Madam Speaker, it is an honour to speak to Bill C-18 which deals with a number of inequities that address, what most of us in the House would say is truly one of the finest police forces in the entire world, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police with its storied history.
All of us know that the men and women who serve in the RCMP do most of their heroic work in silence, far away from our eyes, but they do it with honour, with courage and with a degree of professionalism that other police forces could only hope to emulate.
I have had the honour and privilege of working with members of the RCMP in emergency departments as they have brought in people. I have seen their work in faraway places, such as in the wartorn country of Sierra Leone. People, not only in our country but in other countries, have stood in awe and have complimented the work done by the RCMP in faraway places and within our own country.
Members of the RCMP have a very difficult job to do. They deal with people in times that can be entirely unpredictable. At times, their work can be extraordinarily dangerous and they put their lives on the line to serve and protect us. I think all of us owe them and their families a debt of gratitude for the work they do day in and day out to protect us here at home.
This particular bill, as I said before, addresses a number of inequities dealing with the pension system that relates to our RCMP. It falls in line with a previous initiative we started with the superannuation pension plan for the Canadian Forces members back in 2003 or 2005, somewhere in there. This is a just thing to do for our RCMP and is long overdue.
The bill deals with three particular areas. First, the bill would support Parliament's 1999 intention to expand existing provisions for the election of prior service for RCMP officers. Currently, members of the RCMP pension plan can transfer credits for prior service with a police force that was absorbed by the RCMP, with the Canadian Forces, with the Public Service of Canada or with the House of Commons but, under the new provisions, eligible members could elect to purchase credits from other Canadian pension plans, such as a municipal or provincial police force.
The second area that is extremely important is the pension transfer arrangements in the amended RCMP Superannuation Act. It would allow members to increase their pensionable service by directly transferring the actuarial value of the benefits earned under a previous plan to a new plan.
Last, this bill contains other amendments that would clarify and improve the eligibility aspects of the service for the member.
This is a great opportunity to talk about crime and punishment and deal with criminal activity in Canada. The government frequently says things about crime and punishment, which, on the surface, may sound good, but in fact are actually ineffective. What the government needs to do is employ smart initiatives that will protect our civilian population from harm and from criminals. It also needs to employ things that actually work to prevent crime in our country. I will give some examples as we go along.
Before I go on, I want to know why the government, if it truly wants to support the RCMP, rolled back the wage agreement that the Prime Minister himself announced with great joy before the election. Why did he stand and say that he would give the RCMP a wage increase that would enable RCMP members to achieve parity with other police forces in Canada? It is a good thing to do and we would support that.
However, the RCMP received a cruel Christmas present in December when the government unilaterally decided to eliminate that wage increase, which was a devastating slap in the face for RCMP officers. It told them that the government did not respect them because it did not honour an agreement it had made with the RCMP in good faith.
The downstream implications of this are considerable, because it is going to affect the attrition rate of RCMP officers. The RCMP serve a good chunk of the territory of my riding of Esquimalt--Juan de Fuca. Because of this decision and the inflexibility within the human resources management of the RCMP, officers are leaving the RCMP for the provincial forces. There is an increasing demand being placed on the RCMP because of organized crime gangs and the Olympics. Things are affecting the ability of the RCMP to attract and retain new members. This is a very serious problem. It must be addressed quickly. This is affecting the ability of the RCMP to do one of the prime objectives of any government, which is to protect the population from harm.
That central responsibility of the government is being negatively affected by virtue of neglect on the part of the government and what happened in December with respect to the wage rollback. This is negatively affecting the ability of the RCMP officers to do their job. The reduction in members puts more pressure on existing members. This affects the officers' stress level and contributes to officers going on stress leave or leaving the force altogether. This is something that cannot be tolerated. This is something that Canadians cannot have.
If this situation is not rectified, then the core responsibility of the government to protect the citizens of Canada will be damaged. It is being damaged. I implore the government to work with members across party lines to deal with the central issue. The government must listen to what the RCMP is saying and what the RCMP officers on the ground are saying. They will give the government the straight goods. They will tell the government what is happening on the street. They will tell the government what is affecting them. They will tell the government how to improve the challenges they have and how to implement solutions that will be effective in dealing with those challenges, whether they be personal human resources issues or their ability to execute their duty to serve and protect us.
For heaven's sake, the government must listen to the RCMP officers, not only those who are tasked to represent them, but get into the trenches and listen to the officers. They will tell the government what they need and what can be done for them.
The government also needs to address the issue of IT tools. Criminals involved with organized crime and gangs use new IT tools such as the BlackBerries which many people have, not for good but for malice and crime. The government needs to listen to the RCMP and give the officers the legal tools to monitor, with warrants, the communication that is taking place among members of organized crime gangs which enables organized criminals to circumvent the existing laws for their own benefit, which clearly is not in the interest of Canadians.
This is a very serious issue. The laws of our country have not kept up with the current IT tools. They are mostly in the hands of law-abiding Canadians, but they are also in the hands of a small group of organized crime gangs that are profiteering at the expense of Canadians. I implore the government to work with the RCMP and other police forces in Canada to bring forward legal changes that will enable the force to monitor the communications tools that organized crime gangs are using with impunity.
The next issue regards looking at a public defender system. We have a public prosecution system. California uses a public defender system. It was shown that there were equivalent outcomes between a public defender system and the situation we have now. There was no change in the ability of the accused to have a fair trial. It saved money and resources and improved the efficiency in the execution of justice in Canada. The implementation of justice to make sure that the system was moving in a streamlined, effective way was improved so that the accused could have a fair trial in a reasonable amount of time.
Right now it takes a long time for the accused even to get to trial. Cases are being dropped. People who allegedly have committed crimes are not even getting their day in court. These cases are being dropped. That is not justice. We are seeing a very serious problem in our court systems now.
