselves. Border officers did not have these responsibilities before this bill was implemented, and with the staff cutbacks, there are fewer people doing the same amount of work. The agency was asked to cut back by at least 10%, as were all departments and agencies, which has resulted in a shortfall of over $140 million since 2012. The border officers' union said that some 1,000 jobs would be lost over the next few years as a result of those budget cuts.

In fact, that was one of the main criticisms of the members of the Canadian Anti-Counterfeiting Network, a not-for-profit group made up of individuals, businesses and associations that have joined forces to combat fraud, counterfeiting and copyright violations. In a letter to the Minister of Industry prior to the parliamentary committee's study of Bill C-8, which we are currently debating, the Canadian Anti-Counterfeiting Network outlined five contentious issues in the bill, including the lack of resources.

The letter states, and I quote:

While the Bill empowers Canadian customs officers more than before, we are concerned that insufficient resources may be allocated to allow for effective enforcement by CBSA.

We fully agree that more powers need to be given to border services officers. However, they must know what their rights and responsibilities are, since they will have no legal supervision. The agency must also have the resources needed to train them and properly enforce this legislation.

The Canadian Anti-Counterfeiting Network is currently fulfilling its mandate by helping to train customs officers and members of various police forces to recognize fraud and counterfeit products. In committee, the group's representative expressed his frustration with staff turnover and layoffs. He said:

I'm continually frustrated by the fact that it's like a drop in the bucket. If we go to the Niagara Falls border and train 50 border guards, as we did last year, and then come back in three months, 50% of them have gone on to other jobs, and we start over again. It's very difficult to maintain a level of understanding of what products look like.

They need some help on their side, and we're willing to help them, but we don't have funding either.

Let us be clear: strengthening the rules and legislation on counterfeiting is a good idea, but we have to put words into action.

According to a number of witnesses, the financial burden that comes with penalties and the administrative costs of a seizure falls to the rights owners, who are already stung by the counterfeiting.They therefore become financially responsible for the legislation put in place to protect their rights. The Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology heard from several witnesses about that, including Michael Geist, Wayne Edwards and Martin Lavoie.

At the very least, I would like to cite part of the testimony by Michael Geist, who is well known in the field of digital law and copyright:

Further, detention of goods can be used to harm small Canadian businesses that could find the goods they are seeking to import detained, oftentimes by competitors. The absence of a misuse provision in this bill is particularly notable in this regard.

Those remarks were echoed by Martin Lavoie of the Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters Association:

...I would like to raise a number of concerns that we and our members have with the bill in its current form.

One of them is about the responsibility of the right holder—or in other words, the victim of counterfeiting—to pay the fees associated with the detention and destruction of goods. We do not understand the rationale for this.

We believe that the importers should be responsible for these costs, since they are the ones introducing these goods into our country in the first place. They should not be given a free ride. Where is the disincentive [for importers of counterfeit products] in that? Moreover, these costs, which will largely be incurred in court proceedings, are likely to be onerous and difficult to support for smaller companies that are the victims of counterfeiting. I know that you've heard this from other witnesses. We share this concern.

That is a concern that we on this side of the House also share. We are going to support this bill at third reading, but it is important to recognize that the bill still has shortcomings that were not corrected by the committee.

The NDP proposed nine amendments, which were all rejected. The only amendments that were accepted were technical amendments. This happens regularly in every committee when the Conservatives see certain flaws in their bills.

Like all opposition parties, our role as the official opposition is not only to oppose—which will not be the case with Bill C-8 since we are going to support it—but also to point out any significant flaws in the text and any negative effects that the government did not take into account when drafting and examining the bill. We therefore strongly criticize the government for failing to listen to the arguments made by the opposition.

We are going to support this bill, since it is a step in the right direction on the important issue of counterfeiting. Given that trade with our major trade partner, the United States, is fairly free, this is a way to coordinate our efforts in the fight against counterfeiting, a practice for which there is no justification. As I mentioned earlier, counterfeiting is a type of fraud that must be dealt with.

Will the government now put words into action? Will it provide the resources necessary to implement this bill and ensure that border and other officials responsible for identifying and seizing counterfeit goods can do their work effectively?

With regard to funding for these agencies, whether it be border services, food inspection or customs as a whole, the government still has a long way to go to ensure that Bill C-8 becomes law and that authorities have the strength and power to enforce it.

