International Trade Committee on Nov. 2nd, 2006

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

I'm trying to be helpful, though, Mr. Julian.

We will be getting to each clause, one after the other. I believe you're probably familiar with the process, and we will be getting to each clause. You will certainly have an opportunity to debate each clause as we get to it. That's the way things are normally done at the committee, Mr. Julian. You may be new enough that you don't know that.

[Peter Julian, NDP, Burnaby—New Westminster, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, that's very kind. I do understand what the implication of Mr. Cannan's proposal is. That's exactly what I am speaking to.

[Ron Cannan, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

I'd like to make an amendment, Mr. Chair. I am trying to--

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

I'll accommodate Mr. Julian's request.

[Ron Cannan, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

I'm sorry, I'm speaking, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

You can't, Mr. Cannan. I'm trying to accommodate Mr. Julian's request.

Order!

Mr. Cannan, the only way you can intervene in Mr. Julian's debate is if you move a point of order.

[Ron Cannan, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

I was simply trying to make an amendment to help accommodate his request to proceed.

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

You can't interrupt unless you're moving a point of order.

Mr. Julian.

[Peter Julian, NDP, Burnaby—New Westminster, BC]

A point of order.

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

On a point of order, Mr. Julian.

[Ron Cannan, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

On a point of order, I'd like to make an amendment to my motion to help accommodate Mr. Julian's concerns about clauses 10, 18, and other amendments, so we can have the opportunity to debate fully--

[Peter Julian, NDP, Burnaby—New Westminster, BC]

Mr. Chair, I do have the floor.

A point of order is not an amendment, but I will--

[Ron Cannan, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

I'm trying to be cooperative, as you mentioned earlier how cooperative you are. In the spirit of cooperation and moving ahead--

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

Mr. Cannan--

[Peter Julian, NDP, Burnaby—New Westminster, BC]

Mr. Cannan, I'd be more than pleased to hear your amendment once I'm finished speaking, but I would like the chance to--

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

Order, Mr. Julian. Hold on a minute now.

Mr. Cannan, that isn't a point of order. We have to go back to Mr. Julian.

Mr. Julian.

[Peter Julian, NDP, Burnaby—New Westminster, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I appreciate that, and I will be offering an amendment at the end of my speech, in reaction to Mr. Cannan's proposal.

Because indeed, Mr. Chair, that's what is at stake here. As we heard on Tuesday, we talked about draconian legislation. We have to make sure that every clause is fully amended, that every one of these punitive.... The punitive nature of the bill is quite incredible. But we have to make sure that essentially we're not jeopardizing the softwood industry, those poor softwood companies that have borne the brunt of the last five years.

So essentially because of that we have a wide variety of punitive measures, which have to be duly considered. They have to be fully considered because indeed what we are talking about is the future of our softwood industry.

Now looking at Mr. LeBlanc's proposals in clause 25, for example, he's offered a very extensive amendment at that stage, which I think is well thought out, as most of what Mr. LeBlanc does is thought out with a great deal of forethought and with the appropriate consultation.

Now this motion of Mr. Cannan's would basically eliminate any sort of in-depth debate on the provisions of that particular clause. We have Mr. Casey's amendments, and more from Mr. LeBlanc.

Then we have some of the elements around the punitive nature, which I mentioned—the 18 months certainly—but going further than that, the punitive nature of the government being able to go to softwood directors on an individual basis. This is after what is essentially an imposed assessment, because we've certainly heard from previous testimony that there is an assessment done by the Government of Canada. The assessment is done, but certainly the companies don't have the ability to respond to it. Effectively their recourse is tax court, which could take about a year, from the testimony we heard.

So we're looking at a procedure. If we adopt this bill without the amendments, as I believe Mr. Cannan is pushing, without the real in-depth discussion of the implications of each of these amendments, we would end up with a bill where the assessments are made, where the companies have no recourse in the short term, or recourse really in the medium term either, and then essentially the extremely punitive measures—a bit like what I see Mr. Cannan's motion as being, in trying to close off debate—take effect.

The punitive measures are as follows. The companies and the individual directors become responsible for those debts. Now these are assessments that are imposed, and the companies have no real way of reversing them in the short term. It's up to the minister.

From there, they're going through tax court. Perhaps on a long-term basis, they can expect to see some modification of the assessment. But the government has draconian tools, as Mr. Feldman testified, to go to those individual directors and say to them, you're responsible, and then look at those individual directors to see if they've transferred funds at any time. That's the way the bill is currently crafted.

The amendments we're bringing forward, that the opposition is bringing forward, are dying to address that. But imagine a company in Prince George, where a wrong assessment has been made and the company is going through the long process of tax court to try to get some repudiation of the assessment. Then the government can wade in, go to those individual directors and say to them, “Well, have you transferred money at anytime in your life? Do you have an educational trust fund for your kids? Have you transferred money to your spouse?”

They cannot only go after the individual, the softwood owner and director who started a small softwood company a few years ago in the Cariboo or Prince George, the areas of British Columbia that are highly impacted by Bill C-24—highly impacted if we do not do our job as parliamentarians to fully vet and investigate this bill....

