Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to make a few comments on the proposed changes to Bill C-23, which now comes to us by way of the red chamber.
First let me say that the amendment made by the other place seems to be minor, so I plan to comment on some of the larger aspects of the bill. I will start with some of the long overdue changes that the bill makes in the powers of the Competition Tribunal and the commissioner as they relate to air competition.
I had hundreds of constituents stranded when Canada 3000 collapsed. As members will recall, Air Canada's new subsidiary, Tango, had just been launched and the Competition Bureau was on the verge of slapping Air Canada on the wrist when Canada 3000 went under.
I am not confident that the minor baby steps the bill takes in the right direction will result in better or cheaper air service in Nova Scotia. I am encouraged by the new carriers that say they will be braving the skies to compete with the reality of the virtual and quite brutal monopoly held by Air Canada in Atlantic Canada, but I fear and I know that many of my constituents also fear that we will see a repeat of the Canada 3000 fiasco.
Bill C-23 does nothing to stop Air Canada from using its new subsidiaries Tango or Jazz, or whatever new dance step name it comes up with, to simply undercut new competitors and drive them out of business by having the deep pockets to survive an expensive fight. I fear that in a year we will back where we are now with travellers in Atlantic Canada paying very high prices for poor service provided by an Air Canada monopoly.
I wish that the government and the Senate had come up with real regulations that would have stopped Air Canada from effectively killing competition. I wish that the Minister of Transport had a vision of air service in Canada that went further than the office of Robert Milton. Bill C-23 does nothing to tell me that he does.
On another change that Bill C-23 makes, I congratulate the government. The section dealing with protecting our seniors from unscrupulous direct mail and telemarketers' offers that lie to people as a way to steal their life savings is long overdue. The problem is not unique in Canada, but our laws seem to have been well behind the times.
As the Library of Parliament brief on the bill correctly notes, in June 2001 the U.S. senate permanent subcommittee on investigations heard testimony from victims of and experts on telemarketing fraud. Almost all of them described Canada as a haven for such fraud. The committee heard that phone scams swindle more than $35 million every year from Americans, mostly seniors, and although apparently some fraud originating in the U.S. is aimed at Canadians, it is only a small fraction of the amount aimed at Americans.
Experts praised the U.S.-Canada working group on telemarketing fraud that has reportedly caught a few of the perpetrators. Project Colt was formed in April 1998 to co-ordinate efforts among the RCMP, the U.S. customs service, the FBI and various arms of the Quebec police. Since its inception the project has returned $12 million to victims. Law enforcement officials on both sides of the border met in Ottawa in June 2001 to discuss these and other related issues.
The creation of an offence of deceptive notice of winning a prize will help protect poor and vulnerable people. It is easy for those of us here who make a good salary and who have a huge infrastructure to support us in our work to simply warn people that if someone is promising something for nothing they should not believe it, but there are so many Canadians who live with poverty, who are seniors with inadequate pensions, who have a lack of education and struggle with minimum wage jobs or live with disabilities. They live in a society where culture is based on success, with happiness equalling wealth. When we look at TV or read the sage opinions of our opinion leaders, who are all business leaders because pro-business leaders own all our media, we see that the only goal in Canadian life is to be wealthy, that this is how Canadians would be happy.
This culture leaves those who are poor desperate to become rich, not only so they can get better things, but because it is a culture that says if a person is poor, that person is a failure. Therefore when someone who is poor gets a notice in the mail falsely saying they have won money, the joke is extremely cruel.
When these notices are being used to try and take money from those who already have too little money, then it should be a crime. The creation of this criminal offence in the bill and the mandating of officials to proceed with the prosecution of this crime as a criminal and not an administrative offence is a very good thing.
One last section of the bill I wish to comment on is the increase in international co-operation to investigate competition offences. With globalization becoming a greater reality, we need to have international codes of conduct that transnational corporations have to live by.
Too often companies are using differences in laws and differences in the way that records are kept to escape basic responsibilities, like the paying of a fair share of taxes as good corporate citizens, protecting the environment, and treating workers safely and fairly. I would hope that the provisions of the bill that deal with requests by foreign states for assistance in gathering evidence in Canada required for prosecution of competition offences in a foreign country are a first step by the government to creating rules for the international corporate community.
Using the bill, with references to agreements for foreign states, Canada may enter into an agreement if the Minister of Justice is satisfied that the laws of the foreign state are similar to Canada's; that the confidentiality laws of the foreign state are similar to Canada's; that the agreement will contain provisions for circumstances where Canada can refuse assistance and applicable confidentiality provisions.
As well, the agreements will contain undertakings that the foreign state will provide similar assistance to Canada. Information will not be used for any other purposes. Information will be returned or with consent destroyed. All information will be confidential. The Minister of Justice will be informed if there is a breach of confidentiality. The agreements will contain a termination provision.
The act further states four different judicial orders by which evidence may be gathered for use in a foreign proceeding. These orders are: search and seizure order, which is search and seizure of the evidence; evidence gathering order, which is the examination under oath of a person; a virtual presence order, when a person's virtual presence is requested by video link or similar technology; and finally, lending exhibit order, which requests the loan of an exhibit admitted as evidence.
Let us see these forms of international co-operation as a beginning in the real regulation of all international corporate activity.
I hope that the next step the government brings forward is a Tobin tax, an international environmental protection standard that international companies must respect and enforce in order to have truly international enforceable labour standards.