[Chris Charlton, NDP, Hamilton Mountain, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I want to follow up on one particular part of the bill. I had the privilege of being on the industry committee when this bill was before it and had the opportunity to talk a little with the RCMP and border services officers who were going to be enforcing the bill. One of the questions they were asked is whether there are any numbers on how many Canadian manufacturers have been convicted of importing or exporting counterfeited goods. The superintendent of the RCMP did not have those figures at hand, which is fair enough, so we asked whether he could provide the committee with a written response.

The written response to the committee stated that the RCMP information systems do not capture or track a sufficient level of details in order to provide the number of Canadian manufacturers that are convicted of importing or exporting counterfeit goods. It seemed odd to the committee that we have no way of actually tracking the problem. How do we decide what kinds of resources we need to bring to bear on the problem if we do not know the magnitude of it?

New Democrats moved an amendment asking that Parliament receive annual reports with information on detainments that were made under this scheme. I wonder if the member wants to comment on whether he supports that amendment and why he thinks it is an important one.

[Guy Caron, NDP, Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for her question. I followed her work on the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology, a file previously under my responsibility. Industry and trademark issues are very interesting.

My colleague has raised an important question because this is not the only file where the government has not paid attention to elements important to the application of future legislation. The government must give the agencies, in this case the RCMP, the powers and resources they need to do their job.

How can we ensure that the work is done properly if we do not have the ability to monitor progress made in terms of their capacity to detect and seize counterfeit goods or even to improve processes that can help border services officers or the RCMP do a better job?

Data collection is an important aspect, whether in the private sector or, in this case, the public sector. It helps ensure that effective tools are available or that existing tools are improved so people can do a better job. In that sense, it is fine to feel good about a bill that has more teeth, but we must help these officers effectively detect counterfeiting.

[Sadia Groguhé, NDP, Saint-Lambert, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to congratulate my colleague on his speech.

He mentioned the fact that this work at the border is vital because it stops the counterfeit goods. However, cuts to the CBSA budget will reduce the number of front-line officers and impair our capacity to monitor our borders.

We will support this bill. However, can my colleague tell us whether this bill will attain its objectives with respect to counterfeiting?

[Guy Caron, NDP, Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague from Saint-Lambert raised an excellent point.

Indeed, that point was raised in committee by people such as border officers, who are on the front lines when it comes to enforcing this proposed bill. The border officers' union raised two specific problems, contrary to what the Conservative government has claimed.

The first problem is downsizing. In the coming years, we expect that border services will lose 1,000 positions as a result of cuts. The second problem has to do with training. If there is no stability within border services, meaning that border crossings are being shut down and reopened, as was the case in Niagara Falls, we lose people who were already trained and who would simply need to update their skills, especially when it comes to detecting these goods. We are losing them because they have no job security.

These people eventually turn to other fields. Not only are we losing these resources, but we are also losing the training that was invested in them. We are forced to start from scratch. Those are two extremely relevant points raised by the union that represents border officers and that the government and proponents of the bill have not addressed.

This is very unfortunate, and we have some concerns on this side of the House that do not necessarily have to do with the effectiveness of the bill—even if it does have some flaws that could potentially be fixed—but rather with the ability to implement and enforce this bill properly.

[Hoang Mai, NDP, Brossard—La Prairie, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I have a quick question for my colleague. He raised two issues. If he has the time, I would like him to talk about the enforcement and monitoring of the proposed rules and the proposals that were made. How can it all be improved?

[Guy Caron, NDP, Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC]

Mr. Speaker, it would be difficult to respond to that in 30 seconds. I think that is all the time I have.

There are improvements to be made to this bill, which is not perfect. A number of criticisms were not considered by the committee. I think that once the bill passes, we will have to ensure that the resources are there to enforce it. That is the most important thing once the bill passes.

The House resumed from September 19 consideration of the motion that Bill C-8, An Act to amend the Copyright Act and the Trade-marks Act and to make consequential amendments to other Acts, be read the third time and passed.

[Chris Charlton, NDP, Hamilton Mountain, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to rise in the House today to speak to Bill C-8, the combating counterfeit products act. What a great short title for a bill. Who could possibly not be against counterfeit products coming into our country, especially when they may pose serious health and safety risks for Canadians? Certainly New Democrats are against that. However, despite the fact that the bill tries to frame the debate in the now infamous George Bush way of suggesting “you are either with us, or you're against us”, my NDP colleagues and I take our responsibilities here in the House very seriously, and we proposed a number of amendments that would have vastly improved the bill, so yes, despite supporting the thrust of the bill, we were at times critical of some of its provisions.

