Thank you, Madam Chair.
As I mentioned, I want to move a motion that I put on notice on April 13 of this year. It's a motion to require the Canada Border Services Agency to provide the committee with a copy of the SIMA handbook.
We've had discussions about this before. For those who need a refresher, the SIMA handbook is an administrative guideline for people who interact with Canada's trade remedy regime, which deals with anti-dumping, countervailing and safeguard investigations.
For many years, going back to the 1990s, as Mr. Naqvi can explain, the SIMA handbook was made available to members of council, to members of the importing community, to brokers, to freight forwarders, etc. It's a statement explaining how the CBSA understands its authority under the Special Import Measures Act.
Last year, the CBSA made a decision to no longer provide the public with copies of the SIMA handbook. They've taken a position that it is an internal enforcement manual, and they no longer wish to provide it. I've heard from many members of the bar, as well as many members of the importing community, that this is causing them great difficulty in understanding how the CBSA is operating under the Special Import Measures Act.
There's a basic principle I see here, which is that parties who are interacting with it as administrative decision-makers need to understand the case that they have to meet. That's a basic legal principle. That is being impeded because the CBSA is no longer offering that.
We've had some discussions about it. This motion has been on for a while, so I wanted to move it at the end of this meeting. We have a break week next week. Maybe we can discuss further how we might address this to give the importing community a better understanding of the case they need to make when they're dealing with the CBSA. That's why I'm moving this motion.
Thank you.