Bill C-10 (Historical)

Income Tax Amendments Act, 2006

An Act to amend the Income Tax Act, including amendments in relation to foreign investment entities and non-resident trusts, and to provide for the bijural expression of the provisions of that Act

Part 1 of the enactment enacts, in accordance with proposals announced in the 1999 budget, amendments to the provisions of the Income Tax Act governing the taxation of non-resident trusts and their beneficiaries and of Canadian taxpayers who hold interests in foreign investment entities.
Part 2 enacts various technical amendments that were included in Part 1 of a discussion draft entitled Legislative Proposals and Draft Regulations Relating to Income Tax released for consultation by the Minister of Finance on February 27, 2004. Most of these amendments are relieving in nature, and others correct technical deficiencies in the Act. For example, Part 2 enacts amendments
–       to implement various technical amendments to qualified investments for deferred income plans,
–       to clarify that certain government payments received in lieu of employment insurance are treated the same as employment insurance for income tax purposes,
–       to extend the existing non-resident withholding tax exemption for aircraft to certain air navigation equipment and related computer software,
–       to allow public corporations to return paid-up-capital arising from transactions outside the ordinary course of business, without generating a deemed dividend,
–       to confirm an income tax exemption for corporations owned by a municipal or public body performing a function of government in Canada, and
–       to provide that input tax credits received under the Quebec Sales Tax system are treated for income tax purposes in the same way as input tax credits received under the GST.
Further, Part 2 enacts provisions to implement announcements made by the Minister of Finance
–       on September 18, 2001, limiting the tax shelter benefits to a taxpayer who acquires the future business income of another person,
–       on October 7, 2003, to ensure that payments received for agreeing not to compete are taxable,
–       on November 14, 2003, to simplify and better target the tax incentives for certified Canadian films,
–       on December 5, 2003, to limit the tax benefits of charitable donations made under certain tax shelter and other gifting arrangements, and
–       on November 17, 2005, relating to the cost of property acquired in certain option and similar transactions.
Part 3 deals with provisions of the Act that are not opened up in Parts 1 and 2 in which the following private law concepts are used: right and interest, real and personal property, life estate and remainder interest, tangible and intangible property and joint and several liability. It enacts amendments to ensure that those provisions are bijural, that is that they reflect both the common law and the civil law in both linguistic versions. Similar amendments are made in Parts 1 and 2 to ensure that any provision of the Act enacted by those Parts are also bijural.

[Alexandra MacLean]

The only significant difference is that the public policy test that generated quite a lot of controversy and commentary at the time of Bill C-10 is not part of these measures.

[Scott Brison, Liberal, Kings—Hants, NS]

I have a question on the measures in the Canadian film or video production tax credit. How do these measures differ from those in Bill C-10 and Bill C-33?

[Ted Cook, Senior Legislative Chief, Tax Legislation Division, Tax Policy Branch, Department of Finance]

Certainly. With respect to the bill, probably the best way to provide an overview is to just briefly go through the parts.

Part 1 of the bill relates to non-resident trusts and foreign investment entities, or offshore investment funds. This is, in some sense, a carry-over of measures that were first introduced in the House back in 2006 and 2007, as part of prior Bill C-10. They have been significantly revised as a result of an announcement in budget 2010 and subject to further consultation after budget 2010.

If there are particular questions, perhaps we can deal with them separately.

Parts 2 and 3 deal with amendments to the foreign affiliate and foreign accrual property income regime of Canada. It's a regime dealing with income earned by subsidiaries, loosely speaking, of corporations and other taxpayers resident in Canada. My colleague, Mr. Porter will speak to part 3. I think he can give a bit of an overview of Canada's foreign affiliate system and how the hybrid surplus rules, which are encapsulated in part 3, function. These measures were not part of Bill C-10 so this would be the first time they have been before the House.

Part 4 contains bijuralism measures, which are measures that make amendments to the Income Tax Act to make sure that it properly reflects both common law and civil code concepts mostly with respect to property and property rights. These are amendments that were included in Bill C-10. They are the result of a Department of Justice study.

Part 5 is the major portion of the bill. It contains the remaining portions of Bill C-10, which were introduced in Parliament, as I mentioned, in 2006 and 2007 and died on the order paper both times.

As well, I would note that part 5 includes a number of additional measures—and we may get a chance to speak to them if I can anticipate another question from Ms. Nash—that relate to technical packages that the Department of Finance has released post-2007-08, partly in response to the Auditor General's report. Obviously the decision to release technical packages and include them in the bill is the Minister of Finance's, but the Department of Finance has been working on preparing technical packages.

It also includes a number of previously announced measures, both measures that were included in budget 2010, such as foreign tax credit generator measures, rules with respect to specified leasing properties, SIFT loss conversions and trading—and again, maybe we can speak to those more directly—and a number of miscellaneous previously announced measures.

Part 5 also contains three unannounced measures, very small, relating to income allocation for airlines, short-term residents in Canada and departure tax, and also a measure related to labour-sponsored venture capital corporations.

Parts 6 and 7 relate to GST and federal-provincial arrangements with respect to taxes.

Finally, part 8 just provides coordinating amendments that were necessary because the bill was tabled at the same time that there was a budget implementation act before the House.

That's just a very brief overview of the contents of the bill.

Technical Tax Amendments Act, 2012

[Robert Chisholm, NDP, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have the opportunity to weigh in, for a few moments anyway, on Bill C-48. I commend the member for Brossard—La Prairie, not only for his speech but also for the incredibly valuable work he performed as a member of the Standing Committee on Finance. Not to put too fine a point on it, he is a brilliant deputé and made an important contribution. I know that he will make a similar type of contribution on the justice committee, where he is now focusing his attention.

We are dealing with a bill that is nearly a thousand pages long. As others have said, it deals with a huge number of needed amendments that have been outstanding for nearly 15 years. They were announced but were not enacted in legislation, creating great confusion and problems for tax practitioners and individual Canadians.

The point made by one of the groups we spoke to, and that I am sure he heard from, Blakes, was that as a result of allowing this backlog of amendments to build up, the government has increased the complexity of the tax system. That flies in the face of everything the government has claimed it stands for as it relates to things such as reducing red tape and simplifying the tax system to make it easily accessible and understood by Canadians. That is another example of how the government tells Canadians one thing and goes ahead and does something else.

We heard from other members of this caucus that the Auditor General, in 2009, reported to the House that there were upwards of 400 tax amendments that had been proclaimed and were being carried forward but they had not been codified and enacted in legislation. That was creating a problem, a sense of confusion and an added level of complexity. He said it was simply bad practice and was not the way to run something as technical and important as the tax system under the finance acts.