Let me not get ahead of myself. I will speak to our proposed amendments in due course. First though, let me spend a moment commenting on the bill as a whole. Bill C-8 would amend both the Copyright Act and the Trade-marks Act so as to strengthen enforcement of copyright and trademark rights and to curtail commercial activity involving infringing copies or counterfeit trademark goods.

To that end, the bill would add two new criminal offences under the Copyright Act, for possession and exportation of infringing copies, and create offences for selling or offering counterfeit goods on a commercial scale. It would also create a prohibition against importing or exporting infringing copies and counterfeit goods and introduce some balance to that prohibition by creating two exceptions: one, for personal use, meaning items in one's possession or baggage; and two, for items that are in transit.

On the enforcement side, the bill would grant new ex officio powers to border officials to detain infringing copies or counterfeit goods. This is a significant policy shift. Until now, border officials required private rights holders to obtain a court order before seizing infringing copies or goods. I will have much more to say about that in a moment, but first let me continue with my quick overview of Bill C-8.

The bill would also grant new ex officio powers to the Minister of Public Safety and border officials to share information on detained goods with rights holders. Lastly, it would widen the scope of what can be trademarked to the features found in the broad definition of “sign”, including colour, shapes, scents, taste, et cetera.

There can be no doubt that dealing with counterfeiting and infringement is important to both Canadian businesses and consumers, especially as I said before, where counterfeit goods may put the health or safety of Canadians at risk. However the bill is only as good as its enforcement. The strongest laws in the world do not mean a thing if governments are not willing to dedicate the necessary resources to crack down on counterfeit products coming into our country. When I look at the Conservative government's track record in that regard, I fear that we might be creating a paper tiger.

It is very difficult to see how a bill like this would be implemented, when last year alone the Conservatives slashed $143 million in funding to the Canada Border Services Agency, which further reduced front-line officers and harmed the agency's ability to monitor our borders. In fact, CBSA's report on plans and priorities indicates a loss of 549 full-time employees by 2015.

When I asked the minister about that at committee, he said that no new resources would be needed to implement the bill, but that means that border officials and the RCMP would have to reallocate existing resources to enforce this new law and that begs two questions. Which of the functions that they are currently performing to keep Canadians safe are they going to drop to enforce Bill C-8; or are they really not going to get serious about combatting counterfeit goods, in which case, why are we passing this bill? We never did get a satisfactory answer to that question, but it is a point that we will continue to press because it is critical to the successful fight against counterfeiting.

I want to move on now to a different issue. Canadians will remember that my NDP colleagues and I have often criticized the Conservative government for failing to take a balanced approach to copyright legislation in the past. The government's record was far from stellar. I do want to give the government some credit where credit is due. Bill C-8 contains important measures to protect consumer and individual rights, and my NDP colleagues and I worked hard at committee to make sure that these measures were maintained and strong.

When dealing with intellectual property, it is imperative that we adopt an approach that strikes a balance between the interests of rights holders and the interests of users and consumers. At first, alarm bells went off when the deputy minister for the Department of Industry said that Bill C-8 would bring Canada in line with the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. ACTA contains copyright provisions that have been heavily criticized for failing to achieve this necessary balance. The European parliament rejected ACTA after an unprecedented outcry because its benefits were far outweighed by the threats to civil liberties.

Those threats included the risk of criminalizing individuals, concerns about the definition of “commercial scale”, the role of Internet service providers, and the possible interruption of the transit of generic medicines. In the end, the European Parliament rejected the anti-counterfeiting trade agreement.

I was therefore happy to see that Bill C-8 is much narrower than ACTA and that it contains a number of provisions that offer balance. There are important personal-use exceptions and exceptions for goods that are in transit. Most important, the bill does not address Internet service providers. Therefore, while my NDP colleagues and I continue to be concerned about the broader provisions in ACTA, we are comfortable supporting Bill C-8.

Ironically, it was the Liberal Party that, at committee, threatened to undermine the important balance that Bill C-8 struck. In fact, it moved two amendments that we worked hard to defeat precisely for that reason.

The first Liberal amendment was to remove the personal-use exception for individual travellers, a provision my NDP colleagues and I believe is absolutely crucial to bringing some balance to the bill.

As Dr. Michael Geist, Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law, put it in his blog:

Given that personal use exceptions are even included in the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, it is shocking to see any party proposing their removal, which would result in longer delays at the border and increased searches of individual travellers...“this was one of the important provisions that brought some balance to the bill.”

