Finance committee  Thank you very much. Like most other governments, the federal government charges fees for services that provide recipients with benefits beyond those received by the general public. Some examples of these fees include fees for services, such as icebreaking; inspection of cattle

Finance committee  The way the legislation is worded is that if enabling legislation does not already have an inflationary factor in it, a CPI-type of inflationary indicator would be necessary for all fees. In essence, the fee escalator would apply across all fees. Again, some would be under the le

Finance committee  There are some that are statutory, but there are others that are regulatory as well. Quite frankly, even some of the ones that are statutory do not necessarily have a built-in inflationary escalator. This would ensure, again, that as the inflationary costs of delivering those se

Finance committee  On the specifics for each individual set of regulations, I'm not necessarily sure how to answer that question specifically. The point would be that if a regulation might have stated originally that it was set at $5 and would increase at 2% per year, then obviously the fees would

Finance committee  We had finished our remarks. You had left us with a question. We're happy to start with that or with other questions.

Finance committee  To recap, your question was on how we know the departments will be efficient in their service delivery. From our perspective, under the current regime, there aren't necessarily great incentives to be efficient because it's very difficult for departments to raise the fees. From ou

Finance committee  One of the challenges in the user fee or service fee world is exactly the consolidation of the reporting. Currently departments may report on their fees. CFIA, for example, does have a fairly robust reporting that they table as part of the information that goes with their departm

Finance committee  From our perspective, the inclusion of the escalator and tying it to CPI and saying that unless a department has in its own enabling legislation with a built-in escalator, in which case it was set through their legislative process...was basically to say that at a minimum we want

Finance committee  One of the fundamentals under the User Fees Act and under the service fees act is that consultation is critically important in setting these fees. One thing the service fees act does, from our perspective, is first of all include all fees under that gamut, whereas only 18 fees ar

Finance committee  One of the pieces we'll be doing in addition to this legislation is supporting Treasury Board policy. Something we're considering for that framework is to what extent and what actually has to be shared with the stakeholder groups. One of the things proposed currently is underst

Finance committee  On the specific mechanism, I apologize. What's proposed in the legislation is that we would set it to the CPI, and the calculation is articulated in there. I'm not familiar with the exact mechanism of which you're speaking.

Finance committee  It applies just to the government departments.

Finance committee  From the perspective of what's proposed in the legislation, CPI was chosen, number one, because it's a very simple metric as well as something that covers the wide gamut of fees charged, everything from icebreaking down to campsites and so on. The idea of trying to figure out ano

Finance committee  Again, it's important to look across the wide gamut, the thousands of fees. I guess possibly if a department was recovering 100% of the fees and had efficiencies, then the fees could drop down. One way that would happen is through the annual reporting process. First of all, it wo

Finance committee  No. First of all, departments are going to manage it. Departments know, and the rules state, that the fees collected cannot be greater than the cost. If there are significant deficiencies or there is major efficiency or whatever, one of the things that would do is actually trigge