Industry Committee on May 5th, 2016

[Claude Majeau]

No, there's never been an issue.

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

Is it a possibility you could charge a fee?

[Claude Majeau]

Fees to appear before the board? Are you talking—

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

No, I'm saying like a fee to perform a service.

[Claude Majeau]

There is no service of the board.

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

If a company comes to you for an interpretation of a tariff, do you charge a fee?

[Claude Majeau]

I would refer to that as a cost recovery. It was looked at maybe 15 or 20 years ago, and a study was done. I don't know if it was PricewaterhouseCoopers or us, or another company, but it concluded that it would not be advisable to have such a scheme before the board. Not only that, but beyond that, some lawyers said that it would almost be a denial of justice. You have a right to appear before a public tribunal in the same way you have the right to appear before a court of justice. When you appear before a court of justice, you don't pay for the salary of the judge. You pay for your lawyers, but you don't pay for accessing justice.

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

You could say that the delays could potentially significantly slow down economic activity, right? What's the number? What's your budget projection of what you think you would need to be able to have an acceptable level of service? I think the service you have now is that you'll conclude 70% of the cases within 12 months. Many people would feel that's unacceptable. If you're in business, you would feel that's unacceptable. I think that in the U.S. it takes nine months for a decision? It's the law there that you'll get your decision in nine months. What would it take to have U.S. levels of standards to achieve this?

[Claude Majeau]

In the U.S. the nine months is for what they refer to as the “initial determination”, and not the final determination. They have to come up with an initial determination. It's not final, just so that we're clear on that.

To answer your other question about the staff, as far as I'm concerned, we could easily double the professional staff of the board. We have only two economists right now, so we could easily absorb two more. We have three lawyers now, and one is on family leave, so we could use another two or three lawyers. That's about four or five professional employees.

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

For a country that, to a certain degree, prides itself on technological innovation and creativity in all areas, whether it's music, software, hardware, or what have you, does it seem logical or reasonable that with such a small budget relative to the complete size of the government's $300-plus billion dollar budget, we are hamstringing innovation for a couple of million dollars? Does it seem logical? I'm a Conservative and I don't like to spend any more than I need to, but if it's holding up economic activity...?

Is it that simple? I understand that there are more complex cases, but is it that simple?

[The Chair, Liberal, Dan Ruimy]

We need a very quick answer on that one.

[Claude Majeau]

No, it is not that simple. I think you're right. I couldn't agree more with your way of seeing things.

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

So it's more than just a few more million dollars?

[Claude Majeau]

Can you be more precise?

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

I'm sorry; I guess I'm out of time.

[The Chair, Liberal, Dan Ruimy]

Mr. Jowhari, you have five minutes.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

I'll come back to the question resources again.

In your opening statement, you talk about the working committee, about their objectives, and about their focus around operational procedures and processes. You focus on efficiency and productivity. You also talk about the recommendation that basically says “cut the time down”.

Each one of my colleagues over the last 20 minutes has tried to probe into this to get an understanding of whether it is money, bodies, expertise, or retention. What really is the issue? We are all here to help, and I'm still not 100% sure, when we talk about “necessary resources to adequately deliver its mandate” what those resources are, if it's not money, if it's not expertise and lawyers and clerks. What are the resources?

Again I'm going to come back to what Mr. Baylis asked. How can we help? What is it that I could do tomorrow to get up and go to Minister Dion's office about, saying that we had a meeting and would like to get this?

[Gilles McDougall]

The issue is basically money. Once we have the money, the issue then becomes staffing and retention of the specialized people; but order for us to get there, we need the budget to be able to search for the additional people who are interested in working in this very specialized area and attract them, hire them, and keep them. It's as simple as that, in my own mind.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Perfect. The issue is money. Great.

Now, can you help us understand how, by an increase of $1 million, we could increase the throughput by x number of cases or shorten their length, so that we can go and say...?

[Gilles McDougall]

Unfortunately, it is not as simple as that, because each case at the board is different and complex. Sometimes a particular tariff might need a month of analysis. Other cases might need six months of analysis. It's very difficult to do a direct correlation between the money and the time.

There is something that cannot be compressed. It's the overall complexity of each of the files, and the inherent time, and—I think Mr. Majeau said this in his presentation—whatever resources we have we still need a corps of people who have enough time to understand the issues.

Remember that many of our cases involve making original legal interpretations of some new amendments to the act. On the economic side, some of our economists work at the top level with the various experts who appear before us, trying to understand a new game theory that an economist has thought about that would create a specific value for a tariff. We need time to think, incubate, and eventually produce a decision, and regardless of the money, that cannot be compressed.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

So the time and the steps and the complexity are almost constant, just to simply this issue.

[Claude Majeau]

I would like to add something here. What I would like to do at the board is to be able to pair an economist and a lawyer per file, per tariff. Right now, if you don't have sufficient staff, everyone is involved with everything. This is what I would like to be able to do: to have one lawyer, one economist per file, per hearing, per whatever. That will facilitate our work, instead of having a bottleneck of, let's say, a senior—

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

So rather than being sequential, you're talking about combining tasks, which is the key characteristic of any type of design that you want to do. You bring all the players from the beginning to the end, and you shorten the cycle time.

I got the answer, okay. Perfect.

[The Chair, Liberal, Dan Ruimy]

Mr. Masse, you have two minutes.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

I need to know what we're getting at here. I'm trying not to be partisan, but I want to make sure exactly how we got here and what's happening.

During the election campaign, there were promises made—I've seen the questionnaires—and they also included the Canadian Music Publishers Association. The Liberals promised to revitalize these elements, but I hear from what you're saying that even in the last budget, we have a reduction of that number. Then we have the testimony that's relatively recent—it's only a year old—by now Minister Dion, at that time the critic for Canadian Heritage, saying that several things were wrong, including this.

At the end of the day, have you received anything in response to Minister Bains with regard to your organization and direction and/or an indication of funding improvements? When they rescinded the funding that you had, was there any explanation why, an analysis as to what that would cost your organization?