Professor Jeremy de Beer added that:

...the personal use exception...[is] important...to make the whole system workable, manageable, and cost-effective. It's not possible to do everything within the resource allocations and the training parameters that our agents are provided with. So the system in the bill as it is creates a very pragmatic, workable starting point, and I would encourage us just to leave it there.

Thankfully, the Conservatives agreed with us, and the Liberal amendment was defeated.

The same was true of the Liberal amendment to add statutory damages to the bill. Having already proposed removing the personal exception for travellers and a simplified procedure for the seizure of goods that would remove court oversight in the destruction of goods in a greater number of cases, the Liberals proposed an amendment to add statutory damages, with a mandatory minimum of $1,000 and a maximum of $100,000 in liability. The provision would limit the discretion of judges to order damages based on the evidence.

Again, I am going to quote the expert testimony by Dr. Geist at our committee:

With respect [to trademarks], statutory damages...are unnecessary. Rights holders frequently cite the specific value of their goods and the harms associated with counterfeiting. If the claims are accurate, demonstrating the value for the purpose of a damage award should not be difficult.

Moreover, other countries have experienced problems with statutory damages for trademarks. For example, Taiwan reformed its trademarks statutory damages provision when courts began awarding disproportionate awards. In the U.S., statutory damages for trademarks has led to trademark trolls engaging in litigation designed primarily to obtain costly settlements against small businesses that can ill afford to fight in court.

Again, my NDP colleagues and I were adamant that this amendment be defeated, because it not only undermined the delicate balance achieved by Bill C-8 but actually went beyond what even ACTA had envisioned.

Not all proposed amendments were bad, however, and as I said at the outset, there were sections of the bill that could, and should, have been strengthened. To that end, I want to spend the remainder of the time available to me here to highlight just a few of the amendments my NDP colleagues and I moved in committee in a sincere effort to improve the bill.

The first was one that all parties ended up agreeing to, which was that we needed to return to the original definition of “distinctive” in the Trade-marks Act.

I understand that squabbling about definitions may seem as exciting as watching paint dry, but in this case, it was important that we get it right.

As the generic drug industry persuasively argued before our committee, there is significant case law to make it possible for a generic version of a drug to have the same colour, shape, and size as the brand-name drug with the same effect. This is absolutely crucial for the patients who are using those drugs, since any confusion could have deadly consequences.

To throw that case law into doubt by changing the existing definition for no demonstrably important reason made no sense to any of us on the committee.

I am pleased to say that the original definition is now restored in Bill C-8. Sadly, the spirit of co-operation did not extend to other amendments that would have been equally important to ensuring that the intent of the bill was actually reflected in its language. For example, the NDP moved amendments to Bill C-8 that would have ensured that parallel imports would be excluded from the bill's reach.

Intellectual property lawyer Howard Knopf told us:

The bill should propose appropriate declaratory language for both the Copyright Act and Trade-marks Act that makes is [sic] absolutely clear that, with the exception of the sui generis book importation scheme now found in s. 27.1 of the Copyright Act, neither of these acts shall in any way restrict the importation, distribution or sale of any product, whether tangible or digital, that has been manufactured or first put on the market anywhere in the world with authorization.

This is crucial, because parallel importation is an important tool for many businesses for participating in perfectly legal trade, which we would not want to discourage, yet the bill is unclear as to whether trade like this could unintentionally get caught under this bill. We of course continue to expect that important health and safety standards are met by all parallel imports, but at the same time, we want to ensure that small and medium-sized businesses, and in fact businesses of every kind, can continue to engage in parallel importation.

We heard from Jeremy de Beer at committee. He said:

...I've consulted with a number of my expert colleagues, other intellectual property experts—we don't understand how this doesn't apply to parallel imports. If it's inadvertent, then it's an easy fix. If everybody agrees this shouldn't apply to parallel imports, then we just add an exception for parallel imports and the matter's closed.

We could not agree more, but unfortunately, the government rejected the amendments that would have added that much-needed clarity to the bill.

Our NDP amendments to create a duty to use the measures of the bill in good faith unfortunately met the same end. The intent of our amendments was to counter vexatious litigation and to prevent a rights holder from using detentions and delays to harm a competitor in cases where there was no legitimate counterfeit infringement concern. This is especially important for small-business owners whose businesses may not be able to survive the costs of malicious or bad-faith claims. Again, this was a concern that was raised in testimony to our committee.

Michael Geist made this clear:

...detention of goods can be used to harm small Canadian businesses that could find the goods they are seeking to import detained, oftentimes by competitors. The absence of a misuse provision in this bill is particularly notable in this regard.

