Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Purchasers are men and women who consult with clients, prepare specifications, send out tenders, negotiate with suppliers and get the right product at the right place, at the right time and at the right price. Sixty-eight hundred purchasers in Canada belong to the Purchasing Management Association of Canada. They progress through courses and job experience to achieve five levels of purchasing expertise. The top level is called certified purchasing professional. This title means that the person has passed a series of exams and has satisfied a national board that he or she is fully qualified to carry out all purchasing functions with the highest degree of expertise.
The purpose of this bill, Mr. Chairman, is to recognize in the Northwest Territories the designation of certified professional purchaser, called CPP, and to create an offence for the misuse of the designation. It will protect the public against misuse of the designation and give the public a way to judge the competency, education and ethical practice of a purchaser. Large amounts of corporate funds are spent by purchasers.
Purchasers are also responsible for the expenditure of large
amounts of public funds. There must be some degree of assurance that these funds are being spent wisely and in the corporate or public interest.
If I may, Mr. Chairman, I would like to give an example. Say a person comes to town looking for a job; he is nicely dressed and speaks well; people believe in him; he says he is a certified purchasing professional. Maybe he even has some good looking diplomas. So the co-op hires him to do their purchasing for sealift. Because they believe he is a certified purchasing professional, nobody watches his work closely. He places an order for 10 snowmobiles that are to be shipped by sealift. He orders them by model number only, and accepts the delivery schedule of the supplier. Only five machines meet the sealift deadline, and he does not have them inspected until they arrive in the community. The machines do not meet the specifications with the options initially ordered. These machines are rejected by the client and returned to the co-op at their cost. The co-op now has a very upset client. It has to pay for five machines sitting on a dock in Montreal. It has extra machines in inventory, and the client has no machines at all. The phoney purchaser has cost the co-op a lot of money through his incompetence, but they have no legal stand for charging the person with an offence.
This bill is needed in order to protect the interests of all employers by recognizing the CPP designation and standards of performance it establishes. Without this legislation in the NWT, anyone can hold themselves out as a CPP, and the only recourse would be for the association to write them a letter asking them to stop. Unless this legislation is put in place, any unscrupulous person could say they are a CPP and cause harm to their employer or the public through reckless agreements with suppliers or unnecessary expense.
Six provinces have protected the CPP designation through legislation. They have agreed that the Purchasing Management Association's code of ethics and enforcement procedure are of the highest calibre. They have also recognized that the association is recognized by its 53 districts and branches and is the single largest group of both private and public sector purchasers. I believe it is important that this government adopt this legislation, particularly since our widespread communities and the state of communications sometimes make it difficult to check thoroughly on someone's qualifications. Thank you.