Mr. Speaker, as the Bloc Quebecois representative on the Standing Committee on Industry, I am pleased to take part in the debate on third reading of Bill C-20.
The position I present today has been drawn up in conjunction with the hon. member for Mercier, who also sits on that committee. As many are aware, she has analyzed the matter in great depth and looked at every aspect of this bill, which as a number of hon. members have admitted, is a highly complex one and not very accessible to the average citizen.
Let us recall that the purpose of Bill C-20 is to amend the Competition Act and to make consequential amendments to other acts, yet all those who have spoken on it have focussed on deceptive telemarketing. Why? Because Bill C-20 contains a number of technical proposals which would not particularly fascinate the general public, with the exception of the ones on fraudulent telemarketing, because telemarketing is a sign of our times and a timely topic.
We are becoming aware of the increasing frequency of fraud in this area, not only in Canada, but pretty well everywhere else in the world. Now that there is cut-rate long-distance calling, telemarketing can be done across borders.
For the Liberal government, this bill offers an opportunity to pull a fast one, to cover up one more incidence of interference in provincial jurisdictions, those of Quebec in particular. We have our own Civil Code and the Government of Quebec has already put into place a number of legislative and regulatory means, the Office de la protection du consommateur in particular, to protect the consumer from this type of abuse.
Voting against this bill puts us at risk of being seen as opponents of any regulation of fraudulent telemarketing, something that already affects thousands of people who are not well-off, the elderly in particular.
Voting for Bill C-20 means that we are making radical changes to the Competition Act, and in our opinion the consumer will suffer as a result.
I believe a number of MPs have fallen into this trap, with the possible exception of the NDP members. For that I congratulate them. They looked at the interests of consumers in establishing their position. I thank them for supporting most of the amendments we have proposed.
To avoid having to make an impossible choice, the Bloc Quebecois proposed amendments such that any progress in the control and criminalization of deceptive telemarketing would not be to the detriment of other aspects of competition.
As usual, the Liberal government has declined to support them, probably so that its representatives would not look like they were remiss. I again pay tribute to the support of NDP members.
I will quickly review the various motions. Yes, we are in favour of a legislative framework for telemarketing activities so that the reputation of this kind of commercial activity does not suffer because of a few dishonest individuals.
To that end, we think that Bill C-20 should revert to section 52 of the present Competition Act. Although at first glance the amendments contained in Bill C-20 appear minor, closer examination reveals that they represent a major change in the scope of the Competition Act.
The criminal provisions in section 52 would now apply only to representations that were false or misleading in a material respect—in this regard, I would point out that there has been no legal definition of what is meant by a material respect—, but which will now have to be proven to have been made knowingly or recklessly.
Is such a provision evidence of any real desire to have this legislation protect a swindled consumer? It means that the requirements for establishing guilt are no longer the same. How are we going to tell the elderly that, even if they continue to be badly served by this law, there is ultimately nothing we will be able to do, because it will often be impossible to prove that the false and misleading representations were made knowingly and recklessly? Will a lie detector be used to determine whether individuals' intentions were bad or whether they were perfectly aware of the consequences?
In a telemarketing operation, for instance, the bosses may know, but do the employees? These are sometimes large outfits. At this level, the case law on similar provisions in other legislation shows that it is very difficult to prove.
When it is impossible to prove the intent to mislead, the person who intended to mislead may not be cleared, but they are not charged and there is no follow-up. This is a serious and significant problem. Legislation has to be good. We know it has to be fair and equitable, but it must also be enforceable.
We think this law will be hard to enforce, since it involves intent. It is paradoxical. The focus on intent is a bit of a snow job, since in practice it is just about impossible to prove somebody's bad intentions.
Bill C-20 permits judicial authorization for unapproved interceptions of private communications in the course of an investigation in cases of conspiracy, bid-rigging and deceptive telemarketing. This opens the door a little more to electronic bugging. The issue here again is intent. When it is thought that an individual is guilty, more sophisticated bugging is carried out.
There is some contradiction in the fact that the bill permits the competition bureau to have this powerful investigative tool while it decriminalizes many of the offences under the act, in order, it appears, to lighten the system. They want to decriminalize these offences so they can impose fines, which are not specified in the bill but will no doubt be spelled out in the regulations.
