Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thanks to our witnesses.
There are a couple of things that have worked in the past in this committee that have come to light on where we are right now and how it relates to the voluntary code. One of the things is that it used to be legal in Canada for businesses to write off fines and penalties on the environment or on anti-consumer court cases. They would actually get a tax deduction of up to 50% off the fines and penalties. Drug companies were fined for being misleading and environmental companies were fined for doing the wrong thing—actually, it wasn't environmental companies, but there was environmental damage that was done.
It led to this imbalance that made it actually an incentive, a business-related expense, to go ahead with bad practices that affected people and the environment, because it actually paid off for them. It created an imbalance for innovation and so forth.
The other one is my work on enacting the right to repair, which passed through this committee and was in the Senate. We ended up taking a voluntary agreement in the auto sector. We basically said that we got a field goal instead of a touchdown. This has now emerged again as an issue, because some of the industry will follow the voluntary agreement and some won't. Some wouldn't even sign on to the voluntary agreement, including Tesla, until recently. There are still major issues, and now they're back to lobbying here on the Hill. We did know the vulnerability 10 years ago, when we started this, that when it worked in towards the electronics and the sharing of information and data, it changed things again, and there wasn't anything there.
My question is for Ms. Strome, Ms. Régis and Mr. Bengio.
With this voluntary agreement, have we created a potential system right now whereby good actors will come to the table and follow a voluntary agreement while bad actors might actually use it as an opportunity to extend their business plans and knock out competition? I've seen that happen in those two examples that we've had there.
I'll start with you, Ms. Strome, because you haven't been on yet. Then we can hear from Ms. Régis and Mr. Bengio, if we can go in that order, please.