Bill C-48, I understand, deals with about half of those. It does not deal with the additional ones that have been announced by the government since 2009. Therefore, even though we are dealing with a piece of legislation that is 1000 pages long and is extraordinarily complex, we will not have time to go through it in the kind of detail with which we probably should go through it. The government is still not dealing with all the changes in the tax system that have been enacted already but that have yet to be codified.

That is why the experts, such as the Certified General Accountants-Canada and the Auditor General, have said it is so important. We have comments from Thomas McDonnell, from Thorsteinssons LLP tax lawyers, and others who have said it is important to make sure that, for the tax changes that are proposed, announced and put in place by the Minister of Finance or the government, whether at budget time or at other times during the year, the government should be introducing legislation annually in the House to make sure that happens.

In 2007 the Conservatives introduced Bill C-10, which was an attempt to try to catch up to the backlog. Members will know that in 2008, they pulled the plug, because they felt that they might be able to get a majority government at the time. Even though they were flying in the face of fixed-term legislation that the Prime Minister himself lauded, they went to the polls in the fall of 2008. As a result, Bill C-10 died on the order paper.

The point is that they should not be waiting years to take care of business that should be looked after on an annual basis. It would give legislators here and experts across the country an opportunity to take a small chunk of legislation and amendments and to have a full discussion about their implications. That would be a sign of good governance.

If Parliament were up to date on those kinds of legislative changes, and the government of the day decided to prorogue the House or call an election or whatever, we would only be dealing with one year of changes next time around and would not be participating in a buildup of a backlog.

As everyone who knows about this system has said, it is extraordinarily complex. Allowing this backlog to build and bringing in amendments this way to an extraordinarily technical piece of legislation of almost 1,000 pages does not provide the clarity and opportunity for simplifying the tax system that we should be looking for. It is in the interest of all Canadians.

Since my time is winding down, I will make three points. I have said already that the bill is extremely technical. New Democrats think it does not need to be so technical.

In respect of good governance and legislative management, it should be done on an annual basis. Let me be clear that we on this side believe in cracking down on both tax avoidance and tax evasion while ensuring the integrity of our tax system. We support these changes, but we want to ensure that they happen on a more manageable basis.

This is an omnibus bill of sorts, but as opposed to Bills C-45 and C-38, it does not bring 60 pieces of legislation together with nothing that ties them together. It deals with changes to closely related pieces of legislation.

Finally, the massive size of this bill demonstrates that there is still work to be done in getting technical changes legislated in a timely fashion. As I have said and will reiterate, failing to do so hurts the business community. It makes it difficult for proper evaluation by Parliament. Ultimately, it impacts the economy of this country and individual Canadians who are trying to work with an increasingly complex tax system as they go about their business and their daily lives making sure they provide for themselves and their families and build stronger communities and a stronger country.

That is our goal. Those are the measures we would like to see the government move forward with.

We will be supporting the legislation. I urge the government to ensure that this is done on an annual basis from here on in.

Opposition Motion—Representation in Parliament

[Tom Lukiwski, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure for me to stand here today and join in this very important debate coming from my colleague and friend from Hamilton Centre, talking about two elements of democratic reform.

The first obviously is the one we have been discussing for many months and, actually, for many years, and that is democratic reform of the Senate. The NDP's position is to abolish the Senate.

I will be concentrating all of my remarks on the first part of the opposition day motion that deals with Senate reform, as opposed to the latter part of the opposition day motion on proportional representation. Due to the limited time that I have before me, I will try to concentrate my remarks only on the Senate.

I should also say at the outset that I will be sharing my time with my colleague from Calgary East.

Let me first assure my colleagues, particularly on the NDP side, that I share with them a lot of the frustrations that they seem to be expressing today about Canada's Senate. In fact, I can assure my colleagues that several years ago, before I was elected to Parliament, I completely shared their view that the Senate should be abolished. At that point in time in my view, the Senate was irrelevant, useless and served no useful purpose for Canadians.

However, since I have been elected and have been in this House since 2004, I have changed my mind 100%. I have seen the good work that the Senate can perform. I would also point out that throughout the western world and the democratic nations of the world, bicameralism, which is to say federal institutions having two legislative bodies, is quite common. The U.S., Germany, Australia, and many others have a similar situation to ours. It is there for a reason. It is there to observe and give sober second thought to the legislative process. In other words, it is a legislative review body. It is also a review body that gives careful consideration to policy.

Even though I had great and grave doubts about the Senate in years past, since I have been in Parliament I have seen on many occasions the work that the Senate has done, both in terms of legislative review and on proactive policy considerations, presenting papers for not only this House and our consideration but also for Canadians as a whole. Without getting into an ideological debate about whether the Senate should be a part of our constitution and our legislative process, I would suggest that we will always agree to disagree on that very point.

However, there are two elements to democratic reform within the Senate that I believe should be discussed. I welcome the debate we have before us today. The first is term limits. One of the most unsavoury aspects of the Senate is the fact that senators can be appointed and then serve for up to 45 years. These would be unelected and, some would suggest, unaccountable senators remaining in their positions for 45 years. I do not think by anyone's definition that is palpable. Canadians would not agree with the notion that someone can be appointed to a body and remain in that position for up to 45 years with literally no oversight.

Yes, there are times when senators can be removed with cause, whether they are charged and convicted of a criminal offence, whether their attendance is such that they have not proven their worth in the Senate, but generally speaking, senators can stay in their unelected positions for up to 45 years.

That is why we brought forward Bill C-10 on Senate term limits. Our position is that there should be a finite number of years that senators serve in the upper chamber. Forty-five years is clearly too long a period of time. We believe that eight years is the proper period of time.

Why eight years? Obviously it would take new senators a bit of time to become acclimatized to their new position, their new job, to learn the ropes so to speak. However, after a year or two, senators can properly function in the upper chamber. The most important part of a Senate term limit of eight years is that after eight years, senators have probably served their purpose to the maximum of their abilities. If not, at the very least we can look at renewal within the Senate.

What angers and offends Canadians more than anything else is to see senators who have served in the same position for 10, 20, 30, 40 years and beyond, paying little recognition to Canadians' true feelings. I believe that if senators were confined to a term limit of eight years, they would know that they had a job to do and that they had to get it done in a relatively short period of time.

I do not think there would be any argument that there should be a term limit put on senators. Whether it is eight years, twelve years or more, is open for debate. That debate would be extremely worthwhile.

I note that the former Liberal leader at one time said that he was in favour of term limits for senators. He was not sure whether eight years was the proper term. He suggested at one time 15 years and then 12 years. Nonetheless, he was a strong supporter of term limits. I am pleased to see that at least some in the Liberal Party agree with us that there should be term limits.

I would ask my friends in the NDP and the Bloc Québécois to also engage in this debate and hopefully come to the realization that if the Senate is here to stay, and I suggest it will be, then we should take a look at meaningful reform from within.

