Finance committee  It's a two-year delay.

Finance committee  Yes. There are actually two clauses that talk about delay. The prohibition against further orders that you see in the first paragraph of clause 1 is the two-year period. It's saying that if you've imposed safeguards, you have to wait two years until you impose them again. Under that, there's an exception that says that if you've had your safeguard in place for fewer than than 180 days, you have to wait only one year.

Finance committee  Yes.

Finance committee  There's a reference in the Canadian International Trade Tribunal Act to those provisions, so it's just making a consequential amendment to remove that reference.

Finance committee  Yes.

Finance committee  There are two ways, I guess, we can address those issues. There may be a product that falls under one of the broad product categories that we would be looking at, but perhaps there's a particular item in there that's not produced by a Canadian producer. For some of the products where perhaps trade remedies have already been in place, we were already aware, through previous processes, of some of these products, and they could be removed from the scope out front.

Finance committee  Canada doesn't have a lot of experience with safeguards, so I don't know if we can say what's typical. I would say that certainly if we are in a situation with provisional safeguards, we would largely be driven by that 200-day time frame during which those occur. I think we would certainly want that process wrapped up before the expiry of that 200-day period.

Finance committee  With the surge analysis, that is a little more straightforward. It is looking a little bit more quantitatively at what imports look like and whether they've increased in absolute terms, as well as relatively, compared with what the market is or what Canadian producers have been selling.

Finance committee  Yes.

Finance committee  Yes, there were certainly some issues that came up during the provisional safeguards with ensuring that there was still a situation that was relatively predictable and workable for people who do still need to import steel. Provisional safeguards previously were imposed as tariff rate quotas, so a certain amount could come in without any surtax.

Finance committee  Provisional safeguards can be imposed for a maximum of 200 days. That's because of—

Finance committee  That's correct.

Finance committee  When it's referred to the tribunal, the time frames are actually built into that reference. We can make them as long or as short as possible, because the provisional safeguards were in place for a maximum of 200 days, and 175 days was given to the tribunal to report back in order that the government would have its report before the provisional safeguards expired.

Finance committee  I don't think we should assume that we think there's anything wrong with the CITT report or any of the findings it came up with. It was looking at a particular period of investigation, a particular moment in time, and did its analysis based on that. I think the intent here is to be prepared for changing circumstances.

Finance committee  Yes. Nothing is being changed from what's laid out in the CITT Act or the customs tariff with respect to the conduct of the CITT's inquiries. What happens in such cases is that a reference is made to the CITT requesting that they undertake the inquiry. The terms of it are set out there.