moved:
Motion No. 1
That Bill C-61, in clause 4, be amended by adding after line 23, on page 2, the following:
"(b) prescribing criteria for determining whether an act or omission shall be proceeded with as a violation or as an offence".
Mr. Speaker, we are at report stage of Bill C-61, a bill that allows the Department of Agriculture, under the jurisdiction of the minister of agriculture, to impose administrative monetary penalties for a violation to the various acts that were just read in the House and to seek compliance agreements to ensure the violations do not continue in the future.
My party and I support the concept of administrative monetary penalties. We also support the concept of compliance agreements. The House will see in the amendments we have proposed today that none of them would disallow the use of administrative monetary penalties to implement or to penalize violations of acts, particularly those that would affect regulations dealing with agriculture, health, safety and the like. Nor do any of the amendments we propose, including the one we are dealing with right now, preclude the minister reaching a compliance agreement with an offender or with a violator of any of the offences in the acts we are dealing with today.
Our amendments attempt to qualify and quantify the powers of the minister, the powers of the tribunal to which violators can appeal, and to clarify certain parts of the acts and the rights and the responsibilities of both the violator and the minister in enforcing and administering the monetary penalties and forming compliance agreements.
Motion No. 1 is incorrectly printed in the Notice Paper. It says that the minister shall prescribe "criteria for determining whether an act or omission shall be proceeded with as a violation or as an offence". The amendment requires the minister to have regulations determining the differences between a violation which the AMPs address and an offence which the court system addresses. We feel this clarification would respond to some concerns in the industry about the matter.
The Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food was given information by the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food that a number of institutions and associations impacted by the legislation support Bill C-61. The parliamentary secretary to the minister of agriculture circulated a list in the committee of several organizations such as the Canadian Horticultural Council, the Canadian Meat Council, the Canadian Animal Health Institute, the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association, the Canadian Nursery Trades Association, the Canadian Egg Marketing Agency, the Canadian Seed Growers Association, the Council of Forestry Industries of British Columbia, the Canadian Fertilizer Institute, the National Dairy Council of Canada and the Holstein Association of Canada.
The parliamentary secretary indicated to the committee that all these associations and organizations supported Bill C-61. The list that he circulated in the committee was titled "Organizations which support Bill C-61". He said that he would supply letters of support for the bill to members of the committee. We sought those letters of support, and when we received them only one of the
letters was dated after the introduction of Bill C-61. In other words all the letters the parliamentary secretary suggested indicated support for Bill C-61 were written in 1992 and 1993, which is before the current government was elected and before Bill C-61 was in the drafting stage, let alone introduced into the House of Commons.
We took note of what the individuals who wrote those letters said and found that while they supported the concepts of AMPS and compliance agreements, they wanted to review the legislation once drafted and to comment on it.
To my knowledge the minister of agriculture and his officials have not yet supplied us with any letters, other than one letter from the Canadian Meat Council, that actually support Bill C-61. I bring that forward as a concern and as a rationale for some of the amendments we are proposing.
Motion No. 1 would require the minister to have regulations determining the differences between a violation which the AMPS address and an offence which the court system addresses. This must happen in any case. The amendment ensures that the minister is required to do it. The criteria must be more open and more well known in the industry and if the criteria are wrong we will know in advance, before the regulations are administered, whether or not they will be done in a fair and reasonable manner.
Departmental officials say that they are doing a great job of it right now, that they are very fair minded, very reasonable in the way they administer penalties on violations and deal with offences under the acts. That may very well be; I am not here to challenge whether or not they are doing a good job. However over time, situations change. A few years ago we had a Mulroney government that was very arrogant. We may have a Liberal government that becomes more arrogant or we may have some new arrangement in the Parliament of Canada in the years ahead where ministers and departments overstep their bounds.
The amendment is not criticizing the current administration. It is not a criticism of the Department of Agriculture. It is not a criticism of the minister's officials. It is ensuring that in the future the criteria will be very public, that no one could be biased in their determination of whether a violation would follow the AMPS and compliance route or go the court route, perhaps based on someone's politics, on which part of the country they live in or on some other unreasonable criteria unacceptable to Canadians.
The minister must set out a criterion to determine the differences. This minor amendment would ensure that happens. It would ensure the AMPS and the compliance agreements would have a reason for introduction. If the department decided not to go the AMPS route or the compliance agreement route and decided to take the matter to the courts, to the justice system, we would know the criteria on which the decision was made. It is a more open, transparent way of performing one's responsibilities.
I urge the House to accept the amendment. It certainly is not partisan by nature; it certainly is not unreasonable. Therefore I ask for the support of all members.