Bill C-31 (Historical)

An Act to amend the Criminal Code, the Corruption of Foreign Public Officials Act and the Identification of Criminals Act and to make a consequential amendment to another Act

The enactment amends the Criminal Code, the Corruption of Foreign Public Officials Act and the Identification of Criminals Act and makes a consequential amendment to the Canada Evidence Act.
Among other things, the amendments
(a) provide greater access to the telewarrant process for peace officers and public officers;
(b) reform the expert evidence regime to give parties more time to prepare and respond to expert evidence;
(c) allow the provinces to authorize programs or establish criteria governing the use of agents by defendants who are individuals;
(d) authorize the fingerprinting of, photographing of or application of other identification processes to, persons who are in lawful custody for specified offences but who have not yet been charged;
(e) expand the jurisdiction of Canadian courts to include bribery offences committed by Canadians outside Canada;
(f) expand the list of permitted sports under the prize fighting provisions;
(g) make minor corrections to the pari-mutuel betting provisions, delete unnecessary provisions and update the calculation of pool payouts;
(h) update the provisions on interceptions of private communications in exceptional circumstances;
(i) reclassify six non-violent offences as hybrid offences;
(j) create an offence of leaving the jurisdiction in contravention of an undertaking or recognizance; and
(k) delete provisions of the Criminal Code that are no longer valid, correct or clarify wording in various provisions and make minor updates to others.

Criminal Code

[Peter Julian, NDP, Burnaby—New Westminster, BC]

Mr. Speaker, the amendment proposed by the member for Windsor—Tecumseh is before the House for one simple reason. The government withheld information that the committee should have had.

It is very clear that the amendment brought forward by the very learned member for Windsor—Tecumseh comes as a result of a clear violation of committee privilege. His amendment says:

Bill C-36...be not read a third time but be referred back to the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights for the purpose of reconsidering clauses 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 with a view to making any amendments which may be called for as a result of information undertaken to be placed before the committee by departmental officials on November 4, but which the office of the Minister of Public Safety failed to provide before the committee considered the bill at clause-by-clause stage.

The amendment is very clear. Even Conservatives should support it. Why? Because there are broader principles at work.

The parliamentary committee was endeavouring to do its work. It requested specific information. That information was provided by departmental officials and withheld from committee by the Minister of Public Safety. We are not talking about objective partisan information. We are talking about information that committee needed to do its work.

I have before me the letter that was just received. It was forwarded to the ministry a few days prior to the clause-by-clause discussion on the bill, which resulted in the bill we are debating today. In other words, this information was withheld by the government for up to a week and a half. It was only today, after the amendment was moved, that the government endeavoured to provide the information it had withheld.

That is why the member for Windsor—Tecumseh, who has been ranked year after year as the most learned and most informed member of the House of Commons, brought forward the amendment. The government hid information that committee needed in order to make the bill effective in what it endeavoured to do.

In this corner of the House the NDP always does its homework. We always read our reports. We always ensure we are well prepared. The member for Windsor—Tecumseh asked for specific information, and the Conservatives, rather than provide that information to make the bill an effective one, withheld it.

It is not just in the Afghanistan torture scandal that we see the withholding of government documents. It is not just on the Canada-Colombia trade deal. Information has come forward about a study that was commissioned by the Government of Canada. The government will not release it now because it shows that what the NDP has said all along was right, that the Colombia trade deal would not enhance human rights in Colombia but quite the contrary. My colleague from Elmwood—Transcona mentioned the gun registry report. This again was withheld by the Conservatives.

The Conservatives try to hide information. They try to keep information secret. They try to monkey wrench their own Parliament. They were elected as a minority government and rather than try to make government function, the Conservatives try to monkey wrench on every occasion. They try to withhold important documentation, important information, on every occasion. This is just one more example of how mean-spirited the Conservatives are when it comes to parliamentary work.

What did the member for Windsor—Tecumseh and the member for Abitibi—Témiscamingue ask for? They asked for very clear statistics and a summary dealing with the number of indeterminate offenders and the number of offenders subject to the 25 year restriction. They asked for valuable information for committee while it discussed clause-by-clause.