The NDP's suggestion that the Senate be abolished will probably be something that we will never see. It would never happen because to do that we would have to open up constitutional talks and there is no appetite in Canada, from the Canadians I have spoken with from coast to coast, to reopen the Constitution. We have seen the problems of the Meech Lake accord and the problems of other constitutional talks. There is simply no appetite for constitutional reform at that level.

I suggest that Bill C-10 would allow change and reform to the Senate without having to open up the constitutional talks again. The way we have drafted the legislation would allow reforms to be enacted with the approval of this House.

If the NDP members are truly sincere in their belief that there needs to be reform in Parliament, knowing that the constitutional talks would probably never occur, at least not in my lifetime, on Senate reform they should welcome the opportunity to try and enact positive change. In other words, rather than strictly abolishing the Senate, let us grasp the opportunity to make change for an institution that will be with us for the foreseeable future. I would suggest the same thing happen with senatorial appointments.

Right now we have a system where all Senate appointments are strictly that; appointments rather than elections. If we want to have a truly elected Senate, that would require opening up the Constitution. That will not happen. We do not want that to happen at this point in time. Canadians do not want that to happen.

What we have done, through the Senate, is introduce Bill S-8, Senatorial Selection Act. That, in a nutshell, would allow provinces to have elections for Senate nominees. Those nominees would then be presented to the prime minister of the day and that prime minister would be required to give consideration to those Senate nominees. I would also suggest that no prime minister, regardless of political affiliation, would take those suggestions from the provinces lightly. If a sitting prime minister decided not to appoint a senator who had been recommended and elected from a province, he would do so at his political peril.

These are two real changes that can be made to the Senate, as we speak. They can be made internally in Parliament, without having to reopen constitutional discussions and talks. They would enact real reform within the Senate. It is a set of concerns that all members should take very seriously.

I would encourage all of my colleagues to join with us as we move forward with our democratic reform package in the Senate and ask them to support both Bill C-10 and Bill S-8.

[Mauril Bélanger, Liberal, Ottawa—Vanier, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I have to say that the example I gave was pertaining to Bill C-10 in the 39th Parliament where there was an omnibus legislation and there was one parcel in the bill that basically would have given the Crown, the Minister of Canadian Heritage, the authority to exercise censorship in moviemaking in this country and essentially could have destroyed the entire apparatus we have built up over the years for that industry.

The government should have pointed these things out when it presented its legislation. It did not. Nobody on the opposition side saw that. It was picked up in the Senate and stopped by the Senate. If it had not been stopped I would argue that I do not think that the government would have introduced legislation to change that. Therefore, we would have been stuck with a system that the majority in this House did not want and that the Senate at the time did not want. I said that at that time the Senate saved the day.

There are a number of examples along those lines where it has corrected legislation, where it has picked up things that the House missed. Perhaps down the road there may be another method used than the Senate, but in a bicameral system the notion of checks and balances is imperative. I recognize that some days it may not work. I understand that if we were to end up with a majority Conservative government in the House and a Conservative majority in the Senate, the checks and balances would go out the door. However, most times it does seem to work.

If we are to get rid of the Senate, which is something that the motion put forward by the member calls for, I would rather see something in its stead before we get rid of it. That is why--

Motions in amendment

[Derek Lee, Liberal, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

Mr. Speaker, at this stage in considering Bill C-10, we are looking at amendments proposed and discussed earlier. The particular focus of these amendments relates to the Navigable Waters Protection Act, which is contained in part 7 of the bill.

As I mentioned in some questions and comments earlier, this bill is very much about the economy. In fact, everything is about the economy. The amendments proposed now, while arguably rational, were or are calculated to distract from the economic aspects of this bill.

I will admit that I too had prepared amendments in relation to this particular aspect, and to some other aspects, of this bill. I did not proceed with them on the order paper, because my party is of the view that the economy and Canadians who are now at financial risk in the economy deserve greater attention from all of us in the House than do some of the more technical aspects of this bill.

However, in discussing these amendments, I want the record to show that I have some degree of discomfort with the methodology adopted by the government in its decision to include as part of the stimulus package amendments to this very old piece of federal legislation.

It is there for very good reasons. The Navigable Waters Protection Act assures federal jurisdiction for shipping on our navigable waters, an area that continues to be of huge importance to us. These changes are arguably needed in the act, but why has the government chosen a stimulus package and placed technical amendments in the updating of a very old statute in a bill like this?

There actually is a reason, and I think I can see it. It is that the government has seen that there may be some infrastructure investment in bridges, wharves, canals, navigation buoys, levees, dams, docks and other types of structures. These could be the targets of infrastructure spending. Some of the provisions of the Navigable Waters Protection Act might delay or stall the investments in these works.

There are two aspects to this piggybacking of the Navigable Waters Protection Act in the stimulus package: the measures being put forward for adoption may arguably speed up investment, but they may directly or indirectly reduce the potential for protection of aspects of our navigable waters. Most of us around this place will have an eye for that, and we understand it. It is not as if we do not have environmental protection legislation out there. It is not as if we do not have real scientists, engineers and architects preparing this stuff. However, at the end of the day it is very important that we not lose sight of the proper way of doing things with respect to the environment, with respect to access of our citizens to these waters and with respect to the recreation industry. A lot us have received information from the Canadian Rivers Network. That perspective is very legitimate.

The policy aspect of a minister doing end runs around environmental protection legislation and other legislation that might provide for the public interest but that might also delay investment in a stimulus package is a very important consideration. We are not inviting our government here to be stupid, but we are nervous that the legislation will provide some fast-tracking that places the public interest at risk.

In addition to that, there are clauses in the bill that have actually removed the right of Parliament to review the government and ministerial activity after it has taken place. I cannot for the life of me figure out why the government has done this. We may regard this as just technical, but I do not regard it as technical.

There are actually seven clauses in the bill. I will put them on the record right now: clauses 244, 275, 279, 287, 292, 328 and 453. Each of those clauses purports to remove from Parliamentary scrutiny the administrative regulatory action of a government minister or the governor in council. Some of those involve the Navigable Waters Protection Act and other provisions involve other aspect of legislation in the stimulus package. That is simply unacceptable.

Some may say that the impact was inadvertent because the real purpose of putting these provisions in the bill was to avoid the slowing down by the regulatory process at the front end, the prepublication, the consultation, et cetera. Not only is the government trying to remove that pre-enactment scrutiny but it also has the impact of preventing Parliament from reviewing the regulatory actions to begin with, and that involves a whole slew of regulatory activity, which includes orders and exemptions, certificates, rules and directions.

Bill C-10, in these clauses, authorizes either the governor in council or ministers to take these acts and then says to Parliament that these are not statutory instruments and it cannot look at them after. That is absolutely wrong.

