Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise to participate in the debate on Bill C-20, an act to amend the Competition Act. It is important to recognize what this piece of legislation is intended to do and then to assess the changes which have been proposed in that light.
The purpose of the legislation has been, for a long period of time under whatever name the legislation has had, to ensure that the Canadian marketplace is as competitive as possible in the interest of consumers. It ensures that consumers have a wide range of products available at competitive prices in circumstances in which sellers do not use practices which are unacceptable, misleading and deceptive to attract sales.
It is in the interests of consumers to ensure that various assertions about the quality a product or a service might possess, about the price at which that product or service might or might not have been sold in the past and about various qualities of that product or service be truthful. In that way consumers know what it is they are comparing so they can make efficient and sensible consumer decisions.
It is also plainly in the interests of competitors to ensure that all businesses within the marketplace abide by the same rules and pursue honest, clear and open business practices. If a competitor is able to generate a sale as a result of a misleading practice, then competitors who are adhering to proper and honest business practices will suffer losses accordingly.
It is in both the interests of consumers and the business community that we have effective competition policy. In that regard the legislation approaches these practices in the marketplace in both criminal and non-criminal ways. It deals with conspiracy, bid rigging, discriminatory and predatory pricing, price maintenance, misleading advertising, with which many people are familiar, and deceptive marketing practices.
The courts have the power in those areas to impose fines, to order imprisonment and to issue orders to stop the practice in question. They also have the power to issue interim orders to stop the practice in question and to administer a wide range of remedies.
In addition there are issues which at first blush are not so close to home to consumers but which have a significant impact covered by the act. These primarily deal with restrictions on competition, mergers, the abuse of a dominant position in a marketplace, refusing to sell to someone because of some of their selling practices and essentially dealing with the more macro issues rather than the ones that affect consumers precisely.
This legislation and legislation before it sets out the rules and regulations of the marketplace. This piece of legislation can be divided into two or three segments.
The first deals with deceptive telemarketing. With the growth of telecommunications and the reduction in price of telephone services, by using the telephone it is now very easy and inexpensive for a marketer in one province or country to sell to a buyer in another country or province. As a result we have seen a growth both in legitimate and illegitimate telemarketing. In order to protect those who pursue this activity legitimately, it is necessary to deal with those who bilk millions and perhaps billions of dollars from Canadian consumers. It is also important to protect those Canadian consumers.
This bill should be applauded in that it sets out much more explicitly what the crime of deceptive telemarketing will be. If enforced effectively, the legislation will serve to reduce the abuse of Canadian consumers across the country.
As every member of the House will know, the kinds of people who have been the target of telemarketing are very often those who are most vulnerable in society. Seniors, at least in my estimation, are trusting. They generally believe that people are telling them the truth because that is the way they conduct their affairs. If the evidence is correct, and I believe it is, they tend to believe what telemarketers tell them. When they are offered the $10,000 prize, if they would only send $500, $600, $700 or $800 to cover taxes and other incidental expenditures, they believe they will in fact receive the $10,000 prize.
To many of us it is an incredulous idea, but we know from the evidence that maybe hundreds of thousands of Canadians and perhaps millions across North America have been taken in, in this way, and for significant amounts of money. I have met many Canadians who have been tricked in this way.
Part of the bill is very significant. We have done little about this criminal activity, this defrauding of Canadian consumers, mostly older Canadians, to the order of $4 billion. Making something a crime is only part of the story. We have to be sure that we can enforce the sanctions which flow from making deceptive telemarketing a crime.
To date there is a very small police department headquartered in North Bay, Ontario, called Operation Phonebusters. At last count it had one person who knows the area intimately, Staff Sergeant Elliot. He has done a terrific job on this question. Many of us in the House will have spoken to him and to his very small staff attached to that operation in North Bay. They are dealing with a criminal activity which is costing the most vulnerable Canadians perhaps $4 billion a year.
Let us match that with the resources we spend across the country, province after province, to deal with drivers who speed, with people who break windows and with street crime. The mismatch of resources attached to and applied to this kind of criminal activity is so obvious that we have to ask the solicitor general and the government to make sure they commit adequate resources to deal effectively with this matter. It is not enough to have a small joint OPP-RCMP force in North Bay to try to deal with these cases across the country.
Without that commitment the legislation will mean very little to ordinary Canadians who have been bilked and are likely to continue to be bilked if the kinds of people that engage in deceptive telemarketing, those who are not likely to stop just because the House says it will be a crime, carry on in the way in which they have been carrying on.
We absolutely need a commitment from the government. Maybe the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Industry will be able to commit today to ensuring that the legislation is effectively enforced. It is important to recognize and to support the government in acting on the telemarketing fraud that exists.
Much of this fraud is centred in Montreal. A small number of people are using very sophisticated telephone and marketing techniques across the country into my province, my district in Saskatoon—Rosetown—Biggar, on a regular basis, making billions of dollars off other Canadians.
