It's good to see you, Mr. Beatty. I would just say to the committee that my friendship and association with Mr. Beatty goes back a very long way, and I'm always glad to see him in the committee.
I hear you. I think you've made your points extremely strongly. You mentioned the example of Talisman. You mentioned other examples with respect to the reputational impact. Surely you would agree that there wasn't a Bill C-300 when the issues around Talisman were raised. We now have a counsellor who is going to be hearing cases that will be publicly known. It will be in the papers and on the Internet and on the web.
Do you really think it's fair to...? There's an alternative line one could take, and that is to say that at least what Bill C-300 does is it establishes a forum where a company can be completely exonerated by a statement by a minister. You stated that it would take a long time.
Looking at clause 4, under subclause 4(3), it states that if the minister decides that:
the request is frivolous or vexatious or is made in bad faith, he or she may decline to examine the matter. Otherwise, he or she shall examine the matter described in the complaint and assess compliance
The implication of that would seem to me to be that the minister could pretty quickly... There would have to be a process established under which the minister would receive these complaints and deal with them, and I would assume that the process would involve the counsellor, but I'm just not sure that it's necessarily the case that the intention of Bill C-300 is to go way beyond the government's position as set out in its own recommendations on CSR.
The other point I would make is that it seems to me that what Mr. McKay has done is perhaps go a little bit beyond the consensus that was arrived at, but I would also argue that what the government has done is well less than what was agreed to. What we ought to be looking for as a committee is a way to find the balance, frankly, that strikes right at the heart of what the consensus was that the parties, including the mining companies and the unions and the environmental organizations, agreed was where we should go.
So what concerns me about the government's strategy is it's less than where we want to go, and I do think we could make improvements to this measure that would allow us to hit the target.