It is more than likely that someone from the other place will read some of the debate and more than likely that someone in the other place, that is the Senate, may take an interest in this issue. But at some point, these particular Bill C-10 enactments, including these provisions involving the Navigable Waters Protection Act, will have to be turned around. They will have to be fixed.

I cannot continue comfortably here in the House without trying to do something to fix this. It is now a question of a number of members in the House holding their noses while we pass this economic stimulus package. I cannot stress enough the stupidity of tagging onto economic stimulus legislation a whole lot of contraband in the back of the ambulance. It is not the right place to do it.

I recall another bill in a previous Parliament, also Bill C-10 coincidentally, where, in making a change to the Income Tax Act, this particular government thought it might want to test the waters on what many regarded as a censorship issue. That was just as dumb. We should not be using finance and economic stimulus legislative enactments to deal with other issues like updating the Navigable Waters Protection Act. This should happen in a piece of stand alone legislation.

The bill also has amendments involving the Competition Act. Those amendments should also be stand-alone legislation so the House can truly sink its teeth into it. The problem now is, and I hope Canadians realize it, that we have one bill with all of this in it. The main thrust of the bill is economic stimulus, but we have all of these other add-ons in the back of the truck and a lot of these add-ons, we do not like.

The amendments here are, in part, calculated to get rid of some of that extra baggage, but we are in a situation now, if we are to get the stimulus package moneys through Parliament, authorized, out on the street and creating jobs, we have to pass the bill the way it is now. I regret that, but that is a political reality.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I think it's a question of credibility. It's not credible for a Prime Minister and for this member opposite, Mr. Del Mastro, to suggest over and over that their legislation was successfully passed through the parliamentary session that ended in June and then, three months later, when Parliament is not sitting, to say that Parliament is dysfunctional and we have to ditch a piece of legislation that was implemented by this government.

So I think it's about credibility. But let me get back to the question of the arts. That's also a matter of credibility. You will recall that over the years the party opposite and its predecessor, the Reform Party, frequently made a point of calling for withdrawal of the federal government from the arts sector. You will recall that it was in the party platform of some of the members opposite that the CBC should be privatized, that it should be sold. When they saw that this didn't fly with the Canadian public, they compromised and said that only CBC Television should be sold and we would keep CBC Radio. Then, when they saw that didn't fly, they said they would lay off the CBC for a while but they wouldn't pay much heed to the report that this committee worked so hard on and released in June or May.

So it's a question of credibility. I'm glad my colleague Andy Scott took the time to travel from Fredericton to be here today and share his corporate memory with us. I'm pleased he reminded us that when the Liberal government had to deal with the massive deficit—$42 billion—left by a previous Conservative government, the party opposite thought we were moving too slow on arts cuts. I didn't know that, and I thank the member for bringing it up.

Mr. Del Mastro said that life is about change, that the world is always changing. I thank him for that platitude. I've heard it said that the government loves heritage—it's living art that it's afraid of, because that can be subversive. We've seen the government's reaction with Bill C-10.

Juxtaposed with all of these previous statements is a kind of Orwellian dialogue. They strike a “stand up for Canada” pose, while devolving as much as possible. There used to be a time when an MP like me could promote a municipal infrastructure project at the federal level. The federal government had some say as a third party in these expenditure plans. But the federal government is washing its hands of that and not taking its responsibility.

So we stand up for Canada while we devolve responsibility. We say, in that typical Orwellian fashion, that dismantling a program is not a cut. We're just redistributing. If we're redistributing, let's see what we're redistributing towards. Yes, festivals are important. Absolutely, they're important. We remember that the opposition was pushing the government hard to fund festivals in Quebec and elsewhere. They're important, but so is sending artists abroad who represent the cutting edge in art. That's important too.

But I remember that when we were in government, every time a contingent of artists went abroad the Conservative opposition was quite upset. It was a wasteful expenditure. How dare we send artists abroad, maybe put them up in a hotel, and let them visit a Canadian embassy somewhere. That was a scandal at the time. I sat on the government operations committee and watched the Conservative Party attack attempts to send artists abroad to showcase Canada. It wasn't a good idea then. Today they say, “Well, we're not so against touring programs”, yet they cut them.

I remember, Mr. Chair--and I believe you were an elected member then--when we dealt with the second phase of copyright reform. I wasn't a member myself; I was an assistant to the chair of the committee at the time, you will recall. The Conservative Party wasn't in favour of neighbouring rights, if I recall correctly. The big push at the time was to bring in neighbouring rights so the royalties would flow not only to creators or writers of music, but performers. I remember that the Conservative opposition was against that.

Speaking of copyright, as we all know, the Conservative government is committed to seeing that bill dealt with in the industry committee, not in the committee that is most concerned about arts and culture in this Parliament.

Arts and Culture

[Jean Crowder, NDP, Nanaimo—Cowichan, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I want to present a petition from various signatories calling on Parliament to staunchly defend Canadian artistic and cultural expression and to rescind any provisions of Bill C-10 which allow the government to censor film and video production in Canada and to ensure that the government has in place objective and transparent guidelines that respect freedom of expression when delivering any program intended to support film and video production in Canada.

Film Industry

[Chris Charlton, NDP, Hamilton Mountain, ON]

Mr. Speaker, finally, I am pleased to table a petition that is signed by residents of Ontario and British Columbia who are concerned about the role of the Minister of Canadian Heritage in promoting and defending Canadian cultural and artistic freedom. They believe that there should be no ability for the government, the Minister of Canadian Heritage, any office of government or government official to make subjective judgments concerning artistic content that limit the freedom of expression.

The petitioners call on Parliament to staunchly defend Canadian artistic and cultural expression, to rescind any provisions of Bill C-10 which allow the government to censor film and video production in Canada, and to ensure that the government has in place subjective and transparent guidelines that respect freedom of expression when delivering any program intended to support film and video production in Canada.

Canadian Multiculturalism Act

[Christiane Gagnon, Bloc, Québec, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to respond briefly—since I have yet to give my speech—to the criticism of the Bloc's approach to Bill C-505 as a bit clumsy and heavy-handed.

I understand the NDP's vision, since its members are centralists. They have a centralist vision of Canada. I understand when we hear about the Couture-Cullen agreement. Nevertheless, people who decide to immigrate to Quebec do so in the context of the Canadian nation. Parliament has recognized the Quebec nation. It must also be understood that our distinct society needs all of the tools available to develop and that mixed messages are being sent to the immigrants who choose Quebec, because of the Canadian Multiculturalism Act as well as other acts. Is it not Canadian citizenship that one obtains when one chooses Quebec or any other province? So, does this Parliament really want to recognize the Quebec nation, with all that that entails? That is where we differ.

