Legal news and trends for Canadian in-house counsel and c-suite executives
Issue link: https://digital.canadianlawyermag.com/i/103643
Are there areas of legislation or new regulations that will bring added challenges to your department in 2013? F Daniel Marion Vice president, general counsel, and secretary Thales Canada Inc. Montreal Is your organization exploring opportunities to expand business internationally or domestically? We have three main divisions in Canada: defence, aerospace, and rail signaling. We have had big wins in India 24 • F eb r u a ry 2013 INHOUSE SANDRA STRANGEMORE or 2013, I foresee further enhancement and enforcement of the Corruption of Foreign Public Officials Act here, and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in the United States, as well as the U.K. Bribery Act. There is also one for Quebec — Bill no 1, the Integrity in Public Contracts Act — which has come about specifically due to what's going on in Quebec with public contracts. It is new legislation where every potential bidder to government-related entities in the province would have to be assessed and approved by the securities commission. The criteria are quite stringent and can be applied even outside Canada. All of this together will have quite an impact. As Thales is a French company partially owned by the French government we, like most European companies, have had issues in the past and we have tried to get away from that image as much as possible. We have embedded into every type of policy and process a very tight anticorruption process. In every country the management has to be educated every year, as well as the sales force and program management force in foreign countries — our code of conduct is very strict. We have been lucky so far. We are one of the tops in the world in terms of ratings for anti-bribery. We are also looking at the enforcement of intellectual property protection abroad. We are doing quite a bit of work in Asia and the Middle East and will be doing more, and we have to take measures with respect to IP. In 2012, we put a big emphasis on patent filing and in 2013, we will probably file foreign filings from the ones we filed in Canada and the U.S. After that we have to enforce the patents we have filed. We increased our patent filings four-fold in 2012. As well, I expect issues on transfer pricing and withholding tax to be an issue because the tax authorities both provincially and federally are very aggressive. We are audited all the time for various periods and they really don't leave until they find something.