This is not some sort of high school. This is parliamentary business and clause-by-clause consideration makes a real difference on how the clauses are worded, whether the clauses would effectively do their work or not.

Why, for goodness sake, would the mean-spirited Conservative government withhold all that information from parliamentarians and then try to drive the bill through? When the information becomes public, we suddenly realize that these clauses need to be re-crafted, that the information was not provided, that it was withheld.

This is, as I mentioned earlier, not the first time the Conservatives have withheld information. This is systematic. This is a government that holds meanness and secrecy as paramount virtues, but that is certainly not what Canadians want or need. They want to see a Parliament that works. They want to see parliamentarians given the information. They want to see parliamentarians provided with that public information for which taxpayers have paid.

The government and taxpayer money is not some private piggy bank for Conservatives to do with what they may, that they can take government funds, taxpayer funds, and say that information belongs to them. The same way they cannot take the government funds that should be allocated on a governmental basis and put a big Conservative “C” on their cheques to show that it is not taxpayer money, it is not Canadians' money, it belongs to Conservatives.

That sense of entitlement will bring the Conservatives down. It certainly brought them down in New Westminster—Coquitlam. It is why their poll numbers are going down as well. Canadians see, tragically, that mean-spiritedness every day, whether it is the HST in British Columbia and Ontario or the general air of secrecy and mean-spiritedness of the government.

The information was withheld for a week and a half. It was provided to the member for Windsor—Tecumseh just a few short moments ago. Very clearly the committee was unable to get the information it required from the government, information the government possessed. We are not talking about information that was lost. We are talking about information the government had in hand and the Minister of Public Safety said no, that committee would not get this valuable information so it could complete clause-by-clause and have a bill that held together.

It is ridiculous and Irresponsible. There are many terms both parliamentary and unparliamentary that we could apply to this kind of mean-spirited strategy. Most Canadians do not accept the idea that taxpayer funds are Conservative funds, that taxpayer government information is Conservative information only. That is why this amendment is before the House and we will look to get Bill C-36 back to the committee to try to address the inaccuracies in the bill that were established through the government's own mean-spiritedness. I will not say incompetence because it knew full well what it was doing. It is not incompetence, it is mean-spiritedness when it withholds information from a parliamentary committee. It is also irresponsible, but that is the government we live under currently. I believe a lot of Canadians are waking up to that fact. Certainly people in British Columbia are waking up to the fact that the government is not on their side, and I think there will be some changes whenever the next election comes.

The amendment proposes to move the bill back to committee and fix it. When I spoke on the bill originally, I said that we believed firmly in an approach to the justice system that was based on four pillars. One of those pillars is ensuring victims' rights. I have my own bill in front of the House, which the Conservatives refuse to bring forward, that allows for victims' compensation. We believe very strongly in that principle of the public safety system.

There are other pillars too and this is where Conservative approach on crime legislation falls tragically short. It is not just the hypocrisy of bringing forward a bill on Colombia with a government that is inundated with connections to parliamentary thugs, parliamentary murderers and drug lords. This shows the clear hypocrisy that once outside Canada we can deal with anyone, no matter how many drugs they distribute, which hurt kids, or how many paramilitary thugs are out there killing innocent civilians. The Conservatives support that bill, which shows a pretty clear hypocrisy.

However, when we talk about the Conservative approach, it also has to have the pillars of crime prevention. It has to have the pillar of supporting community policing. It also has to have a pillar of ensuring that we have a working court system. Any evaluation of the approach of the Conservatives on crime has to be evaluated, taking those other pillars. This is a smart approach to crime, which the leader of the NDP and members of this caucus have put forward.

What have the Conservatives done? They have cut back and slashed crime prevention programs, even if they know, and we know, that every dollar invested in crime prevention saves $6 later in policing and court costs. It means no victims as well. They have not followed through on their promises for 2,500 police officers and have not even brought in the public safety officer compensation fund. On crime issues, they simply do not have credibility.

[Paul Szabo, Liberal, Mississauga South, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for his contribution to the debate on the amendment to revert the bill to committee so it can re-examine certain clauses, simply because the information was withheld.

