Yesterday, Members of Parliament debated Bill C-294 as it came out of Committee and returned to the House of Commons for 3rd Reading. I am pleased to share that the Bill passed 3rd Reading and is on its way to the Senate.
This Bill was sponsored by Jeremy Patzer, Saskatchewan MP from Grasslands and NAEDA Canada has not only supported this Bill but have lobbied our MPs to support and pass it as well. We have partnered on this effort with the Agricultural Manufacturers of Canada (AMC) and special recognition goes to Honey Bee Manufacturing for their involvement in this initiative.
The key purpose of the Bill is to align Canada’s Copyright Act with the same interoperability language in the U.S. Interoperability refers to the connectively of an implement to a powered unit. With the recent USMCA discussions, we noticed a grey area where Canada’s language was not as clear as it needed to be. Changes were needed to continue the decades old practice in our industry where two pieces of farm equipment, manufactured by two different OEMs, could continue to “talk to each other” through electronics or hydraulics. Without this change, one manufacturer could go as far as digitally locking out another manufacturer’s implement through a Technological Protection Measure (TPM), or creating a proprietarily hydraulic system. This practice is against the law in the U.S. and we felt it was important for our industry to be under the same rules North America wide.
Another reason why NAEDA Canada got involved in this effort was to ensure that dealers could continue to offer the widest range of products to their customers.
Now that the Bill has passed 3rd Reading and is on its way to the Senate, we are fairly confident that this will be passed into law later this summer. We will provide further updates as progress on the Bill continues. But in the meantime, if you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me at jschmeiser@naeda.com