Finance committee  I've been at the tribunal now for seven or eight years. I've posed that question to myself throughout that period to try to predict our workload for the coming year, and we are never very successful. At the beginning I thought it followed the business cycle; therefore, when thing

Finance committee  We do a great deal of training in-house, not only of the staff but also of the members. We have a constant review process, in which we train our staff and members on aspects of our mandates.

Finance committee  Well, I don't think it is.

Finance committee  It was established in 1989.

Finance committee  No, I think it was in response to the government's desire to bring together a number of small tribunals. There were three: a customs tribunal, a textile and clothing board, and a tribunal that dealt with dumping issues. Then after the FTA, we were also given the mandate to hand

Finance committee  I'm afraid we don't break it out that way. We do it by cases. A case can involve one country or a multiplicity, but we don't break it out by geographic area. The only geographically related type of case we have concerns the special safeguards for China, which came as a result o

Finance committee  I would say there are two or three areas. One is the steel industry, in which we've had many cases of dumping and subsidy complaints from the Canadian steel industry in past years. We have also had a large number of agricultural complaints.

Finance committee  The most recent is the complaint on grain corn from the United States. It was a dumping and subsidy complaint. We've had potatoes, apples, raspberries, garlic—quite a salad. We've done quite a bit of work on textiles in the last few years as well, because the Minister of Finan

Finance committee  I'm sorry, on a yearly basis?

Finance committee  As I said, we've had three textile references from the Minister of Finance in the last two years, one that was particularly broad because it touched all the textile chapters of the tariff and touched on maybe 570 or 580 tariff lines. We also have a standing reference that he se

Finance committee  I don't think it's possible to answer it very quickly.

Finance committee  Once again, it depends entirely on what kind of case we're talking about. If it's a dumping or subsidy case, the CBSA has already determined that there is a percentage of a margin of dumping or a degree of subsidy, and that's expressed in percentage terms. If we find injury on th

Finance committee  It's the Canada Border Services Agency. So it will be an additional tax imposed on imports of that particular product. That's automatic.

Finance committee  It's not retroactive beyond the reach of the complaint--in other words, when the complaint is filed. So the moment the Canada Border Services Agency finds that there is dumping or subsidy, they will impose a preliminary duty, if we find that there is preliminary entry.

Finance committee  No. It doesn't reach back.