Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak today to Bill C-19. The government has decided to proceed by committee report in order to consider the bill more thoroughly. I think this will be a good opportunity to verify whether parliamentary reform has actually produced results. I think that referring the bill directly to committee will permit it to study the bill more broadly and make it much more general than it was.
We just have to look at the report of the committee on industry from a few years ago. The committee had gone through the Competition Act and made a lot of recommendations in order to make it complete and reflect the new reality of competition on the global market and what we are dealing with.
Unfortunately in the bill tabled by the government, 16 recommendations in this parliamentary committee's report, prepared a few years ago, were not implemented. I hope when we are at committee stage that we will meet witnesses and be able to expand the proposed amendments to the bill. There are things that need to be added.
Of course, there are the recommendations on the table, which are in the bill, and we approve them. We will vote for referring this bill to the committee. However, it seems important that we be able to broaden the debate.
I will give just one example. In the committee report, recommendation No. 3 said that the government should empower the court with the right to impose administrative penalties on anyone found in breach of section 75, on the refusal to deal, section 76, on consignment selling, section 77, on exclusive dealing and market restriction, section 79, on abuse of dominant position and section 81, on delivered pricing.
Of these recommendations, the government only agreed with the one relating to abuse of dominant position. The approach in the committee report was really much more comprehensive and general, and we do not find it in the current bill.
During the study in committee, I hope that we will be able to add to the bill. This is not simply consideration at second reading, where we agree on the principle of the bill before referring it to the committee to try to improve it in detail. Instead, we want it to be referred to the committee to broaden the study of it. I think that many people would be interested in testifying in order to bring about much more thorough changes.
In this sense, I wanted to give an example that affects us all, namely, what we have experienced in recent years concerning the price of gas. I remember that the Standing Committee on Industry held hearings where representatives of the oil industry were called in to justify price increases. Finally, it came to the conclusion that it could not really prove that there was collusion. However, it agreed that the commissioner of competition should have enhanced powers. This is not in the bill.
The then commissioner of competition, Mr. von Finckenstein, said:
While the Bureau's mandate includes the very important role of being an investigator and advocate for competition, the current legislation does not provide the Bureau with the authority to conduct an industry study.
The commissioner himself recognized that the legislation did not provide adequate authority to get to the bottom of the matter. He also said that if the legislation was not amended, a neutral body should be created at least to make a thorough examination and permit investigation in the industrial sector, without collusion having to be proven first.
I would have liked to have this type of argument in the bill before us. In the end, this bill seems to go along what big business wants, because it had feared the set of recommendations would require it to treat the consumer with much greater respect. That is not to be found in the bill as it stands right now.
If, in committee, we can manage to give the bill more clout, and have it deal with more issues, I think we will have done a good job.
As to the oil companies, it seems that every time they have been the subject of complaints under the Competition Act, no charge has been laid. Maybe this is because there was no case for an charge, but it is also obvious that the competition commissioner does not have all the tools he needs to do his investigative job properly.
When we are presented with arguments such as the increased cost of gasoline, the instability in Iraq, the hard winters, taxes, a new one crops up every time to justify the price hike. So we have trouble analyzing the situation in depth.
With the hearings all held, and all the testimony heard, we thought the government might have been encouraged to correct the law to allow an in-depth investigation. This has not been possible so far. The commissioner himself acknowledges that the Competition Act lacks backbone. We are in the process of examining amendments to that act which the government has proposed.
A Liberal committee even addressed the matter in 1998 and admitted the lack of competition in the oil and gas industry. It stated:
However, the committee also believes that the wave of mergers in the past ten years has made the industry overly concentrated, and the normal interplay of supply and demand cannot explain the wide price fluctuations.
A number of recommendations made by the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology were not heeded by the government. They were intended to provide us with an amended act that would bring about certain improvements. A number of other recommendations are still waiting in the wings for the action they deserve.
For example, there was a recommendation for “questions of law to be considered by all the members sitting in a proceeding.” That was one of the recommendations. There was also a group, numbers 12 through 15 which stated:
That the Government of Canada amend the Competition Act to create a two-track approach for agreements between competitors. The first track would retain the conspiracy provision...for agreements that are strictly devised to restrict competition.... The second track would deal with any other type of agreement between competitors in which restrictions on competition are ancillary to the agreement’s main or broader purpose.
Hon. members can see that this is a major hang-up, a place should be changed. It would have given the Competition Bureau more leeway to properly deal with everything relating to conspiracies that might not be so much a criminal matter, yet create complications for proper application of the principle of competition.
So, we have this type of recommendations. The government did not follow through on several other ones. The government may say that the bill before us today improves somewhat the current act, however it could have done a lot more. It is hard to understand how the government can say that it took the time to analyze the work of the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology advocating an indepth rework of the bill. Today we only have some of the amendments we would have expected to put more teeth into the Competition Act and give the Competition Bureau the tools it needs to investigate and give consumers what they want.
While markets across the world are evolving, it would be very important to provide the Canadian Competition Act with relevant tools. For instance, last year in California the oil sector was taken to court for alleged price fixing.The current act does not give the Commissioner of Competition the means to be present in court and follow the case closely to see whether it might have any implication in Canada.
There is a whole series of examples showing that the government bill will indeed improve the act, but not to the extent it should. The Bloc Québécois will support sending the bill to committee. In committee, Bloc members will push not only for the bill to be improved in its clauses but also to broaden the scope of the reform. We need a bill that truly reflects the reality of the market place in this 21th century.