As for Bill C-505 on the ideology of multiculturalism, there has been endless debate since the concept was introduced in a bill by Trudeau in 1970 and in the legislation that followed in 1988. For many Quebec nationalists, this is one way of shifting the balance of power in Canada. Earlier, we heard our hon. Liberal colleague say that, thanks to section 27 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, everything is just fine and that it shows an openness towards immigrants. This would seem to suggest that Quebeckers are not open to immigration. On the contrary, but their approach is very different and is based much more on interculturalism.

Does Canada really protect and accept cultural communities? Is that the goal of the Canadian Multiculturalism Act? In his book Selling Illusions, Neil Bissoondath responds to such questions by indicating that Canadian multicultural ideology pigeonholes cultures into dusty stereotypes and politically-driven clichés, but obstructs the creative possibilities that arise when diverse groups meet.

Adopting the vision of multiculturalism also means adopting the vision of a Canadian nation governed by an anglophone majority. I will come back to the vision that comes with that approach to multiculturalism later on. It is aimed precisely at minimizing our francophone society in Quebec and providing it with fewer tools.

For many nationalists, it is a way of changing the balance of power in Canada at the expense of the francophone community. The Quebec vision goes against that vision of multiculturalism designed to encourage minority groups to preserve and perpetuate their culture, as well as to promote these differences within Canadian institutions. So, in a way, the concept of multiculturalism promotes the Canadian nation, and the political discourse backs up this ideology.

One can read all that in a booklet published by the federal government.

Canada is populated by people who have come from every part of the world. Through the Canadian Multiculturalism Act, the government encourages Canadians to take pride in their language, religion and heritage and to keep their customs and traditions, as long as they don’t break Canadian laws.

Encouraging Canadians to take pride in their language, religion and heritage is a one-track approach and it is a problem in Quebec. Why? Because multiculturalism rejects the idea of a common culture by encouraging multiple cultures to coexist. Although it is defined as a model for integrating newcomers, in reality it promotes peaceful coexistence.

Concerned that multiculturalism divides society into a multitude of solitudes, Quebec has always deplored the Canadian approach, especially since it trivializes Quebec's position within Canada and refutes the existence of the Quebec nation. In 1971, Robert Bourassa, Premier of Quebec, stated in a letter to Pierre Elliott Trudeau: “—that notion hardly seems compatible with Quebec's reality—".

Quebec has adopted interculturalism as the model for integration. It requires immigrants to learn French as the common language. With the multiculturalism approach, not even a mention is made of the existence of a nation defined as the Quebec nation, the Charter of the French Language or French as the common language.

I would like to digress from my speech for a moment. With regard to the bilingualism approach, I am reminded of when I was a member of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage and we went on a tour regarding the Broadcasting Act. I remember a certain individual who belonged to a cultural community, had become Canadian and said he was bilingual: he spoke English and his language of origin. This reaction is quite understandable because, according to multiculturalism, this person must retain his language and his culture. I can understand that. However, it is evident that we are sending mixed messages that are very dissimilar. This person honestly believed that he was bilingual, because that was his definition of Canadian bilingualism. That is not at all the intent of multiculturalism.

In other words, unlike the Canadian approach, which tends to value diversity, the Quebec approach supports integration through the learning of the French language—the official and common language of its citizens—and adherence to a set of fundamental values. Accordingly, the Quebec department of immigration and cultural communities states on its website:

An intercultural society's challenge is a collective one: to ensure harmony by maintaining and adopting the values and principles of action that unite all citizens.

I would like to come back to what a Liberal Party colleague said earlier when he referred us to section 27 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This section is at odds with Quebec's wishes and vision for itself. What we have here are two different visions of how to integrate cultural communities, and we are well aware of the magnitude of the challenge.

Today we are discussing a Bloc Québécois bill that seeks to exempt Quebec from the policy underlying the Canadian Multiculturalism Act. I remember that even in 1998, when I was on the Canadian heritage committee, the Bloc Québécois opposed the vision set out in the Canadian Multiculturalism Act.

I know that I will not have time to say everything I planned on today, but I would like to speak about the Quebec nation. It is often said that the Quebec nation has been recognized, but what Quebec nation has been recognized if the tools are not there to fully develop it socially and economically?

As Prime Minister Trudeau hoped in 1970 when he established this law, later amended in 1988, the ideology behind multiculturalism was to reduce the influence of an evolving nation. Since the 17th century, this nation has often been described as a distinct nation in search of its own definition of what constituted a Quebec society on North American soil.

Unfortunately, my time is nearly over. I could have raised many other points to show that this House's recognition of the Quebec nation was nothing but an empty shell. In reality, this vision of Quebec is being denied in a number of areas. For example, there is Bill C-10 concerning financial support for films that are in line with public policy. What is public policy for the Conservative government?

We could also wonder about Bill C-484, which would give legal status to a fetus and which could drastically change the entire—

Canada Elections Act

[David McGuinty, Liberal, Ottawa South, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise to debate Bill C-29, An Act to amend the Canada Elections Act (accountability with respect to loans).

There are aspects of the bill which I support. In fact, when it returned from committee, the bill had been amended in such a fashion that I might have been unable to support it at third reading. Unfortunately, the government, with the help of the NDP, undid three very sensible amendments which would have improved the bill. It remains a mystery to us why the NDP members would want to sidle up with the Reform Conservative movement in Canada today. I still think that they have to justify to their supporters and Canadians at large why they might undermine this progressive piece of legislation.

As a result of those amendments and the NDP support of the government, and for many reasons, I will not be able to give Bill C-29 my support on the vote at third reading.

The majority of the bill comes from recommendations in a report from the Chief Electoral Officer to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs. That, by the way, would be the same Chief Electoral Officer, a highly accomplished lifetime public servant whom the government derided because of its own legislation dealing with veiled voting. However, we will leave that for another debate.

In that report the Chief Electoral Officers found that when loans are given to a political candidate by a person who is not regularly in the business of lending money, it can be perceived by some as a means to influence the political process with money. The report made a series of recommendations to end this perception. All of us, I think, want to see that perception eliminated in Canadian society. We want to drive up trust in our democratic institutions and processes, not drive it down.

One such recommendation was to ensure that all loans granted to a candidate were signed at the going commercial lending rate. A second was to establish a limit on loans made by individuals that would be equal to their annual political contribution amount. If we look at the year 2007, for example, that amount was $1,100. These measures are contained in Bill C-29.

The bill will also ensure that corporations and unions are prevented from making loans to political candidates and parties, just as they have been prevented from making campaign contributions, a theme I will come back to in a moment.

Bill C-29 will ensure if an individual lends and donates money to any candidate that the sum total of his or her contributions and loans will count toward his or her maximum. For instance, a person will not be able to make a $1,000 loan and a $1,000 donation.

Yet another important recommendation made by the Chief Electoral Officer was that the information surrounding any loans be made public. Why? In order to mitigate the chances of a perceived conflict of interest, something that all of us as parliamentarians must fight against, again with the higher public interest in mind, that is, to drive up trust in democratic institutions and the democratic processes that bring us here.

