Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I would like to thank the committee members for having me.
I am pleased to participate in your study of the document titled Proposals for a Miscellaneous Statute Law Amendment Act, 2014.
This document was developed as part of the law amendment program and is the result of significant collaboration between the justice department and members of Parliament. It ensures that updates to the body of federal legislation comply with drafting standards that are applied to current federal laws.
To put the law amendment program into context, I would like to begin with a few comments about the history of the program, the criteria used within the program to determine whether a legislative proposal should be retained and the applicable legislative process. Then, I will provide a general overview of the document's structure and content.
The law amendment program was established in 1975, and it is designed to accelerate the adoption of minor amendments of a non-controversial nature—and you will hear me repeat that phrase—to be made to Canadian laws.
Former minister, Otto Lang, created this new process of making minor amendments to federal legislation. Even back then, the legislative agenda was very busy, making it difficult to make minor changes to or correct the occasional errors in our federal statutes.
Consequently, this program was created to make those changes without taking up too much time in either of the two Houses. Since the program was established, ten bills of this kind have been passed and we are working on the eleventh.
The legislation section of the Department of Justice, which we are a part of, is responsible for the program. This program is a means of correcting anomalies, inconsistencies, archaisms and errors that can sometimes find their way into federal statutes. More specifically, the program uses a bill to allow minor amendments of a non-controversial nature to be made to a number of federal statutes instead of having a specific bill for each amendment.
In certain cases, if the amendments are not made through this program, they may never be made because they are not significant enough to justify the use of the resources needed to draft a bill for that sole purpose.
The legislative process under the miscellaneous statute law amendment program is different from the usual legislative process. Basically, the procedure involves a pre-study of the proposals document by committees of both houses of Parliament before a bill is drafted and introduced. Any proposed amendment that a member of either committee objects to will not be included in the bill that will subsequently be drafted.
The criteria for including a proposed amendment in an initiative under this program are listed on the inside of the cover page of the proposals document. Specifically, the proposed amendments must not be controversial, must not involve the spending of public funds, must not prejudicially affect the rights of persons, and must not create a new offence nor subject a class of persons to an existing offence. The question of whether or not an amendment is controversial is really the main criterion of the program. When former Minister Lang introduced the program he spoke about this main criterion for assessing proposals, that is that they be non-controversial. He said that the determination of that criterion would not be difficult to establish and that a proposed amendment would be controversial as soon as one of the parties expressed opposition to it. This is the essence of the non-partisan process.
Honourable members of the committee, we can assure you that if there is any objection to a proposed amendment in the proposals document by a member of this committee, or of the committee of the Senate that will also be studying the document, that proposed amendment will immediately be withdrawn and will not form part of the bill that will subsequently be drafted.
After the committees of both houses have concluded their review and issued their reports, a bill based on the reports of the two committees and containing the proposed amendments unanimously approved by them will be drafted and introduced in Parliament. Such a bill is customarily read three times and passed without debate or subsequent consideration by committees, as the contents of the bill will have already been reviewed by committees of both houses.
I will now take a few minutes to briefly describe how the proposals document is organized and to summarize its content. A short description of the background of the program criteria and the legislative process of the program can be found on the inside of the cover page of the document. Next to it is the table of provisions, followed by the proposed amendments.
The document contains proposed amendments to 80 acts and the proposed amendments are organized in three parts. Part 1 contains the proposed amendments to several acts organized in alphabetical order according to the English title of the acts. Part 2 contains one clause that makes the same terminology change to several acts by means of a pinpoint amendment. Part 3 contains the coordinating amendments, amendments that serve to coordinate the effects of some of the proposed amendments in the proposals document with other existing legislative initiatives.
Following the proposed amendments is a section with the heading “Explanatory Notes”. This section contains the explanatory notes and descriptive notes for each proposed amendment. The descriptive notes provide short explanations of the reasons for the proposed amendment.
The proposed legislative amendments in the document can be grouped together according to theme. They correct grammatical, spelling and terminology errors. They also correct typographical errors, errors in references, the use of outdated terms, and discrepancies between the French and English versions.
Some of the proposals you will be looking at update the names of provinces and territories. For instance, several proposals update the name of the province of Newfoundland to Newfoundland and Labrador, following the 2001 constitutional amendment to that effect.
Other proposals correct the name of certain courts in federal acts to adapt them to organizational changes. In addition, certain proposed amendments ensure the use of non-sexist terms in the English version: for instance certain instances of “chairman” are replaced by the more neutral term “chairperson”.
The document also contains proposals repealing certain legislative provisions that today are null and void, such as provisions dealing with veterans of the South African War of 1899-1902, also known as the “Boer War”. Since there are no longer any beneficiaries for these provisions, they are null and void and can be repealed.
Finally, some of the proposed amendments were also the subject of comments from the Standing Committee on the Scrutiny of Regulations. Those amendments will in certain cases resolve issues raised by that committee.
Those are my introductory remarks. My colleagues Claudette Rondeau and Julie Ladouceur and I are available to answer your questions.
