Evidence of meeting #4 for Finance in the 39th Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was information.
Bloc
Thierry St-Cyr Bloc Jeanne-Le Ber, QC
Is that normal? Does it usually take some time before your decisions or recommendations are implemented? Does it often happen that they are never implemented, or is that specific to this case?
Chair, Office of the Chairman, Canadian International Trade Tribunal
There again, it depends on the type of case. Safeguard cases are quite rare at the tribunal. I think that we have dealt with four or five since 1989. So the government takes whatever time it needs to respond. There is no set deadline.
Thierry St-Cyr Bloc Jeanne-Le Ber, QC
So, the subject of this case was a safeguard request. Was the instigator of the investigation the government itself?
Chair, Office of the Chairman, Canadian International Trade Tribunal
No, it was the bicycle industry.
Bloc
Thierry St-Cyr Bloc Jeanne-Le Ber, QC
So the industry requested the investigation, and you have submitted your recommendations to the government. So far, there has been no response.
Chair, Office of the Chairman, Canadian International Trade Tribunal
There is nothing to report.
Conservative
Diane Ablonczy Conservative Calgary Nose Hill, AB
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you very much, gentlemen, for trying to shed some light on a very complex area.
I note that in the estimates the funding for your tribunal is rising by nearly 5%. Could you tell the committee and Canadians why this increase is being made and what value you expect to be delivered for the increase in funding?
Chair, Office of the Chairman, Canadian International Trade Tribunal
As far as I know, the increase reflects the wage settlements that the government has made. In other words, our budget has not increased; indeed, our budget has not increased for seven or eight years. The only increases have been to take into account collective agreements.
Conservative
Diane Ablonczy Conservative Calgary Nose Hill, AB
In other words, this increase is going towards salaries for the individuals working in the agency.
Chair, Office of the Chairman, Canadian International Trade Tribunal
That's right.
Conservative
Diane Ablonczy Conservative Calgary Nose Hill, AB
Then tell us this—and you're going to love me for this. As your budget hasn't gone up for five or six years, would it be in order for that to be considered at some point, or are you able to carry out your responsibilities fairly well with the funding that's in place?
Chair, Office of the Chairman, Canadian International Trade Tribunal
In another forum, we have approached the question of an increase in budgetary resources for some projects that we wanted to undertake. The complexity of the cases we are dealing with is increasing, and we were looking for some additional resources to hire some staff.
Conservative
Diane Ablonczy Conservative Calgary Nose Hill, AB
For example, in the estimates between 2005-06 and 2006-07, I notice there is actually a reduction of nearly 20% for economic inquiries and references. It's a fairly hefty reduction. Could explain that?
Chair, Office of the Chairman, Canadian International Trade Tribunal
I should explain how we operate.
Because we have a large number of mandates and we are a relatively small tribunal, first of all, we never set aside a person or a researcher who does only one type of case. We can't predict how many of those kinds of cases we will have this year or how many inquiries, how many safeguards, or how much dumping there will be. All the members sit on all types of cases, and all the researchers handle all types of cases.
This separation between the two mandates is a little artificial. In recognition of that, we have kept only the part that is a purely economic inquiry for the second type of activity. We put all the other types of cases in the same item, because everybody at the tribunal works on those in any event. It's very difficult to separate these things.
Conservative
Diane Ablonczy Conservative Calgary Nose Hill, AB
That makes sense.
The world and the global marketplace are quickly changing. For example, some of the emerging countries are able to manufacture things more cheaply than Canada can. Of course there are commodity price fluctuations, fluctuations in the value of the dollar, and all of those things.
How does that have an impact on your work? Do you find more demand for your opinions because more issues are coming up? Has it always been this way, with a lot of issues but different issues? Tell us how your work is changing and evolving or if it is changing and evolving.
Chair, Office of the Chairman, Canadian International Trade Tribunal
I've been at the tribunal now for seven or eight years. I've posed that question to myself throughout that period to try to predict our workload for the coming year, and we are never very successful. At the beginning I thought it followed the business cycle; therefore, when things were turning down, more people would come forward. But it doesn't seem to follow much of a pattern.
I think it's fair to say that while we may have a smaller number of unfair trade cases, the ones we get are very large and complex.
Conservative
Diane Ablonczy Conservative Calgary Nose Hill, AB
Are you finding that new skills are needed for your staff, or do you simply do on-the-job training and upgrading? Tell us how you do that.
Chair, Office of the Chairman, Canadian International Trade Tribunal
We do a great deal of training in-house, not only of the staff but also of the members. We have a constant review process, in which we train our staff and members on aspects of our mandates.
Conservative
Chair, Office of the Chairman, Canadian International Trade Tribunal
Well, I don't think it is.
NDP
Judy Wasylycia-Leis NDP Winnipeg North, MB
Thank you, Mr. Chairperson.
Thank you, Mr. Gosselin and Mr. Greig.
I'm interested in trying to trace developments pursuant to your tribunal over a period of time. First, in what year did this tribunal get established?