According to the report, the information to be disclosed should include the identity of the lender, the interest rate, and a repayment schedule for the loan, over what period of time, how much, with a beginning, a middle and an end to the schedule. The reason it is important to disclose this type of information throughout a campaign is that after a vote, while the information may be telling, it comes too late to help a voter make an informed decision about which candidate he or she may choose to support or not.

I can support this measure in Bill C-29. It is the right thing to do.

In fact, for Canadians watching or reading Hansard at some point, let me take a moment to remind them it is the Liberal Party of Canada that was well ahead of the curve on this issue.

During the last Liberal leadership race, our leadership candidates went way above and beyond the call of duty to disclose this type of information. It is an excellent idea. I strongly believe that the other parties in the House should be brought under the same type and level of scrutiny that the Liberal Party of Canada has voluntarily adopted.

We have heard from numerous speakers this afternoon and throughout this debate specifically about the Prime Minister. It is revealing. It is more than interesting. It is not somewhat passing that the Prime Minister has not yet revealed the names of the people and organizations that contributed to his leadership campaign in 2002. Why? Why would a leadership candidate not want to reveal the people and organizations supporting, in this case, his leadership bid? This kind of secrecy is exactly what leads many Canadians to become distrustful of the political process.

Who exactly, they might ask, put the Prime Minister at the helm of the Conservative Party? Who? Who wrote the cheques? Which Conservative members? Was it the big oil companies? An objective Canadian might ask, is this why the Prime Minister continues to deny the existence of climate change? When faced with one of the greatest ecological threats of our time, in the wake of the loss of 2,500 of the highest paying jobs in the manufacturing sector in Canada, how does the Prime Minister respond? How does he respond to the climate change crisis facing the planet? With a talking oil stain that tells Canadians there is no point in trying to curb our greenhouse gas emissions.

It is actually encouraging. I encourage the Prime Minister and his party to pursue exactly those kinds of tactics. I encourage him to run those advertisements at every gas pump in every service station in the country. Why? Because Canadians would then see that the response to the climate change crisis by the Prime Minister is a cartoon character. I ask him to please go forward in that regard and continue to proliferate those kinds of race to the bottom tactics.

Was he funded, for example, by groups like Charles McVety's at the Canada Christian College, who was recently in Ottawa to help the government push through Bill C-10? That bill would give the Conservative government the right to censor Canadian films based on whatever they seem to find offensive.

Or is it the same Charles McVety who actually cybersquatted on over 40 MPs websites, including my own? Having seized it, he was confronted by me, and was shamed into actually transferring mine back to me and the others back to the other members from all sides of the House, all parties? Dr. McVety, whatever his doctorate might be in, was opposed to the notion of same sex civil marriage and he used cyber theft and cybersquatting as his modus operandi to achieve his objectives. Is this the group that funded the Prime Minister's leadership bid?

We should know those things. If either of these are the case, I believe that Canadians deserve an answer. They have a right to know. I encourage my colleagues on the Conservative side of the House to urge their leader to disclose those contributions as quickly as possible.

While they are at it, why do they not ask the Minister of National Defence which sole contributor paid off up to half a million dollars of his leadership debt. One cheque, one donor, the amount has never been disclosed. The Minister of National Defence has never come clean with Canadians.

It is no surprise that some of the measures we find in this bill are supported by the Conservatives.

Those are two examples and there may be more. That is exactly the kind of transparency the House should be seeking to increase, not decrease, to drive up trust in the democratic institutions and the processes that brought us here.

I understand that members in the Conservative Party are not allowed to question their leader or even to express their own ideas, failing which we see the kind of despicable content which has emerged in the last 48 hours from the Parliamentary Secretary to the President of the Treasury Board. On that note, we know the apology is not enough. It is not enough because it is not the first time.

This is about restoring the faith of Canadians in the democratic process. Over the past five years the Liberal Party has done tremendous work, I believe, to help restore faith. It was in 2003 that the previous Liberal government introduced the very first annual limits on individual contributions to a political party and to our candidates. In that same bill we also banned contributions from corporations and unions to political parties. That is progressive. Those changes stand today as the most significant ones that have been made to political financing at the federal level in decades. We went further.

In 2006 the maximum contribution amounts were lowered even further. They are now tied to the rate of inflation and in theory should rise slightly each year. I say “in theory” because we have yet to see if Canada's Minister of Finance will be able to steer the economy well enough to meet targeted inflation rates. Given his past behaviour at Queen's Park and his performance in the Ontario government, Canadians are of course deeply suspicious of an individual who increases provincial debt by $28 billion and leaves a $5.6 billion deficit in Canada's largest province.

Nevertheless, we did support lowering those maximums, which brings me to the part of my speech where I have to raise my concerns about this bill. There is a danger that sometimes we, as legislators, in our zeal to make things better, often make things worse through a variety of unintended consequences.

This bill, unfortunately, finds itself well across the line of what is needed in order to make things better. To their credit, the members from all sides of the House who studied the bill at committee stage tried to make the bill better. At least in this case it was not one of the six standing committees that have been filibustered, blocked, toyed with and brought into disrepute by the conduct of Conservative members, most recently of course in a number of standing committees with respect to their cheap and dishonest talk about carbon pricing.

The members who studied the bill did try to make the bill better. There were, however, three amendments made at committee which the government did not agree with and which were eliminated at report stage, again with the help of the NDP. It is a shame because it was widely recognized that these amendments would have improved the bill.

One such amendment has to do with who is liable for loans that go unpaid. The Bloc and the Liberal members of the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs were concerned that the original wording of the bill could have made political parties responsible for loans that their candidates took without even knowing that their candidates had taken those loans. Let me give an example.

The local candidate takes out a $30,000 loan to finance his campaign. He does not inform the central Conservative Party that he is doing this. The central party, however, is now responsible for that loan should the candidate not win and declare bankruptcy. That is right; a political party would not have authorized the loan, would have had no knowledge of the loan, yet it would be required to assume liability for the loan if the candidate declared bankruptcy.

I do not think this is right. I actually do not even think it is legal, particularly when we consider that there are parties not represented in this House and for whom a $30,000 debt is an extremely high sum of money to be stuck with through no fault of their own. In short, this is not good for democracy. It does not give rise to the possibility of new political parties, for example.

That brings me to my last point. It is about who will be disenfranchised by Bill C-29. Every single politician cuts his or her teeth in politics by taking a chance and running for office. From a local councillor to a federal cabinet minister, we all start that way; everyone except, of course, for the Minister of Public Works, whom the Prime Minister appointed to the Senate and who, in his own words, did not feel like running for office.