What we see is that those directors and their spouses and their children could have the government going after them for moneys owed for an assessment that might well be incorrect. But the procedures, the systems of checks and balances that exist in other legislation, as we've seen, don't exist in Bill C-24. So that system of checks and balances that we as parliamentarians are responsible for maintaining does not exist. Essentially, a director can be...

pursued by the government, and the same goes for his or her children and spouse. If we are talking about the Abitibi, a small company could find itself in the same situation. The amount of money due would be determined by the government. The calculation is not always very precise and the company could not go after the government. It would have to rely on the tax court, and that takes time, sometimes up to a year. There therefore would be no recourse. These directors and their families would see the government go after them. There is no system of checks and balances vis-à-vis the powers the government is assuming under Bill C-24. Small softwood lumber company directors are seeking justice and fairness and they wish to be treated with respect.

Other punitive elements of this, Mr. Chair, lie in the fact that not only can the company directors have the government going after them, but you actually have commercial clients of these softwood companies.... For example, in Quesnel, British Columbia, if that small company gets an incorrect assessment, and essentially what they're doing is trying desperately to stay afloat, they have to pay the assessment. If they don't pay that assessment, their recourse in tax court takes too long, and then you can have the government, under the current wording of Bill C-24, actually go after their commercial clients.

What are the implications of that, Mr. Chair? What are the implications of this kind of draconian legislation that says now if you are a commercial client of a Canadian softwood industry...

Be careful, because if you are the customer of such a company, the government can go after you. This possibility would exist under the bill if it is adopted. Who would want to do business with a softwood lumber company from the North Shore, the Saguenay—Lac-Saint-Jean area or the Abitibi-Témiscamingue? Who would want to do business with a softwood lumber company in Northern Ontario?

Who would do business with a softwood company in Saskatchewan, Alberta, or British Columbia? If there are cashflow difficulties, we're in a situation under this draconian legislation that essentially what we could have is the government going after those clients.

So the perverse impacts of that kind of situation, once word gets out, if we were to adopt Mr. Cannan's motion and just ram it through with no due consideration of the amendments--just ram it through, and let's not go into any depth, let's just treat this as question period, very brief, nothing of any depth or any substance to it. The implications of just ramming this through are significant and they are irreversible, Mr. Chair--irreversible--because the decisions we make now could well run many of those companies that are already on the ropes right out of business, either directly, through the punitive measures that are imposed on those companies, the fines, the imprisonment, the fact that you can go after directors and certainly go after directors' families, but also because of the ability of the government to go after the commercial clients....

What we will see, those of us who've been in business, is a shying away of companies that don't want to get involved with companies that might be liable to draw them into legal difficulty with the government. Who would want that? What commercial client would want to be involved in a company that may have the government coming after them? Yet this is one of the very perverse and very unfortunate consequences of badly crafted legislation.

We have responsibilities. We have the responsibility as parliamentarians to fully vet this legislation. We have the responsibility to go through clause-by-clause in detail and indepth to ensure that essentially we do not at any time make decisions that would imperil the softwood companies that are left.

If we simply allow things to stand, if we simply allow the fines, the imprisonment, half of this legislation, more than half of the legislation...in fact, if we go from clause 50 on, I believe, we are looking at punitive measures, clause after clause after clause.

In the front portion of the legislation, we have legislation that imposes double taxation, double penalties. We have legislation that, at this point, desperately needs to be amended. That's whether we're talking about how the lumber remanufacturers are defined, which has been a serious issue that folks have raised, and the Independent Lumber Remanufacturers Association certainly raised that--and I'll come back to that in a moment.

In the back end of the legislation, as we've seen, we're talking about draconian measure after draconian measure--draconian measures that follow one after the other, penalties, fines, jail sentences, all for folks who just wanted to create jobs in their community and who just wanted to sell value-added softwood products. That's all they wanted to do.

So what we have when we go to the front end of this legislation, if we take Mr. Cannan's motion and if we have the government impose this on us, and what we have in the back of the legislation is draconian in nature and it has to be amended. We cannot simply allow the legislation to leave this committee as it is written. It simply cannot, and I don't see how any parliamentarian around this table would support such draconian measures for softwood companies in Quesnel, B.C., in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, or in northern Alberta, and we can look right across the country, in The Pas, Manitoba--I'll certainly be going there to meet with folks in the softwood industry next weekend--and when we look at the north, northern Ontario, and certainly the reaction we've seen there in the softwood industry...a concern about the draconian nature of this legislation.

The representatives of the industry in Quebec are a little worried about this. And if you take the industry in the Maritimes, we have amendments...

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

Mr. Menzies.

[Ted Menzies, Conservative, Macleod, AB]

On a point of order, Mr. Chair, I've lost track of how many times I've heard the word “draconian”, and if that isn't repetitive, if that isn't a waste of this committee's time.... That should be a point of order.

You spoke earlier about wasting this committee's time with repetition of the same thing. We have a motion that we should be discussing. This committee should be discussing this piece of enabling legislation rather than listening to this filibuster that is an absolute waste of this committee's time.

I call for the vote.

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

That's not possible, Mr. Menzies. As long as Mr. Julian is debating Mr. Cannan's motion, he can proceed.

[Ted Menzies, Conservative, Macleod, AB]

That's my point—he's not.

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

I've already brought it to Mr. Julian's attention that he has been repeating himself. He's then gone on to new debate.

[Helena Guergis, Conservative, Simcoe—Grey, ON]

Mr. Chair, how do we end this, in order to proceed?

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

That's a discussion you'll have to have back there. In the meantime, I will allow Mr. Julian to go ahead.

[Peter Julian, NDP, Burnaby—New Westminster, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. In consideration of Mr. Menzies, I'll use the word “dictatorial” from now on.