Finance committee  Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman. I am pleased to appear before this committee and to answer your questions. My name is Pierre Gosselin, I am chair of the Canadian International Trade Tribunal. I am accompanied today by Mr. Sandy Greig, Director General of the Research Branch. Befo

Finance committee  No, what I said was that the Minister of Finance can refer cases involving an inquiry on tariff matters, and all other safeguard types of inquiries come from the Governor in Council or can be filed directly by the interested parties. Also, inquiries of a general economic nature c

Finance committee  Well, let me be clear. We have to know which kind of case we're dealing with to determine who can do what. If we're dealing with private matters such as complaints of dumping, complaints of subsidy, or complaints under procurement, those are private, and the parties involved file

Finance committee  First of all, the legislation provides for that. The government can support the domestic industry's complaint that imports are damaging and they therefore ask us to undertake an inquiry to determine whether there is injury.

Finance committee  If it's a procurement, they come directly to us because that's a private matter, or in a dumping case, let's say a particular industry complains that imports from a particular country or group of countries are unfairly being sold in--

Finance committee  First of all, the tribunal does not collect or charge fees for hearing a case. So the short answer to your question is that it's the government that picks up the tab for the costs of operating the tribunal.

Finance committee  The private parties will cover their own costs to come before the tribunal, yes. So both sides will be represented, just like in court, and we will adjudicate the case.

Finance committee  Yes, normally represented by the Department of Justice.

Finance committee  Not by us.

Finance committee  That's right.

Finance committee  It means that under most of the types of cases we handle, we have statutory deadlines that cannot be exceeded. To give you an example, in a dumping case we have 120 days in which to hear the case, arrive at a decision, and publish our statement of reasons; the same is true in a s

Finance committee  No, this is from beginning to end. This is from the day it's filed.

Finance committee  We control our own procedures. We set the time limits for them to provide evidence, to respond to the other party's evidence. We set the time available for a hearing, etc. It's a very tightly controlled process.

Finance committee  No, we do not.

Finance committee  No. Unfortunately, that's not a very good measure, and we are struggling with this to try to arrive at some way of measuring this, because you can have very simple cases or you can have very complex cases. Recently we had a case involving an agricultural product where we had 25 d