Thank you, Mr. Chair.
We have had a number of discussions on this issue with telecommunications companies, which expressed their concerns, and rightly so, about the provisions dealing with administrative monetary penalties and violations, including continuing violations. I will read section 72.131 on violations proposed in the bill:
72.131 Every contravention of a provision of an order made under section 15.1 or 15.2 or a regulation made under paragraph 15.8(1)(a) constitutes a violation and the person who commits the violation is liable to an administrative monetary penalty of an amount (a) in the case of an individual, not exceeding $25,000 and, for a subsequent contravention, not exceeding $50,000; or (b) in any other case, not exceeding $10,000,000 and, for a subsequent contravention, not exceeding $15,000,000.
The bill also proposes the creation of a section on continuing violations:
72.132 A violation that is continued on more than one day constitutes a separate violation in respect of each day during which it is continued.
The purpose of our amendment is to delete those lines—lines 24 to 26—because such penalties of $10 million or $15 million, which is already enormous for large companies, are devastating for a small business. The Canadian Chamber of Commerce has also recommended that this section be removed because presumably, in the aftermath of the violation, businesses are trying to solve the problem. It is not in bad faith that someone would be in continuing violation of the act.
Our reasoning is as follows. The section states that a continuing or prolonged violation of the act can be punishable by additional daily fines. As non-compliance is often related to systemic issues that are not resolved quickly or in a day, a single continuing violation of the act could result in substantial and repeated administrative monetary penalties. Such severe penalties could lead to widespread outages of telephone, Internet and mobile phone services owing to a lack of time to properly develop and test fixes, which may introduce unintended technical vulnerabilities. Removing section 72.132 would allow for separate violations to be recognized without reducing the government's ability to impose fines for continuing violations.
I hope my colleagues will vote in favour of this amendment.