Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I also thank Mr. Ste‑Marie for his amendment. We worked on it together, and I know Mr. Davies worked on that part as well.
To be clear, the act originally made some changes to the Competition Act that would deal with greenwashing with respect to specific products, products that you could test, so you would have to prove that the product has the environmental claims you say it does. This amendment that Monsieur Ste-Marie has put forward would expand this further for claims that are made by a business, and this is incredibly important, because there are some things you can't fully prove through a test. What this new change will require is to provide evidence to substantiate this claim.
To give you an example, a company may say that they are on track to net zero emissions by a certain year but not have done that, and that can be a form of greenwashing. This will get at claims like that. I appreciate Monsieur Ste-Marie's bringing this forward.
I also want to say thanks for a lot of the testimony we've heard at this committee, including from the Quebec Environmental Law Centre and the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment.
To the last point that Monsieur Ste-Marie made that this evidence be made publicly available on request, this one does create some problems, and while there are other jurisdictions that have similar provisions, they're not done in the context of antitrust law. This would create some challenges in this regard.
Also, there isn't any guidance about how that information would be provided, in what form, in what time period and what the penalties would be for not complying with that, and it would put undue burden on small and medium enterprises and could have the negative effect of leading to a process called greenhushing, whereby companies would be deterred from speaking to some of the environmental attributes of their products.
I would oppose that last change that was put forward and would propose to amend the amendment Monsieur Ste-Marie has put forward at the end, after it says, “the proof of which lies on the person making the representation...” Delete the next part of that amendment, which reads “and the evidence for which must be made publicly available on request”.