Evidence of meeting #62 for Finance in the 41st Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site.) The winning word was clauses.

A video is available from Parliament.

On the agenda

MPs speaking

Also speaking

Alexandra MacLean  Director, Tax Legislation, Tax Policy Branch, Department of Finance
Miodrag Jovanovic  Director, Personal Income Tax, Tax Policy Branch, Department of Finance
Trevor McGowan  Senior Chief, International Inbound Investments, Department of Finance
Pierre Mercille  Senior Legislative Chief, Sales Tax Division, Tax Policy Branch, Department of Finance
Denis Martel  Director, Patent Policy Directorate, Marketplace Framework Policy Branch, Department of Industry
Shari Currie  Acting Director General, Civil Aviation, Department of Transport
Marie-Claude Day  Legal Counsel, Department of Transport
Stephen Van Dine  Director General, Northern Strategic Policy Branch, Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development
Pamela Miller  Director General, Telecommunications Policy Branch, Department of Industry
Tamara Rudge  Director, Port Policy, Department of Transport
Sean Jorgensen  Director, Strategic Policy and Integration, Specialized Policing Services, Royal Canadian Mounted Police
Sylvain Segard  Acting Assistant Deputy Minister, Strategic Policy, Planning and International Affairs Branch, Public Health Agency of Canada
Colin Spencer James  Director, Policy and Program Design, Temporary Foreign Workers, Skills and Employment Branch, Department of Employment and Social Development
Mark Pearson  Director General, External Relations, Science and Policy Integration Sector, Department of Natural Resources
Ekaterina Ohandjanian  Legal Counsel, Department of Natural Resources

8:10 p.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative James Rajotte

Sure, if you wish.

8:10 p.m.

NDP

Murray Rankin NDP Victoria, BC

That would be under proposed subsection 30.1(2). It would add the following:

name and address from the list; provided that, in the case of an employer whose employees are represented by a trade union, the Minister or the Minister of Employment and Social Development, as the case may be, has consulted with the relevant local representatives of that trade union before doing so.

That's just to provide a bit of an accountability loop.

8:10 p.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative James Rajotte

Thank you.

Do you have discussion, Mr. Allen, on this?

8:10 p.m.

Conservative

Mike Allen Conservative Tobique—Mactaquac, NB

Yes, thank you very much, Mr. Chair. I appreciate Mr. Rankin's comments, and the amendments, although I'm not inclined to support them for a couple of reasons.

First—and I'm going to ask the officials a clarification question, too—when it comes to proposed section 30.1 and “shall”, I think it's better to leave “may” in there because we do have the minister, which is the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, under this clause, and now we're adding the Minister of Employment and Social Development, who will be making regulations with respect to that list, the notification provisions and that kind of thing, and the rules around that. So to say “shall” under the enabling legislation is, I think, strong. I'd like feedback from the officials on this.

With respect to the second amendment, I believe it's incumbent on the minister to inform the employer when they will be put on this list, but I would be very reluctant to start segregating groups within the employer, whether it be trade unions, professional associations, accountants, lawyers—whatever it happens to be in that organization. I would suggest to you that the employer is enough. I wouldn't segregate any trade union or any other group within the company.

Do the officials agree that “shall” would be a strong way to start this one, when in fact, we're going to be having enabling regulations to specify what the publishing criteria will be?

8:10 p.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative James Rajotte

We'll go to Mr. James, please.

November 26th, 2014 / 8:10 p.m.

Colin Spencer James Director, Policy and Program Design, Temporary Foreign Workers, Skills and Employment Branch, Department of Employment and Social Development

The amendment being made is simply an enabling authority. The actual details of the measure would be set out in regulations.

8:10 p.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative James Rajotte

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Allen.

We'll go to the vote on NDP-6.

(Amendment negatived)

NDP-7, all those in favour?

(Amendment negatived)

All in favour of clause 308?

(Clause 308 agreed to)

(Clauses 309 to 311 inclusive agreed to)

(On clause 312)

We'll go to clause 312. We have Mr. Hsu on Liberal-3 please.

8:10 p.m.

Liberal

Ted Hsu Liberal Kingston and the Islands, ON

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

As I said at the beginning of this division, this particular amendment would delete an exemption to the User Fees Act for fees connected to the new temporary foreign worker compliance regime, as recommended by the Canadian Bar Association.

8:15 p.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative James Rajotte

Thank you very much for that.

We'll then go to the vote on Liberal-3.

(Amendment negatived [See Minutes of Proceedings])

(Clause 312 agreed to)

(On clause 313)

Mr. Rankin.

8:15 p.m.

NDP

Murray Rankin NDP Victoria, BC

Thanks, Mr. Chair.

A couple of concerns that we've heard, for example, from the Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants about this particular clause that would now allow the government to collect, retain, and use social insurance numbers. They say that there's concern about that from a privacy perspective, that it's unnecessarily intrusive for workers and it is duplicating what Citizenship and Immigration is already doing. It seems duplicative and invasive, and for those reasons we would oppose this.

8:15 p.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative James Rajotte

Thank you, Mr. Rankin. We'll go to the vote.

(Clause 313 agreed to)

(Clause 314 agreed to)

I want to thank our two officials from the Department of Citizenship and Immigration for their presence here this evening. We appreciate it. Thank you.

Colleagues, are there any comments on division 25?

Shall clauses 315 to 333 carry?

(Clauses 315 to 333 inclusive agreed to)

8:15 p.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative James Rajotte

We'll then move to division 26, the Canadian Payments Act. Again, I do not have any amendments for this division.

