Mr. Speaker, I thank the House for the opportunity to give a final summary of this debate. I want to thank all of my colleagues for participating in the two hours of debate. I am actually a little more enthusiastic about my colleagues on this side of the House than that side, but nevertheless I do appreciate their at least engaging.
I want to commend the member for Lac-Saint-Louis and the member for Hamilton East—Stoney Creek for speaking today. I do want to correct the member for Hamilton East—Stoney Creek. I think he confused me, as the sponsor of the bill, with his esteemed colleague from Ottawa Centre, who has his own very worthwhile bill on the floor of the House.
As he and others have rightly said, this bill is modelled on the Cardin-Lugar amendment to the Dodd-Frank bill. It is about as similar a bill as one could make it given the differences in the jurisdiction, because I did not want to see an unnecessary regulatory burden imposed on Canadian companies that trade exclusively in Canada.
Ironically, Canadian companies that trade both in Canada and the U.S. will be forced to comply on September 1. They will be forced to tell the United States Securities and Exchange Commission what monies were paid, to whom they were paid, the currency they were paid in, and what project they were paid for, so that everyone in the world, including Canada, will find out what Canadian companies paid to secure those concessions, and yet the government continues to resist.
I had occasion to go over the arguments put forward by government members in the last hour of debate, which I found more amusing than anything else. Regrettably, it is not a laughing matter.
The Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Natural Resources has referred previously to “The new mandatory reporting regime announced by the Prime Minister...”. There is no mandatory reporting regime. There are no regulations. There is no law. There is an announcement. That is it. The only time a Canadian company would actually have to disclose the information in Bill C-474 would be when it files its return with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission.
The parliamentary secretary went on to say that “Canada already has a well-established financial recording system...”. There is no recording system. If there were a recording system, we would not have to go through this.
The Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Foreign Affairs recognizes international voluntary guidelines. It cannot be voluntary and mandatory at the same time. The industry is actually quite supportive of the voluntary guidelines.
The same parliamentary secretary then made reference to the CSR's extractive sector and Marketta Evans. She has been in place for, I think, either three or four years. She resigned last year. Her budget was around $1 million a year. She had precisely three cases, none of which were resolved. I do not know how that can be considered to be progress on this particular file.
This month, the former minister of natural resources, now the Minister of Finance, made a big announcement at the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada conference, where he said that if they could not get their game together, particularly the provinces, the government would start the process of initiating legislation on April 1, 2015, more than a year from now. Any legislation he initiates will look a lot like Bill C-474.
As I said, it cannot be both voluntary and mandatory. There is no voluntary aspect. It is actually mandatory.
The government, by its announcement at PDAC, contradicts all of the representations made by the speakers from the Conservative side in the first hour.
This is very serious stuff. Mining companies are having real difficulties these days. It is extremely expensive. The meltdown in shares, particularly of one company in South America, because it did not follow disclosure requirements and did not take corporate and social responsibility seriously, has resulted in a massive multi-billion dollar write-down in its share value and the exit of the chairman of that corporation.
I wish not to be discouraged but I am. The Prime Minister is prepared to blow off the G8, President Obama, Prime Minister Cameron, and Canadians. I regret to say that the industry is desirous of this kind of legislation and the only drag is the government itself.