Our amendments should have been seen as friendly. They were in keeping with the spirit of the legislation and simply sought to improve enforcement mechanisms without creating new barriers to competition. Sadly,the government rejected our good-faith efforts to improve the bill.

In a similar vein, we tried to amend Bill C-8 to address the costs that may be borne by small businesses for the wrongful and mistaken detention of goods. As the bill is currently written, it contains a “no liability” provision for the crown and provides for damages against rights holders in cases where court proceedings are dismissed or discontinued. In attempting to strike an appropriate balance between consumer and industry interests, Bill C-8 would place the cost of detaining suspect goods on the rights holder. However, as we heard during testimony at committee, Bill C-8 is clearly lacking misuse provisions to ensure that actors are not engaging in frivolous claims as a means of acting anti-competitively. As a result, our amendments sought to provide the courts with the clear authority to provide for damages where any court action is determined to be frivolous, vexatious, or made in bad faith.

Without creating a new barrier for rights holders to protect their copyright or trademark, this amendment would create a safeguard to ensure the integrity of the system and would protect small businesses from the possibility of a company abusing the provisions of Bill C-8 for anti-competitive purposes rather than for protecting their legitimate intellectual property. Although we again believed that these amendments would be deemed to be friendly by the government, we were mistaken. These two were defeated, and in our view, it was an important missed opportunity to make the bill stronger.

The last NDP amendment I want to highlight here was our effort to create a tool for assessing whether the bill would actually be effective in combatting counterfeit products, as the bill's title would have us believe it would be. When my NDP colleagues and I asked in committee whether it was possible to ascertain the extent of the problem of counterfeit goods coming into our country, the answer was a resounding no. At best, we know the value of the seizures that were made. As the RCMP told us, the retail value of counterfeit goods they seized increased from $7.6 million in 2005 to $38 million in 2012. However, that does not account for any of the goods that were not detected as they crossed our borders.

That is a significant concern, especially since, as I said earlier, the government has cut the ability of Canada Border Services to do its job by slashing the agency's budget by $143 million. That cut has seriously harmed our ability to monitor our borders.

We know that the problem is bigger than the numbers reflected in the RCMP's seizure stats, but accurately measuring the scale of counterfeit copies and goods in Canada remains difficult. This is owing to the clandestine nature of counterfeiting. In addition to the actual seizures, much of the data are estimates based on anecdotal information or are from industry itself, in which case, the collection methods may be unavailable to assess.

What we do know is that counterfeit products can pose risks to the health and safety of consumers, whether we are talking about counterfeit electrical components, faulty brake pads, or unsanitary stuffing in goose down jackets.

According to the Chamber of Commerce's Canadian Intellectual Property Council, counterfeit batteries have exploded in the desks of police who have stored them, and the acid leaking from counterfeit batteries has caused burns to at least eight Canadian children. It is precisely for those types of safety reasons that it is essential that we know the scope of the problem. How else can we know whether we are assigning the appropriate resources to dealing with the problem of counterfeiting?

When I raised this issue with the Minister of Industry in committee, he acknowledged that there are no more accurate estimates out there. When we asked the RCMP whether it had numbers, just with respect to the number of Canadian manufacturers who have been convicted of importing or exporting counterfeit goods, we were told that it had no figures for that either. Therefore, it seemed to us that the bill could create an important opportunity to require accurate information to be both collected and reported so that Parliament, and more importantly Canadians, would have a better way of evaluating whether we were being successful in addressing the concerns at the heart of this bill. In fact, we were simply echoing the recommendation of the industry committee in 2007, which called on the government to establish a reporting system that would track investigations, charges, and seizures for infringing copies and counterfeit goods as a means of collecting some data.

Our proposed amendment had the support of the Canadian Association of Importers and Exporters. Joy Nott, the president and CEO of the organization, responded to a question from me by saying:

Do I support the monitoring of this sort of thing? Absolutely I do. I think that's a great idea because, from a business perspective, business lives on metrics and on data. This is how they help to make decisions. Right now when it comes to copyright infringement, trademark infringement, and the ability to import into Canada, it's a little bit like the wild west in that there's nothing that stops these shipments at the border currently unless the owner of the trademark takes specific, very onerous action through Canadian federal courts to register something.

Since there seemed to be agreement that a reporting requirement would be an important improvement to Bill C-8, we moved an amendment to require an annual report to Parliament with information on detainments made under the bill. We had hoped for information on the number of detainments, the number of requests for assistance under both the Copyright Act and the Trade-marks Act, and the number of inspections conducted. Sadly, the government members voted to defeat this amendment, and once again confirmed for me that this government has complete disdain for evidence-based decision making.

