Thank you very much, Mr. Rae, for a very thoughtful question.
Let me start first with the issue of Talisman. You're quite right, the Talisman situation existed before Bill C-300 was even tabled in the House. So even in the absence of this sort of formal mechanism, which in our view will encourage frivolous or vexatious or unfair allegations to be made against Canadian companies, Canadian companies were at risk of having their reputations damaged, with enormous loss for everybody involved. Our concern is that this bill would make that situation even worse. It would actually build in an incentive for the commercial competitors to Canadian companies, whose standards may be well below those of Canadian companies and certainly whose standards would be well below the standards that we would assume we'd want Canadian companies to aspire to, to make these sorts of complaints. It would encourage them to do that.
You're right. There is a provision in the bill, in clause 4, that says the minister may decline to examine the matter, but a decision not to examine the complaint would be subject to judicial review, and generally the standard to prima facie dismiss a complaint in these criteria would have to be very high. The minister could not just frivolously throw it out himself and say, this is a group that is known to recklessly damage the reputation of people; I don't take seriously the allegation they make.
There would be a process there. One could easily see the incentive built in when a Canadian company was looking at opening up operations abroad, for example, if it was looking for licences in a country, for its commercial competitors to encourage a series of complaints to be made against Canadian companies on the grounds that they have violated environmental standards or human rights standards or a range of other international CSR concerns, perhaps in another country.