Finance Committee on Nov. 7th, 2018

[Greg Fergus, Liberal, Hull—Aylmer, QC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I would like to thank all the witnesses who have appeared here today.

I will continue along the same lines as Mr. Julian, Mrs. Picard and Ms. Berry.

First, thank you for your testimony, ladies.

I understand what you are saying. A diamond in the rough is still a diamond. We want to move forward and we can do so here. The proposed bill on pay equity is a step in the right direction. I am very interested in the criticisms you have made about the bill.

Ms. Berry, your body language tells me that you had something to add to Mr. Julian’s penultimate question. What is your opinion about it?

[Helen Berry]

I'm actually not quite sure. I don't speak French, so I'm listening to the translation. I'm not exactly sure what my body language said.

[Greg Fergus, Liberal, Hull—Aylmer, QC]

I think you were going to make a comment as to whether or not you thought that parts of the bill would be challenged legally. I thought you were going to make a point on that.

[Helen Berry]

The point really is that we don't know at this point what parts of the bill, or any bill, we will have to challenge.

PSAC—and you probably know this—has come across a lot of legislation that we've challenged, and had to challenge. Sometimes we don't recognize what aspects of the law will become problems until we're going down that road. We don't know at this point that for sure these measures will cause litigation or long litigation. We don't know.

Again, this is better than the 30 years we spent on the Canada Post pay equity case that the Supreme Court finally ruled on in 20 minutes. As Ms. Picard said earlier, many of our members have worked hard and have not received pay equity, and it will go to their estates when they're dead. We don't want to see that. This is a good first step. We think it's an important first step. I think it will lay the groundwork for equal pay for work of equal value to be the norm in society. We see some areas of difficulty, but we certainly see some positive areas as well.

[Greg Fergus, Liberal, Hull—Aylmer, QC]

Thank you very much for your answer.

Mrs. Picard, do you have anything to add?

[Magali Picard]

No. Thank you.

[Greg Fergus, Liberal, Hull—Aylmer, QC]

Okay.

Once again, my thanks go to the officials from the Public Service Alliance of Canada for their testimony.

Mr. Geist, thank you also for your testimony. Your second recommendation is about

the notice and notice of copyright infringement.

This is a good start, you said, but perhaps some amendments are needed. Will these measures solve the problems? How can we improve them?

[Dr. Michael Geist]

Thanks for the question.

As you may know, the notice-and-notice approach was adopted in 2012 as a better mechanism to try to educate Canadians on the boundaries of copyright and to provide rights holders with a mechanism to raise that awareness while still safeguarding the privacy of the users.

The problem that emerged almost immediately was that because there were no regulations or limitations on what could be included in a notice and because Internet providers were required to forward whatever they got, under potential penalties for failing to do so, we saw certain companies sending out settlement demands to unsuspecting users. They were sending out literally hundreds of thousands of these demands, with unsuspecting people simply clicking and paying hundreds of dollars when there was no requirement to do so.

The bill makes a very important step by saying that an ISP won't be required to forward a notice if it includes any of those kinds of settlement demands.

That's great, but I don't think it goes quite far enough. What it does, in a sense, is to put all the obligation on an Internet provider to fully examine whether or not there is a notification or a settlement demand. Hopefully, they won't forward those notifications. However, given the volume, there are still risks that some of these may go through, and costs may accrue.

I think we could improve this situation by making it clear that there is a penalty for violating the rules for using the system to send along notifications. At the moment, there is no penalty for doing so. The worst that someone who does that faces is the possibility that their notification won't be sent along.

If they send out hundreds of thousands of these, some may get through, and there's no penalty for doing so. I think it would be fairly easy to say that there would be the prospect of some sort of violation or penalty if they've actually violated the rules in that way.

The other thing we could really benefit from is that because of the volume, creating a standard form of what is to be included would allow for greater automation, reducing costs and making it simpler for end-users to receive it. We don't have a clear-cut form either.

In a sense, it's really fine tuning, but allowing the intent of what I think the government is trying to achieve, which takes us back to that original intent. It could improve what is a good first step in trying to get back to what was intended in the first place.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Thank you all.

The bells are ringing.

Committee members, are we okay to go another 15 minutes?

We have 28 minutes left, so—

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

It will be pretty close. What about 10 minutes?

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

We're only five minutes from the chamber.

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

Some of us are faster than others. I know that.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Okay, Mr. Kmiec. The floor is yours.

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Going back to Mr. Lynds, you mentioned paragraphs 14(c) and 14(d), the provisions that exclude some of the members of your institute right now from being able to run for the board.

You mentioned that these would be your most senior members in the profession. Essentially, the more junior members would be ones who would then run for board positions.

Currently, I'm guessing, you have an operational group or committee, so do you have some of them maybe doing continuing professional development conferences?

[Grant Lynds]

Yes.

We have a wide breadth of committees, from organizing our annual conferences—the educational aspect—to committees that deal with litigation, a litigation committee.

A wide breadth of areas of IP are embodied in committees that members join. We encourage members to join committees and to get involved, to learn more about IP, learn more about the educational aspects of the profession, and get involved in giving webinars and seminars to our members.

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

Do they get any CPD points, continuing professional development points, toward current certification, or—

[Grant Lynds]

Yes. If they belong to bodies that require it, absolutely. Our courses are qualified.

I know for sure, as a member of the Law Society of Ontario.... It depends on which courses they are, but yes, they can be qualified, and—

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

These provisions basically would exclude the most active members who are involved in your profession from—

[Grant Lynds]

Absolutely.

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

—participating in their own profession's college.

[Grant Lynds]

That's right. You're right, and—

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

Sorry, can I just—?

[Grant Lynds]

You've got it. You have it.

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

We have the bells going, so I need to ask the next question.

In here, there is protection provided for the title of the profession, but not an acronym for the profession.

From my experience, the accounting profession is a good example. In their colleges, their regulations, law, their statutes, typically they will protect the word “accountant” and variations of the word “accountant”. As well, they'll protect CPA, CA, CMA, and all the old varieties of accountants.

If this bill passes the way it is right now, because there is no acronym in here, to the best of my knowledge, you will have people who will want to pretend to be trademark agents and will simply use an acronym. I don't know if that's ever been noticed by members of the institute.

It goes back to the question of whether you have current members who perhaps engage in the provision of services that they're not supposed to provide or are not qualified for. Are there people out there pretending to be trademark agents?

[Grant Lynds]

Yes, there could be a grey area. It's pretty clear that if you're doing business before the patent or trademark office, you have to be, in those rules, set up as a patent agent or a trademark agent to represent a person before those offices, and those are the titles that are carried forward in the legislation for the college.

There are others out there. You'll see advertisements that will use different phrasing, but they don't encroach on, or at least they shouldn't encroach on, patent agent or trademark agent.

I think the short answer there, if I can make it as short as possible, is that we don't see a lot of nibbling around the titles that are true and accurate to what our professionals are doing, patent agent and trademark agent.

Part of this is education, which we embrace, to get the businesses to recognize who is a qualified patent agent and a trademark agent and the education that goes into that, as opposed to somebody who carries themselves as a business adviser on intellectual property.