We must ensure that Quebec authorities effectively deal with this question even when a loss has not occurred in the province of Quebec. We have to make sure we co-ordinate activities across the country to put an end to this kind of activity.
Let me summarize that point by saying that I support the government in its measures in this regard. I hope it will commit resources to make sure that the legislation is adequately enforced and that Canadians are adequately protected.
We need to do a little work on informing consumers. Last year, faced with complaints in my riding, I provided a telephone security tip brochure which people could put by their telephones telling them what not to do and what they might do to protect themselves from telemarketing scam artists.
Let us see some commitment on the part of the government to enforcing the legislation. Although it is late, I think we should congratulate the government for introducing the legislation.
On another part we have some serious questions which arise as a result of what I indicated in the beginning. The legislation is designed to ensure we have a competitive marketplace in Canada. Separate from issues like health care and education which we and Canadians believe should fundamentally be largely outside the markets and administered in a separate way in the public interest, things should be bought and sold in the marketplace in a competitive environment. The actors in the marketplace, the sellers and the providers of goods and services, should also act in a competitive way.
We can also support dealing with changes to trade practices and misleading advertising to provide the government with a number of different ways to approach this problem. Making something criminal is not the only way to attack an issue. That has been made clear. We need a mixture of criminal, civil and administrative measures to ensure that consumers and competitors are best protected.
Let me come to the point where I have some difficulty, the merger part of the legislation. Canada has one of the weakest anti-merger pieces of legislation in the world. Of any developed country we have not treated the question of larger mergers seriously. Only one has perhaps ever been seriously called into question.
We are now faced with merger mania, with big banks merging and with big insurance companies merging. I believe we are just at the beginning of merger mania. Many of our large corporations will be telling us that it is in their best interests to have less competition in Canada so that they can compete in the world economy.
I am sure members have heard in their ridings that Canadians simply do not buy that argument. They do not want big mergers to take place. They do not want the Royal Bank and the Bank of Montreal to merge. They do not want big insurance companies to merge. They do not want their fellow Canadians to lose their jobs and they do not want to have less competition. They want to have more choice, not less.
What does this merger legislation do with regard to these questions? Essentially it does not do anything. It leaves our whole structure, our whole process, pretty darn weak. It does not ensure that we will have serious review of bank mergers, insurance company mergers or any others.
Does anybody seriously think that the merger between the Royal Bank and the Bank of Montreal is anything other than a foregone conclusion? Is there any expectation across the country that because of the power of those two big banks and our weak merger legislation this merger will go ahead? We would be foolhardy to think this was not essentially a foregone conclusion. We can work as hard as we can to stop it because Canadians do not want it. Many of these mergers are not in the public interest.
Because of the legislation, because of the approach the government takes and because the approach of the Conservative and Reform parties and those parties that tend to support big business, there is unlikely to be anything significant in this regard without a major change of heart.
We see The Bay and K-Mart merging. Is anybody going to ask any questions about whether it is in the public interest? I do not think so, from those three parties I mentioned. Indeed the public interest seems to be the last thing anybody cares about in pro-business parties with regard to mergers.
Canadians want better, deserve better and should have better. They should have merger legislation which puts proposed mergers to the test. It would require those who want to merge to show why it is in the interest of Canada that they do so.
Nothing in the bill requires any accounting by the Bank of Montreal and the Royal Bank. We know jobs will be lost. The presidents of those two organizations have made sure they will not lose their jobs, but the cashiers in the branches in our communities will not be there and the branches will not be there because of the merger. That is not good enough.
Passing legislation of this sort is an opportunity to beef up the legislation so the interest of Canadians can be protected, so we have an economy that is getting more competitive and not less, and so we have an economy that acts in the interest of Canadians and not just in the interest of large banks, large insurance companies and large retailers. It is unfortunate that the government did not take the opportunity to do what it philosophically says it wants to do, that is enhance the competition inherent in Canada's marketplace.
Perhaps some would find it odd that it has to be a social democrat who asks why we do not focus on a competitive marketplace. Why do the Reform Party, the Tory Party and the Liberal Party say they do not give a damn about competition? They would rather have these big mergers taking place. They would much rather have a policy of deregulation, privatization and monopolization, which is exactly what has happened in Canada over the last few years.
It is time we had merger legislation that is actually in the interest of Canadians and not just in the interest of those who want to merge and consolidate their own power, their own prestige and their own ability to control the rest of us.
There are good parts in the legislation. I applaud the government's move on fraudulent telemarketing. It is very important to commit adequate resources to ensure these crimes can be effectively policed and Canadians can be effectively protected.
However, on the merger part, which in an odd way is kind of combined with the telemarketing legislation, much more could have been done. The government deserves significant criticism, as do those who support this weak merger regime that we have in Canada, for not taking strident measures to make sure we have a more competitive economy in Canada rather than a less competitive one.