I will admit that in mounting a campaign for office some people will have advantages. They might have a recognizable name or face because of their past activities. There is nothing wrong with that, but it does give them an early advantage in getting the early stage donations that are so crucial to a candidacy.

Others come to politics with a good amount of money in their bank accounts. That is neither a good thing nor a bad thing. Any political bodies should be represented by a broad spectrum of the citizens who vote them there. The advantage that these types of candidates will have, however, is that it will be far easier for them to secure loans from a financial institution to get their candidacy up and running. If they have a big house or other assets to use as collateral against a loan, the banks will be all too willing to give them that loan.

Banks and financial institutions, of course, are the only places where federal political candidates will be allowed to secure loans for over $1,100 if Bill C-29 passes. That would be for a nomination campaign, a leadership campaign or an election campaign.

Then there is a third type of politician, one who runs for office without a lot of face recognition and without the benefit of having much wealth tucked away. These politicians run because they want to make a difference. They believe their ideas can help to shape the national debate.

These are the candidates who would be disenfranchised by the bill. They do not have the face recognition needed to get a lot of early stage donations. They might not have the assets for a bank to give them a starter loan. In the case of a nomination battle for a riding, this could easily be the difference between launching a winning campaign and losing one.

What about family and friends? Why can family and friends not support early funding start-up for nomination battles? This is exactly what has happened, for example, in our IT sector, where so much of our IT success has come from individuals with robust ideas who have drawn from family, friends, contacts and neighbours to help start up with a positive idea. I draw a parallel here between both.

Arts and Culture

[Denise Savoie, NDP, Victoria, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to present a petition on behalf of many Canadians who are asking that the government rescind a provision of Bill C-10 that allows the government to censor film or video productions under some ill-defined, vague criteria. We have all heard of the impact these provisions will have on the film industry, and there are already laws that contain provisions regarding pornography, child pornography, hate propaganda and violent crime.

These Canadians are asking the government to put in place objective and transparent guidelines that respect freedom of expression when delivering any program intended to support film and video production in Canada.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to table a petition signed by Canadians from Quebec and Ontario, all of whom are concerned about the provisions of Bill C-10 with regard to the film and video tax credit.

The petitioners demand protection for freedom of expression in Canada and call on the government to take measures to promote and not limit artistic freedom. They note their strong opposition to measures of censorship and their belief that the provisions of Bill C-10 are just that and should be rescinded.

The petitioners are also concerned that Bill C-10 gives the Minister of Canadian Heritage discretionary power to impose her own subjective judgments concerning artistic content.

Finally, the petitioners call for objective and transparent program guidelines that support film and video production.

Extension of Sitting Hours

[Pierre Paquette, Bloc, Joliette, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I will start off by saying that the Bloc Québécois, like the official opposition, and like—I believe—the NDP, will opposed the motion by the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons to extend the sitting hours, for a number of reasons.

First, it is important to remember—and this was mentioned by the House leader of the official opposition—that the government and the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons have been completely unwilling to negotiate and cooperate. Usually, when Parliament is running smoothly, the leaders meet and agree on some priorities, some items and some ways of getting them done. But since the start of this session, or at least since September, House leaders' meetings on Tuesday afternoons have simply been meetings where we hear about a legislative agenda, which, within hours after we leave the meeting, is completely changed.

That is not how we move forward. Now the government can see that its way of doing things does not produce results. In fact, I think that this is what the government wanted in recent weeks, to prevent Parliament, the House of Commons and the various committees from working efficiently and effectively.

As I was saying, usually such motions are born out of cooperation, and are negotiated in good faith between the government and the opposition parties. But we were simply told that today a motion would be moved to extend the sitting hours, but with no information forthcoming about what the government's priorities would be through the end of this session, until June 20.

This was a very cavalier way to treat the opposition parties. And today, the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons and the Conservative government are reaping the consequences of their haughty attitude. As the saying goes, he who sows the wind, reaps the whirlwind. That is exactly what has happened to the Conservatives after many weeks of acting in bad faith and failing to cooperate with the opposition parties.

In this case, the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons—and earlier I mentioned his arrogance, which, to me, has reached its peak today with the way the motion was moved—gave us no indication as to his government's priorities from now until the end of the session, despite the fact that he was pointedly questioned about that matter. What we did receive was a grocery list with no order, no priorities. As the leader of the official opposition said earlier, when everything is a priority, it means that nothing is.

That is the current situation: they gave us a list of bills which, in fact, included almost all of the bills on the order paper. Not only were things not prioritized, but in addition, as I mentioned before, it showed a disregard for the opposition parties. There is a price to pay for that today—we do not see why the government needs to extend the sitting hours.

Not only was the grocery list not realistic, but also it showed that the government has absolutely no priorities set. The list includes almost all of the bills, but week after week, despite what was said during the leaders' meetings, the order of business changed. If the order of business changes at the drop of a hat, with no rhyme or reason, it means that the government does not really have priorities.

I am thinking about Bill C-50, a bill to implement the budget, which we waited on for a long time. The government is surprised that we are coming up to the end of the session and that it will be adopted in the coming hours. However, we have to remember that between the budget speech and the introduction of Bill C-50, many weeks passed that could have been spent working on the bill.

As I mentioned, the list presented to us is unrealistic. It shows the arrogance of this government, and furthermore, the order of the bills on the list is constantly changing. We feel this is a clear demonstration of this government's lack of priority.

In light of that, we can reach only one conclusion: if the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons and Minister for Democratic Reform cannot present us with his government's legislative priorities as we near the end of this session, in effect, it means that his government has no legislative priorities. It has no long-term vision. Its management is short sighted, very short sighted indeed. I would even say it is managing from one day to the next. From my perspective, this can mean only one thing: it has no legislative agenda. When we have before us bills dealing with only minor issues, this is what that means.

Proof of this lack of legislative agenda is easy to see, considering the current state of this government's agenda. An abnormally small number of bills for this time of year are currently before the House at the report stage and at third reading. Usually, if the government had planned, if it had been working in good faith and had cooperated with the opposition parties, in these last two weeks remaining before the summer recess, we should have been completing the work on any number of bills.

Overall, as we speak there are just five government bills that are ready to be debated at these stages, in other words, report stage or third reading stage. Among those, we note that Bill C-7, which is now at third reading stage, reached report stage during the first session of the 39th Parliament, in other words in June 2007. It has been brought back to us a year later. And that is a priority? What happened between June 2007 and June 2008 to prevent Bill C-7 from getting through third reading stage? In my opinion, we should indeed finish the work on Bill C-7, but this truly illustrates the government's lack of planning and organization.

As far as Bill C-5 is concerned, it was reported on by the Standing Committee on Natural Resources on December 12, 2007, and voted on at report stage on May 6, 2008. Again, a great deal of time, nearly six months, went by between the tabling of the report and the vote at this stage, which was held on May 6, 2008, while the report was tabled on December 12, 2007.

