Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you for being here today.
Mr. Wallace brought up something that was interesting, about people calling and wanting a study. As I read it right now in the act, in subsection 9(1), “Any six persons resident in Canada who are not less than eighteen years of age and who are of the opinion that”. It gives three main criteria, with references; they “may apply to the Commissioner for an inquiry”. So that exists. There's nothing new going on. This allows the commissioner to study a whole industry. Right now if the commissioner sees one particular corporation or one particular entity, he or she has the permission to go in to see if they're competing well.
Now, sometimes when you look at one entity within an industry, wouldn't it be a lot more productive if you got to study a whole industry and identify what's going on, what the positives and negatives are? Then maybe from that investigation of the whole industry--and it doesn't necessarily have to be a negative--we could look at a study, an inquiry, an investigation, maybe dig deeper to find out what's going on. Really what we're trying to do is promote competition. How we do it is the question here.
I hear that we don't really trust the person in charge or the commissioner with this. I would think that the Constitution would keep the competition commissioner in line. Is there any truth to that? There are some limitations. Are we running from our own shadows here trying to protect ourselves from the bad old commissioner?
I'll start off with Ms. Rodal, and then over to Mr. Janigan.