The member was maybe a little too kind about how this occurred. It would appear to me that the officials and Correctional Service Canada should have had that information available when they were in committee. I do not understand, for instance, how it could possibly not be available when they are there to do this work in committee.

Then we had a situation where an RCMP report, having to do with the gun registry, was somehow allegedly kept behind by a minister of the crown. Now there is another case where information on this bill is kept behind. Is there a further case where information and documentation on Afghanistan detainees is being held back from committees?

There seems to be a pattern. Would the member care to elaborate on this apparent coincidence?

[Peter Julian, NDP, Burnaby—New Westminster, BC]

Mr. Speaker, there is a systematic pattern of cover ups in that administration.

I know the member for Mississauga South will remember when the Liberals had a sense of entitlement and what Canadians did to punish them. The Conservatives now, in a few short years, have now reached that same level of sense of entitlement, that information belongs to them and them only, that they can cover up and withhold from the Canadian public, the press gallery and opposition members of Parliament important information that is part of what we need in a democratic society to move forward.

We are not Colombia, thank goodness, where labour leaders or aboriginal people are killed. We are in this country and the Conservatives have to respect the democratic foundation of our country and our institutions.

The member is absolutely right. We see a pattern of cover-ups and the withholding of information. That is deplorable and we are going to fight it in this corner of the House all the way.

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Mr. Speaker, having listened with great interest to my colleague's comments, one would think he was present at the meeting of which he speaks. It was a meeting of the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights.

It is very apparent, when one reads the transcript of the meeting, that the member does not know what actually went on. In fact, if he had looked at the comments of his colleague, the member for Windsor—Tecumseh, he would have noticed the member was not sure whether this was an issue of deliberately withholding information or some other delay in providing information to the committee.

Yet the member for Burnaby—New Westminster is suggesting that the minister deliberately withheld information. He is quite incorrect. I would ask him to go back to the record, check it for himself, correct the record and confirm that in fact there is no evidence the minister deliberately withheld anything from the committee.

[Peter Julian, NDP, Burnaby—New Westminster, BC]

Mr. Speaker, that is a very clever attempt to deviate, and I thank the member for Abbotsford for his attempt.

There are two stages about which Canadians need to know. The first stage is in committee where the member for Windsor—Tecumseh asked those valid questions, as did the member for Abitibi—Témiscamingue. It was on November 4 when they asked for that information. It was supposed to go to committee. Then we found out that the information was not sent to committee. It was sent to the Minister of Public Safety, which is stage two.

The member for Windsor—Tecumseh is without reproach, as the member for Abbotsford well knows. He may try to tackle the member for Windsor—Tecumseh, but I will put the credibility of the member for Windsor—Tecumseh against the member for Abbotsford any time. The reason why the member for Windsor—Tecumseh is consistently ranked as the most learned is because he always checks his facts.

There is no doubt the information was withheld from committee and that is deplorable.

[Jack Harris, NDP, St. John's East, NL]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to join in this debate on the amendment by my colleague, the member for Windsor—Tecumseh, related to the operation of this debate at third reading.

The amendment before the House would send the bill back to the Standing Committee for Justice and Human Rights to reconsider clauses 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 because the committee has not been able to do its work.

One of the responsibilities of a parliamentary committee studying legislation is to study the legislation in detail, clause by clause for each and every clause, to determine whether or not any amendments need to be made.

How does the committee do its work? It asks for witnesses. It asks for information that it needs to understand the reason and the rationale for a particular amendment before it can consider it fully. Members of the House in doing their duty asked for this information from the department. We understand that information was available.

I was not in the committee. I would say there is a very good chance that there were at least 290 or 295 members of the House who were not in the committee, because that is the way Parliament operates.

The committee is an agent of Parliament and does on behalf of other parliamentarians the serious work of investigating a bill.

The information that was being talked about is statistical information on the number of prisoners who are in jails, subject to various sentences. It is very important information to have in order for members to be able to understand the necessity or otherwise of the kind of amendments that are being proposed.