Shall clauses 334 to 359 carry?

(Clauses 334 to 359 inclusive agreed to on division).

We now have the Payment Clearing and Settlement Act. We do have one amendment on clause 364, so can I group 360 to 363 and shall they carry?

(Clauses 360 to 363 inclusive agreed to)

(On clause 364)

We will then move to clause 364 and we have G-1, government-1. We'll go to Mr. Saxton, please.

8:15 p.m.

Conservative

Andrew Saxton Conservative North Vancouver, BC

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

This amendment is to change it so that Bill C-43 in clause 364 be amended by replacing in the English version line 2 on page 432 with the following:

to in subsection (1) that systemic risk or payments system risk is being

The proposed amendment is to correct an editorial error. The term “payments system risk” was inadvertently omitted from proposed subsection 6(2) in clause 364 of the English version of the bill, not in the French version.

The amendment ensures consistency with proposed subsection 6(1) of clause 364, which will allow the Governor of the Bank of Canada to issue a directive to a clearing house for systemic risk or payments system risk. The amendment ensures alignment between the English and the French versions of clause 364. The French version includes the term risque pour le système de paiement, i.e., payments system risk .

That is the purpose of the amendment.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

8:15 p.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative James Rajotte

Mr. Cullen.

8:15 p.m.

NDP

Nathan Cullen NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC

Very briefly, this is, I suppose, a level of progress and we congratulate the government. We will not have to wait to the next omnibus bill to fix it. We only had one correction to this omnibus bill and I'm sure there will be more, but this is an advance in the making of law in Canada. It's one for the good guys.

8:15 p.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative James Rajotte

Who are the good guys in this case?

8:15 p.m.

NDP

Nathan Cullen NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC

Us. The committee doing the good work on behalf of—

8:15 p.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative James Rajotte

Order. I think the Chair started that. I shouldn't have.

All those in favour of G-1 then?

(Amendment agreed to)

(Clause 364 as amended agreed to)

(Clauses 365 to 375 inclusive agreed to)

I want to thank our officials for being here.

We'll now go to division 28, the extractive sector transparency measures act.

We have two clauses here and a number of amendments on these clauses.

(On clause 376)

We have Liberal-4, Liberal-5, Liberal-6, Liberal-7, and Green Party or PV-16.

Just for your information, Green Party-16 is the same as Liberal-8 and NDP-8. The vote on Green Party-16 will apply to both Liberal-8 and NDP-8.

Those are the amendments on clause 376. There are no amendments for clause 377.

We'll begin with Liberal-4.

8:20 p.m.

Liberal

Ted Hsu Liberal Kingston and the Islands, ON

Division 28 represents a step in the right direction, although it could have been stronger and more effective. The Liberal Party has put forward six amendments in an effort to improve the new act.

Mr. Chair, I would like to describe the first four amendments, which do not overlap the amendments from the other parties.

Liberal-4 is an amendment that is an anti-avoidance measure that expands the application of the new act, so it also includes payments to entities controlled by an employee or public officer-holder of a payee, instead of just payments to those employees or public office-holders of a payee.

Liberal-5 is an amendment that clarifies the application of the new act by adding a definition of “assets” and “employee”. This was also recommended by the Canadian Bar Association.

Liberal-6 is an amendment that adds an explicit requirement for the federal government to consult aboriginal governments on any measure under the new act pertaining to them.

Liberal-7, the last of the first four amendments, allows an auditor to attest that information appears to be accurate instead of having to attest that the information is true, accurate, and complete. The latter is something that an auditor is often not in a position to do. This was also recommended by the Canadian Bar Association.

8:20 p.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative James Rajotte

Mr. Cullen.

8:20 p.m.

NDP

Nathan Cullen NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC

This is not a complaint. It's a bit of an awkward process because we're dealing with a bunch of amendments, some of which we have variations on. I can speak to the broad terms of the—

8:20 p.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative James Rajotte

If you want to speak to them separately, you can certainly do that.

8:20 p.m.

NDP

Nathan Cullen NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC

No, I think this would be best, because I can make the case for support of some of these Liberal amendments and then the enhancement of what we see.

The challenge is that this is, I believe, an attempt to do away with some corruption or some practices in which full disclosure wasn't happening, particularly between resource companies and their international and national applications. I think none of the committee members here were at the committee that studied this legislation. What was attempted, and I think achieved, particularly through amendment NDP-8, was to have some level of consensus between environmental groups, human rights groups, first nations, and resource companies themselves. As committee members can imagine, that's not necessarily the easiest consensus to try to pull off.

The attempt is to have greater transparency. We agree with the broad directive that's approached by the Liberal amendments here and enhanced by what we're including, that if we are going to take a shot at this, to have greater transparency for Canadian firms when dealing with international and national-level governments, we want to have the best that we can. If we can get an amendment that environmental groups, mining companies, and first nations can agree with, I don't know why anyone would want to stand in the way. I think sometimes the best role of government is to get out of the way when the interested parties are able to come to some agreement. That's the basis of amendment NDP-8, which I can speak to again when it comes up.

Broadly speaking, this is, as Mr. Hsu has said, a step forward. If we are going to change these things only every so often, Chair, and we don't often change this kind of legislation, then one would expect us to try to aim for the very best we can. We don't find that this is as good as it could be, and that's again according to the testimony at the committee that did address this section of the bill.

8:25 p.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative James Rajotte

Thank you.

Can I group these four then for one vote? If I do Liberal 4 to Liberal 7, is it okay for one vote?

8:25 p.m.

Some hon. members

Agreed.