International Trade committee  Yes. The way it works is that once there's a licence and all of the players on the chain are licensed, the relief flows immediately, so they simply aren't having to pay the duty and taxes. If we find out after the fact through verification, through audit, that they have broken th

International Trade committee  I'll speak quickly to it, and then I'll ask Alex to add something. This is more his specific domain, in the sense that he was one of those officers earlier in his career. They tend to be accountant types in the way that a CRA auditor is—not always, but they tend to be B.Com. acc

International Trade committee  I think there's a little bit of a difference that I need to clarify here. When I spoke in my remarks about the time frames being shortened, that was in reference to the processing of the duty relief program and the drawback program. That's people who are looking for relief either

International Trade committee  We're looking at the whole advance monetary penalties regime in the trade area, including the SIMA duties, to make sure they are providing the deterrents they are intended to provide. On the first part of the question, we haven't had yet.... I should back up. The SIMA investiga

International Trade committee  The penalty really depends on the nature of the activities. There are penalties for late accounting and there are penalties for making errors in classification. There's a whole gamut of them. The penalty depends on the type of misclassification or activity, but the maximum, at th

International Trade committee  I believe it was upwards of 60 personnel.

International Trade committee  So far we've hired 10, and those are all investigators. We were able to hit the ground running with staffing. Staffing in the government, as you can appreciate, takes a while. We have 10 in the door already, and we have processes under way to bring in more.

International Trade committee  We don't have a specific unit dedicated to that function. As of yet, we haven't had any complaints initiated by the industry. What we have is a team that is able to undertake all the various forms of investigative activity. I should say that your point about cheating is quite l

International Trade committee  The team that is new is 10 people strong right now. That is in addition to our initial resource base. I have to be clear with the committee; it's not dedicated to the new authorities. That additional team of people will give us the ability to cover all of the authorities, includi

International Trade committee  Thanks for the question. I'll answer the first question in terms of the new money. The new monies go to having 40 new officers. It is for the Special Import Measures Act activities that we perform, as we're part of the trade remedy system that Patrick outlined. That's to hire ne

International Trade committee  I think that question gets at a couple of different areas. The first one, as I understand it—please correct me if I'm wrong—is about how people avoid or evade duties.

International Trade committee  They can misclassify them. They can, as you say, say that it's only this much or it's from this country. When we have a measure in force as a result of our investigations and we're applying duties to imports from a given country of a given product, we have the ability to identify

International Trade committee  In terms of the surtax, for the first two months it was hovering around $230 million. We're still refining the numbers as we speak. However, presently, from what we can tell from the data, the trajectory of the trend line that we saw in those first two months is remaining on the

International Trade committee  A surtax is a different form of duty. It's not a customs duty, but it is a duty, and it is eligible under the duty relief and drawback programs for relief.

International Trade committee  Yes.