I gave a speech yesterday and talked about the number of prisoners we have in our prisons who are serving life sentences and the number of all the prisoners who have served life sentences over the last 15 or 16 years who have been given an opportunity to seek further parole and to in fact get parole. This is important information to have in order to understand the context of the amendments being proposed.

What has happened here is that the government has decided not to make that information available and we are now in the House discussing a bill at third reading, trying to do here in the House the work of the committee without the facts and information before us.

This is not something that should be done in the House. It is something that should be done in the committee. I think the member for Windsor—Tecumseh, who sits on the committee, is proposing a very reasoned and very reasonable amendment, and as my colleague from Burnaby—New Westminster pointed out, the member for Windsor—Tecumseh has a very significant reputation for doing his homework and for being knowledgeable and competent on matters affecting justice issues.

Therefore I have to accept that when this information is asked for to allow the committee to do its work, that is something that I should support.

The government claims to have some kind of monopoly or at least a belief in transparency and accountability. What we are seeing instead is an attempt to manipulate the work of the committee through the control of information.

We saw examples of that, as were referenced earlier, when we had the Minister of Public Safety failing to release an RCMP report relating to the gun registry until after a vote had been taken in the House. This is the kind of so-called transparency and accountability that we are getting from the government, the manipulation and control of information in order to try to influence what the public knows and does not know about the true facts and the reality of something so that the government can get its own way.

I do not think it is something that Canadians want to see in their government. They do not want to be manipulated. They do not want to be told one thing publicly while the true facts are kept hidden or not made available at the right time.

There are other instances of trying to manipulate a committee going on right now with respect to the Afghanistan committee. Information this committee needs in order to do its work has not been made available to it, yet the government wants to bring people in to agree with its political point of view without giving the committee a proper opportunity to have the basic information before it in order to conduct the proper inquiry and to ask the kinds of questions that need to be asked.

The government is insisting on putting the cart before the horse, just as it is doing here, saying we should continue to study and vote on the bill without having the proper information before the committee.

In the case of the Afghanistan committee, they are doing the same thing, saying that we want to hear from a certain individual because we think we will like what he has to say, but the committee will not have the documentary information that is required to properly consider and ask questions of the witness who is to come before it.

This is the kind of thing we have seen in the committees in the past. In fact I recall a couple of years ago, in the lead-up to the last election, when the government had a rule book on how to distort and disrupt the activities of committees, which the Conservatives used to make things difficult to operate. Then, over the course of the summer, they claimed that the committee system was not working and that Parliament was not working, and that was an excuse for them to call an election, which I do not believe the public wanted then either.

They do not want one now, obviously. We have been told time and time again. They did not want one then either, and perhaps they will not want one whenever it comes, but the fact of the matter is that the government has a history of using committees in a way that is contrary to accountability, contrary to transparency, contrary to the full and open access to information that true democracy relies upon.

This motion is not an attempt to delay anything. I am hoping we will have a vote on it very soon this afternoon, unless there are a lot of other speakers. We hope that this bill, as a result of that vote, will be sent back to the committee so that it can actually do its job. That is the purpose of this motion. It is not to delay anything.

This bill does not have any great urgency to it, to my knowledge and understanding. Someone can correct me if I am wrong. I do not see any hands up other than to get some water or assistance from the pages, but I believe that there is no great urgency for this bill. It can be sent back to the committee. The information can be provided. The committee can do its work and send it back to this House. That is something that is moderate and reasonable and should be acceptable to this House, and when we come to vote on that, I hope to find that is the case.

The Minister of Public Safety is the one being asked to provide this information. We understand that it is readily available. It is not something that is any more secret than the report of the RCMP commissioner, which the minister failed to make available before an important vote in this House, which I have to say surprised me a lot.

If the Minister of Public Safety, who is responsible for the public safety of the country and who is responsible for ensuring that people feel safe in their homes and on the streets, has a report from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, our national police force, on an issue that is pertinent to the gun registry and to a vote that was to take place in this House, for him to sit on that and not make it available was shocking to me.

