Mr. Speaker, I want to say a few words on Bill C-14, the Canada Shipping Act and amendments to the Shipping Conferences Exemption Act.
When the bill was tabled, the minister's press release stated that it would update, modernize and streamline Canada's marine law and that it would delineate new roles for the Department of Transport and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.
The minister also indicated that the bill would allow the entire marine community to operate in a manner that is safer, more efficient, environmentally sound and responsive to the needs of Canadians in a global community and a global economy. These are laudable aims that we in this party can support.
The proposed amendments to the Shipping Conferences Exemption Act are purported to generally streamline the administration of the act and to promote greater competition in the marine shipping industry.
Shipping conferences of course are groupings of shipping lines that are essentially cartels. The word cartel brings to mind OPEC, an organization dedicated to fixing the volume and price of oil on world markets. Similarly, shipping conferences collude on prices and services and claim to prevent wild fluctuations in same as regards the marine shipment of goods. The conferences claim that the benefit to our importers and exporters is stability in the shipping industry.
In general, most stakeholder witnesses at the transport committee felt that Bill C-14 was generally an improvement over the current situation. However, just about every group of witnesses had one or two complaints about one clause or another. As an opposition critic and a layman in the field, one is faced with saying yea or nay to a complicated piece of legislation where the average witness says that he or she is in favour of 95% of the bill but that he or she is strongly opposed to clause x or y.
One major change that the bill brings in is to put all commercial vessels under the jurisdiction of the Department of Transport and all pleasure craft under the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.
The Department of Transport will now have to create an automated small vessel registry as small commercial vessels under 12 metres in length used to be handled by DFO. One hopes that this will not result in a bureaucratic nightmare for small commercial vessels.
One concern that has come up is that the boats are not always pleasure craft or commercial vessels, depending on usage. In many rural areas of Canada, the family pleasure craft is sometimes rented out to say a sports fishing or outfitting company if there is a large increase in clients. The vessel that met the pleasure craft standards yesterday may not meet the Department of Transport rules for commercial vessels tomorrow. This will preclude rural people from making a few extra dollars if the transport department rules are strongly enforced. There are implications down the road for ordinary people that may not be evident at first glance.
One witness asked the committee “What if a pleasure craft gets into an accident with a small water taxi?” Whose jurisdiction is it to straighten out that mess, the Department of Transport or DFO?
There are millions of pleasure craft in Canada and this bill would allow the minister to make regulations on standards of construction and equipment carried on boats. A number of witnesses expressed concern that the government may require pleasure craft to be upgraded in order to be licensed. This could lead to financial hardship for many small boat owners, especially pleasure craft owners, whose boats were bought many years ago when standards were different or not as high as they are today. Are we going to run into a situation that sees people being refused a licence unless considerable money is spent on a small boat?
I am given to understand that federal legislation requires that a boat with an engine larger than 9.9 horsepower be licensed, and that includes many boats in Canada. At present we have a paper only licensing system where a form is filled out that goes into a file cabinet and nowhere else. If a boat is licensed, carries a number and gets lost or stolen, how do police trace it? At present they cannot look it up on their computers because the only copy of the licence is in a file cabinet in some government office halfway across the country. As a result, thousands of small boats in the country are not licensed at all, and because the boat may be at a lake near a cottage, no one in authority really knows it exists.
The solution of course is a computerized licensing system, but I wonder if the general public out there is ready or willing to get into a new bureaucratic system on boats that has been taken for granted for years. I realize that boat traffic in some of the lakes and waterways in the mainland of Canada can be very dense during the summer months and tighter controls are necessary. In rural Canada, however, such a new intrusion into peoples' lives may not be welcome. My problem of course is that the bill raises more questions than it probably answers.
Bill C-14 claims to be progressive in that enforcement mechanisms would allow for administrative penalties in addition to the usual court proceedings. In theory, this would allow the minister to take action against lesser infractions without dragging someone into court and maybe giving him or her a criminal record. That could be very good.
However, in court one must be found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt and one has the protection of the charter of rights. In an administrative penalty, the onus on the minister to prove guilt is far less onerous. Just about all the witnesses commented that they disagreed with the administrative penalties because one would not have full access to due process as one would have in a court of law. I do not know if that is good or bad. I guess we will have to wait and see.
At the beginning of my remarks, I mentioned that the amendments to the Shipping Conferences Exemption Act were purported to encourage more competition in the shipping industry. The exemption in the act's title refers to exemption from Canada's competition laws which would normally outlaw cartel activities. In particular, the Minister of Transport claimed that the bill would bring our legislation more in line with our American trading partners. The shipping conferences generally agreed but people with goods to ship, the Canadian Shipping Council for instance, did not. We will wait to see where that leads as well.
Shippers want to be able to enter into confidential contracts with individual shipping lines so as to get the lowest price for shipping their goods. This bill would allow them to do so, but there is no clause requiring the owner of the ship to keep the details of such a contract secret from other shipowners in the conference.
In the United States a shipper can enter into such a confidential contract but in the U.S. the owners of the ship and the members of the conference are expressly forbidden to share the details of the contract with fellow conference members. The change in our rules would be a step toward the American rules but falls a bit short of them.
The shippers wanted a dispute settling mechanism in the legislation but were also disappointed. As well, they wanted a sunset clause ultimately phasing out the cartels over a number of years, and they lost that battle as well.
All told, the shipping conference legislation changes little that would help our exporters and importers. The bill merely makes some administrative improvements to the status quo.
I am given to understand that changes to Canada's shipping laws have been in the works for many years and there have been extensive consultations with many stakeholders. I am reluctant to vote against the bill if there has been that kind of wide consultation. However, I have grave reservations about the implications for small pleasure and commercial vessels. I fear that in due course the public may be in for more bureaucratic entanglements than they currently expect or want.