Thank you for allowing me to testify before you today.
I've been involved in over 10,000 actions or enforcements against counterfeiters since 1985, and I've coordinated and conducted the training of thousands of customs officers and law enforcement officials across Canada for the identification of counterfeits and how to prosecute cases for over 18 years. I've been practising across the country.
I'm here to underscore the importance of having a simplified procedure to deal with what I strongly believe will be the majority, the vast majority, of counterfeit product shipments coming into Canada. A simplified procedure will reduce additional and unnecessary cost to customs, which means to taxpayers, to everyone in Canada.
Canada's court system has been moving, along with other court systems, towards a mediation process, not a litigation process. I believe if we move towards a simplified procedure, we will reduce the strain on our courts, which are presently quite busy.
I was very involved in the RCMP's Project O-Scorpion that you've heard about. I was very involved as I was in charge of anti-counterfeiting for the Olympics for VANOC, and I was quite familiar with the hockey jersey situation.
In respect of O-Scorpion, on the RCMP website they talk about having 49 seizures valued at $78 million over six months. Fantastic. It's depressing because the largest seizure total they had before then was $37 million, and since then it has dwindled to next to nothing.
Our office was involved in over a dozen of these cases, providing information to the RCMP to help them prosecute the cases for 23 rights holders and others that we assisted. In many cases, there were multiple brands on the shipment, as many as 39. Under a simplified procedure, many—and I underscore many—of the brands with small quantities of counterfeits on those shipments that would otherwise opt not to institute legal action under the current legislation would take part in a simplified procedure. That translates into more counterfeits being dealt with quickly, cost effectively, and destroyed at a cost to the brand owner, which, as I understand it, is what is intended by the legislation. There will be significant cost savings all around, especially to customs.
If a shipment has some brands filing actions and some not filing actions, it means that customs is going to have to incur additional cost to remove the goods from the brands that opt out.
I think we all agree that the legislation should, and in my respectful opinion must, encourage brands to take part in the process of removing these goods at their cost. The simplified procedure has worked very well. If you look at the statistics in the European Union, over 75% of the shipments that have been detained, resulting in destruction, were because of the simplified procedure. There was no court action required.
My question is, why should we even consider a court action if it's not required? Why do we need to hire more people in the courts to deal with these matters if it's unnecessary. I looked at the Federal Court, at their records, and the most number of copyright or trademark infringement matters they've deal with per year is 225.
If we look at O-Scorpion, with 49 different seizures involving all these multiple brands, that was approximately 250 brands. That's adding 250 additional court cases if the brands would go along with it. If we look at the VANOC situation, it's interesting—1,500 shipments. Not one person, when provided with evidence of the authenticity that these goods were counterfeit, disputed the authenticity.
Of the over 16,000 jerseys that were detained by a customs officer as being suspected of being counterfeit, not one of them was a grey market. Not one of them was authentic; every one of them was counterfeit. How many of the over 1,500 people agreed to a voluntary relinquishment without a court case, without dealing with it? Every one of them, because the evidence was given to them.
In many of the shipments involved in Project O-Scorpion, the brand didn't have a trademark registered in Canada. I think there will be increased cost to customs having to remove the goods from a shipment when the counterfeit is really from a company that has a common law right but not a registered trademark right.
In my opinion, anyone supporting or buying counterfeits is supporting a serious crime that is deserving of the attention this committee is giving the subject through these hearings. For that, I thank and applaud you, and more importantly, I urge you to consider some of the submissions that I think will save us all a lot of money.
Thank you.