As I mentioned before, there is the issue of the prosecution of crime, dealing with those who are criminals, but there is a huge gap in what we need to do in terms of prevention. The government likes to talk about its tough on crime agenda, but it is missing the boat in truly serving Canadians and enabling us to have a safer country. It is not addressing crime prevention. In order to prevent crime we have to deal with the social determinants of health.
In my community of Victoria, a good chunk of the people who are being prosecuted have drug problems, psychiatric problems, or what is called dual diagnosis which means they have a drug problem as well as a psychiatric problem. If we do not treat their underlying problems there will be a revolving door of recidivism. To simply throw the book at these people without dealing with their underlying problems is a serious issue.
On the prevention side I have mentioned the head start early learning program which started in Ypsilanti, Michigan more than 30 years ago. This program has been adopted by a former colleague of ours in New Brunswick and in a smattering of places across the country. This program has proven to reduce youth crime by 60%. If I said there was a program that saves $7 for every $1 invested, that produced a 60% reduction in youth crime, that enabled children to have better outcomes in school, that enabled less dependence on welfare and social programs, would that not be a wise investment? I think so, and most Canadians would think so too. Why on earth does the government stick its head in the sand? Why does it not work with the provinces to adopt an early learning head start program for children? It is not difficult or complex.
We are trying to do this in my riding. We are working together with a great social worker, Mia Grenier, and a municipal police officer to try to implement this program in a school that has poor outcomes. Only a handful of children graduate from high school. At any one time one-third of the kids are not even in school.
We have to bring the parents into the school for a couple of hours every week and get them and the kids to work on issues such as proper nutrition. A can of Coke and a bag of potato chips is not a good breakfast. I will discuss getting kids active later. We want children to know the importance of literacy. Taking kids to the library does not cost anything. We have to let them run wild in the library so that they can explore the wealth of information and knowledge, the world that is available through books. We must encourage kids to do that, encourage them to take out books to read. Literacy is a cornerstone in improving outcomes for children later on.
On the issue of physical activity there is some very interesting new research. Some of the journals on neuroscience reported that if kids participate in hard aerobic physical activity for 30 to 40 minutes a day, they were able to focus better. They were able to study and do their homework better. The performance of those children in school improved not just a little, but it improved dramatically. This was a school that had poor outcomes. The theory is that 30 to 45 minutes of good aerobic physical activity a day stimulates the front part and other parts of the brain that are responsible for focus and learning. Physical activity can dramatically improve the ability of children to focus.
Another issue is that the time children spend in front of a television or playing Xbox or other computer games has a negative impact on their ability to focus and to learn. It also has a negative impact on their health. For the first time in history, the current generation of children will have a shorter lifespan than their parents. Childhood obesity is epidemic. One of the easiest ways to address that is to get the kids physically active every single day for 30 to 45 minutes. They should exercise at their own pace, but it is extremely important that they get their heart rates above 130 beats per minute. That will help to deal with the issue of childhood obesity. This will have a positive outcome in terms of future demands on our health care system. Our health care system is already overburdened and the demands will increase.
I say that because in the future, the burden of chronic disease is going to have such a significant impact. It is going to break the camel's back in terms of the ability of any government in our country to provide the resources necessary to enable Canadians to get timely access to quality health care wherever they live.
There has to be a long-term solution. One of the easiest ways is to encourage kids to be physically active early on. The lessons learned will last them throughout their lifetimes as adults and will give them a much better chance to lead healthy lives. If we do that, the impact of cardiovascular diseases and cancers in our society will be reduced as people get older.
Regarding the other issue of drug policy, the government's tough on drugs approach is one which we have seen south of the border and we know it simply does not work. It does not serve anybody, least of all our society, to have a system where the government wants to put low-level drug pushers in jail. These people are pushing drugs, which is not a good thing; it is a bad thing, but they push drugs to try to make money to finance their own drug problems. They have substance abuse issues themselves. The problem is not drug pushing. That is a symptom of the underlying problem that the individuals actually have a substance abuse problem.
People would be shocked to know that the government is actually taking legal action to reverse a decision in my province of British Columbia, which said that the government has no right whatsoever to deprive individuals from access to programs such as the Insite supervised injection program in Vancouver. This is a harm reduction strategy that works to save lives. The courts in Vancouver stepped in and said that the government could not close down Insite because people would die. It would cause harm and kill people, not to put too fine a point on it.
Instead of saying, “We have examined the facts and the science by Dr. Julio Montaner and the great team at St. Paul's Hospital. We found that the science supports programs like Insite and we are going to enable communities across our country to have supervised injection sites”, the government took the route of trying to block this decision.
Better than Insite though is the NAOMI project, the North American opiate medication initiative, where an addict will receive a narcotic under medical supervision. What that does is fascinating. There are addicts who go out on the street and basically steal more than a quarter of a million dollars a year in goods, which they sell for about $50,000. They cause all kinds of harm in the lives of law-abiding citizens in order to get the money to pay for their drug addiction. If the medical system were allowed to have programs like NAOMI more widely available, the addict would go to a physician to receive a narcotic. That would sever the tie between the individual addict and the criminal activity he or she is engaging in. It would also sever the tie between the addict and the real beneficiaries of the status quo, organized crime gangs.
Organized crime gangs love the status quo. They are profiting from the current situation in Canada. The war on drugs, to be blunt, benefits organized crime. It also, by extension, benefits those who are trying to kill our troops in Afghanistan, because the Taliban and other groups are generating funds from the sale of illegal drugs.
I see my time is up, Madam Speaker. I wanted to get into victims issues and other issues in terms of cigarette smuggling, but I hope I will have a chance to do that in the questions and answers segment.
