Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to speak to the bill and to welcome all members back after a long, hard, working week in the ridings. I enjoyed the opportunity to spend the week in St. Catharines and I worked pretty hard on making a couple of announcements with respect to the environment.
Today I welcome the opportunity to participate in the debate on Bill C-454, An Act to amend the Competition Act. I listened closely to my colleague about the positions with respect to the non-competition act, which is a pretty complicated bill. It has a number of aspects to it and I will address a couple of them in my remarks today.
First, Bill C-454 contains a provision that would allow consumers to seek restitution for harm they may have suffered as a result of deceptive marketing practices.
Second, the bill would alter the administrative monetary penalty, or the AMP. It is a scheme for deceptive marketing practices. This would be done by increasing the maximum amount of financial penalty that the Competition Tribunal may impose for deceptive marketing practices and by providing for an additional penalty to remove any profits for that activity.
I will begin with the issue of restitution.
Bill C-454 proposes to allow the Competition Tribunal to order a company that has promoted a product through false or misleading advertising to pay restitution to the consumers who purchased that product.
However, the Bloc bill actually gives very little guidance as to how this process would work. In fact, the only direction that the Bloc thought to provide was to instruct the Competition Tribunal to appoint an administrator to manage the restitution fund and process consumer claims. In fact, the proposed wording is extremely broad and vague and could actually cause more harm than good. The language in the bill says that the amount of the restitution is to be distributed “in any manner and on any terms that the court considers appropriate”.
The problem with the Bloc's “throw the ball in the air and maybe we'll get it into the net” approach is that it severely lacks the precision necessary for legislation that actually underpins Canadian business and international competitiveness. I would hope that, in the course of this debate and at committee stage, we will obtain more clarity as to how exactly this proposed restitution scheme would actually function.
For the moment, there are a number of questions that stand out for me.
For example, the issue of unclaimed funds needs to be addressed. There would almost certainly be unclaimed funds every time restitution would be ordered. Not every affected consumer would be aware of a judgment in his or her favour nor would every affected consumer be able to prove that he or she actually bought the product in question. Then there is a good chance that some consumers would simply not bother to pursue their claim, in part, if it is only for the small amount of, say, a few bucks. However, even a few dollars multiplied by thousands or tens of thousands of people, or perhaps more depending on the product, could quickly, as we see, become a great deal of money.
What will become of these funds if they are not claimed? Obviously, such money could not simply be returned to the offending business because that would actually counter what the bill is trying to accomplish. Hopefully, the Bloc has thought through its political rhetoric on this and will be able to answer this important question because I assume that everyone would want to fully understand the answers to these questions.
The second matter that I will address today concerns a provision within Bill C-454 that would allow for increased penalties for individuals and businesses engaging in deceptive marketing.
From a justice perspective, we on this side of the House are in full agreement. When there are serious crimes that require minimum sentencing, we will always be in support.
The current maximum penalty for individuals is $50,000 for a first order and a maximum of $100,000 for each subsequent order. Bill C-454 proposes to raise these amounts to a maximum of $750,000 for the first order and a maximum of $1 million for each subsequent order.
For corporations, the current penalty is a maximum of $100,000 for the first violation and a maximum of $200,000 for each subsequent order. The provisions contained in Bill C-454 would actually replace these amounts with a maximum of up to $10 million for the first violation and a maximum of up to $15 million for each subsequent order.
Bill C-454 also proposes to give the Competition Tribunal the ability to order a second penalty in addition to the one described above. This second penalty appears to be intended to take away profits generated by the deceptive marketing practices.
The nature of these provisions with two separate penalties raises a few questions. First, I would find it useful to get some explanation as to how and why it was decided to propose two types of administrative monetary penalties. What are the reasons for adding this extra layer? Why is a single penalty not adequate? It is not clear to me why they would both be needed.
It would also be very helpful to hear exactly how these two penalties relate to each other. For example, could the Competition Tribunal order the second penalty only after there had been an order for the first one? If the second penalty could be levied on its own, could the tribunal do this in all cases or only in some cases? Has the Bloc actually thought through these issues?
Finally, there is also the issue of how or even whether the restitution scheme I described earlier relates to these penalties. Is it the intention of this bill to have all these provisions apply at the same time? Again, there are a number of questions that do not seem to have any answers within the context of this very complicated bill.
There may be answers to these questions but the Bloc did not answer these essential questions within its legislation. Putting forward half-thought through policy for the sake of some weak political rhetoric is not the right way to go about this. It is my hope that we will get the answers to these very important questions as deliberations on Bill C-454 continue.
The Competition Act is a very complicated piece of legislation. Likewise, Bill C-454 is lengthy and complex. A number of substantive policy questions arising from this legislation, such as implementing “price gouging” or “price regulation”, are provincial matters. I find it interesting that the Bloc raises time after time the issues it faces from a provincial perspective and yet, within the context of this bill, actually surrenders some of that provincial responsibility.
These provisions could be potentially damaging to supply management and should make members wonder whether this is just political wrangling rather than sound legislation as is required for the amendments to the Competition Act.
I trust that during committee stage there will be a complete and thorough review of this bill and that the federalist parties will actually protect the jurisdiction of the provinces because it seems that in portions of this bill the Bloc is not prepared to defend provincial jurisdiction on portions.