I note that the new commissioner—since the director of the competition bureau will now be called a commissioner—can, on his own, determine whether an individual must appear in court and set a 48 hour time frame. Within this period, businesses can reach an agreement with him. This is another aspect we cannot accept: the considerable powers given the new commissioner.
We also wanted to include the Internet in the provisions of the law to avoid its becoming quickly outdated. We were told that the Internet is less interactive and therefore people contacted can easily cut short communications.
There is, however, one thing I do not understand. Does false and misleading information that causes an individual to buy a product become excusable because it is transmitted on the Internet? Unfortunately, by rejecting the inclusion of the Internet in the scope of Bill C-20, the Liberals are preventing this bill from being enforceable or effective.
I must, however, state that I did note some degree of receptivity on the part of the parliamentary secretary at the report stage with respect to our amendments. I hope he was sincere about the possibility of bringing in corrections with future legislation, and I believe he was.
When one thinks that the standing committee spent half its time last year focussing on the Year 2000 bug, it is difficult to grasp that no thought has been given to the Internet, which is going to be more and more a part of everyone's daily life.
The hon. member for Portneuf, a specialist in computers and all telecommunications matters, has just been telling me that, according to his information, 30% of Quebec families, and probably of Canadian families as well, are already connected to the Internet. This is already a reality.
Some people may think the Internet is a complicated affair that requires costly computers and gadgets, but my colleague also told me that a person can use a little box that costs about $400 to hook up to a phone line, and then access the Internet through the television set. That is the way of the future. I know that the millennium bug is close at hand, but I think that all the problems associated with the Internet should have been addressed.
We wanted to balance the power Bill C-20 gives to the director of the competition bureau. In the bill as it stands, only the future commissioner may ask the tribunal whether someone engaged or is engaging in reviewable conduct. That is a lot of power for one person. In the past, people could file complaints and the final decision was left to the tribunal.
Now, more power is being given to the director of the competition bureau, who will now have the title of commissioner, and he, and he alone, will decide whether or not it will go to the tribunal. We think that this is leaving a great deal of power in the hands of one non-elected individual. We are not questioning his competence—that is not the issue—but we feel this leaves a lot of power in the hands of one person.
I now know why the Liberal government wanted to take this route. It wanted, of course, to protect its own interests, which is fine, but it also wanted to acquire greater powers, as I explained, over Quebec in particular, which, as people know, has a civil code, unlike the other provinces in Canada, and an agency to protect consumers with respect to such things as telemarketing.
Like members of the New Democratic Party, we think that the reason the government and Liberal members are introducing this bill has very little to do with their concerns about consumers. We think that competition should be at the heart of this bill, and we do not think that it is. That is why members of the Bloc Quebecois will be voting against the bill. It needs a lot of improvement.
We are also unhappy that all the amendments we proposed were rejected. The Liberal member who just spoke, and his colleague as well, was pleased that, after trying for months, apparently, he managed to convince the Liberal majority to pass his amendment about whistleblowers. We supported it too, but we see, and this is sometimes a bit discouraging, that the government is very reticent, even intolerant. It almost never passes amendments from the opposition parties, not just from the Bloc Quebecois, purely so that it can give the impression that it has anticipated everything, that it has analyzed all aspects of a bill and its consequences. But we do not think this to be the case, quite the contrary.
It is odd. The Liberals in opposition swore they would throw out the free trade agreement, because it was worthless. We know what happened. The free trade agreement was kept. The same thing happened with the elimination of the GST. In the words of the Prime Minister—Quebeckers will not have any trouble understanding—he talked of scrapping the GST. However, nothing happened.
I recall as well that the Liberals said they would not be going after the disadvantaged. They blamed the Conservatives for doing just that. I recall a letter from the Prime Minister, when he was the leader of the opposition, which expressed his horror at the treatment by the former Conservative minister, Mr. Valcourt, of the unemployed with cuts to unemployment insurance. However, we saw what they did later on. They made more cuts; they went even further. They paid the price, in the Maritimes, for example, as we know.
Today, however, the Liberal Party has left these concerns far behind. It too used a miracle marketing approach to permit certain businesses to profit at consumers' expense. However, the Liberal government can prove that it honoured its promises knowingly and without concern for their consequences.
This is why the members of the Bloc Quebecois will oppose this bill, whose objective was laudable, nonetheless.
The bill's lack of clarity will make it hard to enforce and, ultimately, prevent it from truly protecting the interests of consumers.