Despite the fact that our amendments were defeated, we continue to be supportive of the bill as a whole. In this case, at least it is a start. Dealing with counterfeiting and infringement is important for both Canadian businesses and consumers. Members can rest assured that with or without a report back to Parliament, we will not stop holding the government to account on this important file. Without adequate resources for enforcement, C-8 will prove to be a paper tiger. That cannot be allowed to happen, especially when the health and safety of Canadians may very well be at risk.

[Tyrone Benskin, NDP, Jeanne-Le Ber, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for her very in-depth speech. It seems to me that we are flying blind on this. My colleague mentioned the fact that there have been a certain number of seizures. However, is there any evidence as to what percentage of the total counterfeiting issue these seizures represent? Is it 10%, 50%, or 30%? I would like to ask my hon. colleague that question.

[Chris Charlton, NDP, Hamilton Mountain, ON]

Mr. Speaker, that is a very good question. The statistic we have is that a quarter of RCMP investigations and seizures of counterfeit products were potentially harmful to consumers in 2011, and that proportion has gone up from 11% in 2005. Both of those were a response to an order paper question that my colleague from Sudbury placed on the order paper. That was the only way we were getting the information from the government.

The question we still have, as I indicated in my speech, is this: when is the government going to focus its efforts, in the area of counterfeiting, on the health, safety, and security of consumers?

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I listened with great interest. We saw the main problem with ACTA, and certainly the backlash in Europe. It was the attempt to blur the line between criminal counterfeiting, which we need to go after, and going after individuals who may infringe copyright but are certainly not criminal actors.

I would like to ask my hon. colleague about the Liberals' attempt to amend the law so that they could stop people travelling internationally and go after them for personal use. This seems to be way beyond what ACTA envisioned and way beyond what anyone else has brought forward. With statutory damages of $100,000 and limiting judges, it seems to me that we are talking about criminalizing a whole class of consumers as opposed to focusing on the real criminal element.

I would like to ask my colleague why she thinks the Liberals came forward with such an extreme position.

[Chris Charlton, NDP, Hamilton Mountain, ON]

Mr. Speaker, trying to get into the heads of my Liberal colleagues is a very daunting proposition. I am not really prepared to do that.

I do know that when we were at committee my colleagues on our side of the committee room were quite surprised at the Liberals' approach. Every bit of expert testimony we had suggested that their proposed amendment would be a huge infringement on civil liberties. We found ourselves in the very strange position as New Democrats of voting with the Conservatives in maintaining the balance. It is indeed a very crucial balance that we tried to achieve in the bill between consumer rights and still being able to go after counterfeit goods.

I very much appreciate the question. I do not have an answer. I have no idea why the Liberals wanted to infringe civil liberties through the implementation of Bill C-8. It certainly made no sense to us.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I want to emphasize one of the things the Liberal Party has spoken at great lengths about. That is the importance of ensuring the safety and health of our children, in particular, as well as seniors and others. There are many benefits within the legislation that would in fact enable safer importation of pharmaceutical medications, for example. There are many fraudulent games and toys that are brought into the country that have all sorts of potential chemicals put into the paints, and so forth, which are all quite dangerous to our population, our children in particular.

I wonder if the member might want to provide some comment, if the NDP were successful at bringing any amendments, to deal with those two specific issues, pharmaceuticals and children's toys. I use those as examples.

[Chris Charlton, NDP, Hamilton Mountain, ON]

Mr. Speaker, indeed we were. As I suggested during my speech, particularly with respect to the definition of “distinctive”, as it was rewritten in the bill, it was imperative that we return to the original so that it would be possible for people to have confidence in generic drugs and that we were not inadvertently affecting people's health and safety by making a change in the bill for which there was no demonstrable reason.

One of the things that was really fascinating to me during the committee's deliberations on the bill was the magnitude of counterfeit goods that have been coming into the country. We learned, for example, that many of the counterfeit Canada Goose goose-down jackets have chicken feces and chicken beaks instead of just down in the coats. We heard of batteries exploding and the deaths of police officers. I did not know that when one buys a Team Canada hockey jersey, the way to know whether it is a fake or it is real is to check to see if it was made in Canada. If the jersey was made in Canada, it is actually a fake.

There are all kinds of consumer issues that we need to address in a very serious way, and frankly, we need to do much more consumer education as well so that we can detect, as consumers, which goods are officially licensed and which ones are counterfeit.