I can walk through a bit about the investigation process.
Essentially, there are two agencies responsible for conducting trade remedy investigations.
Canada Border Services Agency is responsible for initiating a case at the beginning and then looking into whether dumping and subsidizing is taking place, and in what amounts.
The Canadian International Trade Tribunal is responsible for looking at whether that dumping and subsidization is causing injury to the domestic industry.
They have separate functions, and the investigations move in parallel.
Once a complaint has been received by the industry, the CBSA has a certain period of time to determine whether it's properly documented and then, on that basis, whether they want to initiate an investigation.
Once that's initiated, this parallel process goes on where the trade tribunal, first, makes a decision as to whether there's an initial indication that there's injury; then the CBSA makes its decision as to whether there's an initial indication of dumping or subsidizing. Based on those findings, provisional duties can be put in place. Then that moves on to the final stage, where they're doing additional verifications. The CITT holds public hearings and they're just gathering the information to make the final finding. The CBSA will then issue its decision as to what the levels of dumping are. Then the CITT, as a final step, confirms, or not, whether that dumping is causing injury. From that point, final anti-dumping duties or countervailing duties, depending on the issue, would be put in place.
Once measures are in place, they're in place for a five-year period, and that's the time at which, when duties are being collected, some of these issues that you're talking about might be taking place, potentially, where companies might be trying to get around the duties by misrepresenting the nature of what the product is, or where it's coming from. Basically, they will look at what the duties apply to and see if there's a way that they can get out of it. That does happen, from time to time. We don't have a lot of evidence as to the extent to which that's happening in the Canadian market, but there is some anecdotal evidence.
That's one of the areas that we looked at in the consultations as to what tools we might need to have to address that.
We already have, actually, quite good tools within the Special Import Measures Act, within the Customs Act, to deal with fraud and evasion, where there's really just wrong information, incorrect information, being put on entries.
For things where it's more about using loopholes, making small modifications to goods, we're looking to see whether that's an extensive problem that merits having a separate process to be able to address that, as well.
I think your other question was on this software. This is something that's only come to our attention recently. It's the way that dumping margins are calculated. You're basically comparing the prices that they're being sold at in Canada by this exporter with the prices that they're being sold at in their domestic market. If they can play with the prices in the domestic market, it can affect the levels of dumping duties that can be applied.
The CBSA has quite a lot of tools at their disposal to determine whether the pricing in the other market is actually reliable. On that particular case, I don't have an answer as to whether they could address that. We haven't been able to raise that with them yet. But it's been brought to our attention and we're having a look at whether anything additional is needed in that respect.