Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to talk about corruption and bribery. It looks like this will be a discussion that we will have all day. We will have this discussion before question period, during question period, after question period and, I dare say, this is not a conversation that will go to go away any time soon.
As I said in my previous interventions, we generally support this bill. The various aspects of the legislation are actually pretty good ideas. We hope the bill will go to committee sooner rather than later, that it will not suffer the fates of a potential prorogation and that we will have an amendment to the Criminal Code, which would enable better prosecution of companies that find themselves in difficult situations with respect to allegations of corruption and bribery.
Canadians are thoroughly fed up with reading about their companies being involved in allegations and convictions of bribery.
I bring to the attention of my colleagues several recent instances. Regrettably we have about one of Canada's premier companies, SNC-Lavalin, which has been banned from bidding on contracts with the World Bank for the next 10 years because of convictions regarding bribery and corruption. Not only has it lost its reputation, it has had to fire a number of its senior executives. It has had to undergo the humiliation of being investigated by the RCMP and other international police forces. Its stock has been hammered, which always gets the attention of shareholders. Niko Resources was fined $9.5 million for bribing a former energy minister also in Bangladesh. Griffiths Energy International was fined $10.3 million for bribing the wife of Chad's former ambassador to Canada.
I do not care to carry on with this laundry list, but these are very difficult times for some of Canada's premier industries and they know they have a problem. As the member for Ottawa Centre indicated, they are actually asking for enforceable transparency initiatives and those transparency initiatives hopefully would go to help this.
Not only is the reputation of the individual company hammered, not only is its stock hammered, but the industry itself is hammered. The vast majority of companies that wish to operate by internationally recognized standards of corporate social responsibility are also getting hammered and they have difficulties getting out their message that they operate ethically, transparently and in a corporately social responsible fashion. Therefore, the company is being hammered, the stock is being hammered, the industry is being hammered and, in addition, we have our national reputation being hammered.
The parliamentary secretary pulled out some quote and talked about how our nation still had a good reputation and things of that nature. That is not due to anything that the Conservatives have done, but I think he is living in a bit of a la-la land because we actually have had a reputational decline and that is very difficult to recover. Those who conduct these surveys have noted that the loss of reputation is very difficult to reverse. The government has made some efforts. This is one of the efforts.
The government has tried to repair the reputation in the extractive sector with the corporate social responsibility counsellor. After four years, and I do not know how many millions of dollars, two cases or three cases gives the appearance of doing something without actually having done anything at all. I do not know if the government has actually taken our decline in reputation seriously. This damage to our reputation is a serious issue.
The Globe and Mail published an article stating that Canada was at the lowest category of countries with little or no enforcement when it came to not initiating new measures, but applying the bribery standards set out in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The issue is not the absence of legislation but the application of the legislation.
I am perfectly prepared to admit that this is complicated law to apply. It requires a lot of resources and we all know these resources are being stretched. Nevertheless, it seems that other nations take it far more seriously than we do.
By contrast, the U.S. has prosecuted more than 200 companies and individuals, many of them “a veritable who’s who of the corporate world”, according to Peter Dent, a partner at Deloitte Touche who sits on the board of Transparency International Canada. Then it goes on to list a number of cases, including Backfire Exploration Ltd. in Mexico, Niko Resources in Bangladesh, Nazir Karigar in India.
The numbers tell the tale. There have been 227 cases prosecuted in the United States, 135 in Germany, 35 in Switzerland, 24 in France and in Italy and the United Kingdom 18 and 17 respectively. We have two, yet we are the nation with the greatest number of companies operating in the world in the extractive sector. We have the greatest number of companies and the best stock exchange in the world. This is where the world comes to do mining right. We have the best geologist, lawyers, financing and accounting. We have it all here and yet apparently we have no corruption whatsoever. There have been two cases prosecuted in the last number of years.
I would like the government to accompany its initiative, which is a good initiative, with real resources and the support of the sunshine bill, Bill C-474. It would provide the evidence base for the prosecutions under this initiative by the government. Bill C-474 would require each company, 180 days after its fiscal year ends, to file with the government statement with respect to each project and what payments were made to facilitate that project. Therefore, within 180 days, the governments, shareholders and NGOs would know. Obviously, management would already know because that information would be readily available to it. Then a light would be shed on that.
If I am a police officer contemplating a prosecution against a company that has “allegations” against it, the first thing I would do is look at the record of filings for company X, Y or Z to determine if it filed the previous year or the year before and what it had listed.