I have been around a long time in politics. I do not know if this is unparliamentary or not, but it was a very brazen act. I do not know if it is unparliamentary to say that. It certainly does not seem to be unparliamentary to do it, if the minister is able to get away with doing that in the face of an extremely important and well-attended vote across this country.

I hope that the actions of the Minister of Public Safety, in suppressing this report until after that vote had taken place and after the publicity had died down, are equally noted by the people of Canada. Suppressing the report that our national police force made available was a brazen affront to the parliamentary process, to an expectation that a government is reasonable, transparent and accountable to voters. For the House to have that evidence in front of it before that vote was taken was important, just as, I would suggest, having the information requested by this committee, promised to the committee, undertaken to be placed before the committee by departmental officials was important. It was not made available. It should be put before this committee, before the bill can come back to this House, for proper consideration.

[Brent Rathgeber, Conservative, Edmonton—St. Albert, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the hon. member from Newfoundland for his participation in this motion to hoist this bill and put it back to committee for further consideration.

As he probably knows, I sit on the committee and I think he needs to understand the chronology here.

If he is not aware, he ought to be aware that the witness in question, Mr. Head, the chief of Correctional Service of Canada, appeared before the committee on November 4. When asked for specific data regarding the faint hope clause, he said it would take a week or two to put it together, because it would involve having to go through a whole number of files.

Clause by clause occurred on November 16. Less than two weeks had passed.

I have said this a number of times today, but the hon. member is a lawyer so I am going to ask him this specifically. If the information was not available on November 16 when the committee did clause by clause, was it not incumbent upon the member for Windsor—Tecumseh to raise his objections then?

If he wanted the information to do clause by clause, he should have asked for it then. He should have asked for an adjournment. He should have kept the bill in committee until he got the information that he thought he needed, rather than raising this point at third reading.

[Jack Harris, NDP, St. John's East, NL]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member asked an important question. As he would know and those of us who have practised law over many years would know, our opponents are not perfect and neither are we. We do not always make the kinds of objections that our colleagues would expect us to make, or make them at the time or the place where our opponents would expect us to make them.

We do have a process here before us. We were considering the bill at third reading. It appears that this information is useful. We have a procedure by which this information can be made available to the committee and we have opportunity, so whatever needs to be done, can be done.

If there was a failure, as my colleague and learned friend, since he is a member of the Bar, has suggested, then we now have a way of fixing that and making sure it does not cause problems.

[Paul Szabo, Liberal, Mississauga South, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the member for Windsor—Tecumseh responded to this earlier and said that in his view, he assumed that somehow all the committee members had just missed the information and that they were sure it had been sent. That was not the case, so it was detrimental reliance, if anything.

There appears to be a systemic problem here, that of the withholding from committees information that they need to be able to do their work. I would have thought that the officials would have come prepared to answer those questions, obvious questions that they have undertaken to provide that information subsequently, such as how many times the faint hope clause has been used in the last ten years. This is so fundamental to the bill and for the consideration of the bill that these are questions that need not be asked; they are automatic.

I would ask the member whether or not he believes that maybe there is little bit more here in terms of possibly a breach of the rules of Parliament with regard to deliberately withholding evidence and information from committees.

[Jack Harris, NDP, St. John's East, NL]

Mr. Speaker, I can understand the hon. member's suspicions. I certainly do not have enough information to make such a charge, but I do believe that the Conservatives have been rushing, hell-bent on bringing before the House as many pieces of legislation as possible to support some political campaign in which they would hope to engage suggesting that somehow or other they are tough on crime and that everybody else in the House does not support their point of view.

If they really believe that this faint hope clause is abused or overused or that it results in some significant problems, then surely we would expect them to bring the evidence to support those beliefs before a committee studying the very elements of the legislation that they hope to change. The fact that they failed to do that smacks of political motivation more than anything else. I agree with the hon. member. The way to correct that is to send the bill back to committee and get the information so the committee can look at it.

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Barry Devolin]

Is the House ready for the question?

[Some hon. members]

Question.

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Barry Devolin]

The question is on the amendment. Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the amendment?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

No.

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Barry Devolin]

All those in favour of the amendment will please say yea.