Madam Chair, committee members, I appreciate the opportunity to be with you today to discuss the important issue of motor vehicle safety and the proposed amendments to the Motor Vehicle Safety Act, as contemplated in Bill S-2. I am not going to bore you with the details of the promotional spiel on our association, but suffice it to say that we represent the international automakers in the Canadian marketplace—essentially, everybody but Mark's members.
At the outset, I want to say that safety is of paramount importance to each and every one of the GAC member companies. As I noted before your colleagues in the Senate last fall, our members have consistently been at the vanguard of the introduction of advanced safety technologies, such as the three-point seat belt, electronic stability control, and advanced lighting, currently the subject of CMVSS 108, which I also made reference to in my testimony to the Senate, and for which we are still looking for a final regulation from the department.
I was pleased to be at Tuesday’s meeting of the committee on Bill S-2 for part of the time. A number of the committee members expressed concern about the rapid pace with which technological innovation is happening in the automotive industry. I concur with you that the pace of change is both unprecedented and disruptive. In this regard, the Global Automakers of Canada supports the flexibility being afforded by Bill S-2 to accommodate adjustment to this rapid change with respect to propulsion, connectivity, and automation technologies. This flexibility, used prudently, should allow Canada to better stay at the forefront of new technological advancements and any regulatory regime required to support them.
I also want to comment briefly on the sections of the bill that are intended to bring Canada into greater regulatory alignment with the United States. The members of the Global Automakers of Canada support the recognition of U.S. standards across the NAFTA region, as our plants in the three countries are geared to serving the larger U.S. market, and building once for all three countries has the benefit of reducing complexity and yielding economies of scale.
That being said, vehicles meeting the UNECE global standards are similarly safe and often incorporate advances not yet adopted in the United States. We therefore believe that Canada should retain the flexibility to recognize other advanced standards, in addition to FMVSS, in order to deliver the greatest benefits to Canadians and to ensure that we are able to meet our CETA obligations.
Without such consideration, Canadians are being shortchanged. Transport Canada not only faces increasing regulatory irrelevance but also misses an opportunity to play a leading role in the North American regulatory framework, not by adopting a unique Canadian standard but rather by critically assessing standards in the rest of the world—i.e., the UNECE standards, as well as those of the United States—to ensure that Canadians are not being denied leading safety or environment technologies simply because the U.S. is unprepared or unwilling to embrace such standards. Canada can be, and frankly should be, innovative in its regulating, as well as capitalizing on the regulatory co-operation provisions with respect to regulations and standards in both the United States and the EU.
The association’s members support amendments to the Motor Vehicle Safety Act that would provide meaningful improvements to public safety. However, additional regulatory burden without benefits to the motoring public should be avoided.
The question was raised by a member on Tuesday with respect to whether the collection of more data would assist in improving safety. The members of the GAC are not against the provision of additional data, provided it is reasonable and useful, and ultimately improves safety. The experience of the United States has demonstrated that the identification of safety defects is often a very complex task and data alone is insufficient for that task. The U.S. gathers a tremendous amount of data, but that data did not help with respect to the early identification of some of the defects related to recent high-profile recall situations.
In this regard, our members do have a concern with respect to proposed subsection 8.1(1), which Mr. Nantais also referenced, which provides the minister with the power to order a company to “conduct tests, analyses or studies...to verify compliance with this Act, that the Minister considers necessary”. This is a wide-ranging, Canada-unique power that provides the minister with unfettered discretion to order these tests with no consideration as to the cost to the company, nor the potential charter implications of asking a company to conduct and pay for work that may subsequently be used by the government against the company.
This clause is problematic, and if the language cannot be tightened up in the legislation, then we believe regulations should be developed to provide guidance as to what conditions would justify such a request, what framework would be used to standardize expectations over how those requests are filled, and who would assume the costs of such tests.
There are other sections in this bill as amended by the Senate that raise concerns for our members, but my time has expired. Based on conversations amongst the committee and two years spent on this bill, I think time has expired in terms of moving the bill forward as well.