Finally, Bills C-29 and C-16 were both reported on by the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs roughly six months ago.

All these delays of six months to a year force us to conclude that these bills are not legislative priorities to this government.

It would be great to finish the work on these four or five bills, but let us admit that we could have finished it much sooner.

This lack of legislative priority was even more apparent before question period when the House was debating second reading of Bill C-51 on food and drugs. Next on the agenda is second reading of Bill C-53 on auto theft.

If these five bills were a priority, we would finish the work. But no, what we are being presented with are bills that are only at second reading stage. This only delays further the report stage or third reading of the bills I have already mentioned. If we were serious about this, we would finish the work on bills at third reading and then move on to bills that are at second reading.

Furthermore, if its legislative agenda has moved forward at a snail's pace, the government is responsible for that and has only itself to blame, since it paralyzed the work of important committees, including the justice committee and the procedure and House affairs committee, to which several bills had been referred. And then they dare make some sort of bogus Conservative moral claim, saying that we are refusing to extend sitting hours because we do not want to work. For months and months now, opposition members, especially the Bloc Québécois, have been trying to work in committee, but the government, for partisan reasons, in order to avoid talking about the Conservative Party's problems, has been obstructing committee work.

Earlier, the NDP whip spoke about take note debates.

Once again, it is not the opposition that is refusing to work on issues that are important to Canadians and Quebeckers. Rather, it is the government that refuses to allow take note debates, because of partisan obstinacy. In that regard, we clearly see that the argument presented by the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons and Minister for Democratic Reform is mere tautology or a false argument. In fact, it was the Conservative Party, the Conservative government, that slowed down the work of the House and obstructed the work of several committees.

Not only is the government incapable of planning, vision, cooperation and good faith, but furthermore, its legislative agenda is very meagre and does not in any way warrant extending the sitting hours. In addition, the Bloc Québécois sees many of the bills that are now at the bottom of the list as problematic, but if we extend the sitting hours, we will end up having to examine them.

Take Bill C-14, for example, which would permit the privatization of certain Canada Post activities. Do they really think that sitting hours will be extended to hasten debate on a bill that threatens jobs and the quality of a public service as essential as that provided by the Canada Post Corporation? That demonstrates just how detrimental the Conservatives' right-wing ideology is, not just to public services but to the economy. Everyone knows very well—there are a large number of very convincing examples globally—that privatizing postal services leads to significant price increases for consumers and a deterioration in service, particularly in rural areas.

I will give another example, that of Bill C-24, which would abolish the long gun registry even though police forces want to keep it. Once again, we have an utter contradiction. Although the government boasts of an agenda that will increase security, they are dismantling a preventtive tool welcomed by all stakeholders. They are indirectly contributing to an increase in the crime rate.

These are two examples of matters that are not in step with the government's message. It is quite clear that we are not interested in extending sitting hours to move more quickly to a debate on Bill C-24.

I must also mention bills concerning democratic reform—or pseudo-reform. In my opinion, they are the best example of the hypocrisy of this government, which introduces bills and then, in the end, makes proposals that run counter to the interests of Quebec in particular.

Take Bill C-20, for example, on the consultation of voters with respect to the pool of candidates from which the Prime Minister should choose senators. Almost all the constitutional experts who appeared before the committee currently studying Bill C-20 said that the bill would do indirectly what cannot be done directly. We know that the basic characteristics of the Senate cannot be changed without the agreement of the provinces or, at the very least, without following the rule of the majority for constitutional amendments, which requires approval by seven provinces representing 50% of the population.

Since the government knows very well that it cannot move forward with its Senate reforms, it introduced a bill that would change the essential characteristics of the Senate, something prohibited by the Constitution, on the basis of some technicalities.

It is interesting to note that even a constitutional expert who told the committee that he did not think the way the government had manipulated the bill was unconstitutional admitted that the bill would indirectly allow the government to do what it could not do directly.

They are playing with the most important democratic institutions.

A country's Constitution—and we want Quebec to have its own Constitution soon—is the fundamental text. We currently have a government, a Prime Minister and a Leader of the Government in the House of Commons who are manipulating this fundamental text— the Canadian Constitution—in favour of reforms that would satisfy their supporters in western Canada.

We do not want to rush this bill through the House by extending the sitting hours. It is the same thing for Bill C-19, which, I remind members, limits a Senator's tenure to eight years.

These two bills, Bill C-19 and Bill C-20, in their previous form, meaning before the session was prorogued in the summer of 2007, were unanimously denounced by the Quebec National Assembly, which asked that they be withdrawn. It is rather ironic that the federal government recognized the Quebec nation and then decided to introduce two bills that were denounced by the Quebec National Assembly.

I must say that the two opposition parties are opposed to Bill C-20, albeit for different reasons. Thus, I do not think it would be in the best interests of the House to rush these bills through, since we are far from reaching a consensus on them.

I have one last example, that is, Bill C-22, which aims to change the make-up of the House of Commons. If passed, it would increase the number of members in Ontario and in western Canada, which would reduce the political weight of the 75 members from Quebec, since their representation in this House would drop from 24.4% to 22.7%. It is not that we are against changing the distribution of seats based on the changing demographics of the various regions of Canada. We would like to ensure, however, that the Quebec nation, which was recognized by the House of Commons, has a voice that is strong enough to be heard.

The way things are going today, it is clear that in 10, 15 or 20 years, Quebec will no longer be able to make its voice heard in this House. We therefore believe we must guarantee the Quebec nation a percentage of the members in this House. We propose that it be 25%. If people want more members in Ontario and in the west, that is not a problem. We will simply have to increase the number of members from Quebec to maintain a proportion of 25%. There are a number of possible solutions to this.

Once again, I would like to point out that we introduced a whole series of bills to formalize the recognition of the Quebec nation, including Bill C-482, sponsored by my colleague from Drummond. That bill sought to apply the Charter of the French Language to federally regulated organizations working in Quebec. That was for organizations working in Quebec, of course. At no time did we seek to control what happens elsewhere in Canada. The bill would have given employees of federally regulated organizations the same rights as all employees in Quebec, that is, the right to work in French.

Unfortunately, the bill was defeated, but we will try again. Once again, the fact that Bill C-482 was defeated does not mean we are about to throw in the towel and let Bills C-22, C-19, and C-20 pass just like that. As I said earlier, we will certainly not make things easy for the government by rushing debate on these bills here.

And now to my fourth point. I started out talking about the government's lack of cooperation, vision and planning, not to mention its bad faith. Next, I talked about its poor excuse for a legislative agenda. Then I talked about the fact that we find certain bills extremely problematic. We will certainly not be giving the government carte blanche to bring those bills back here in a big hurry before the end of the session on June 20. Our fourth reason is the government's hypocrisy, in a general sense.

This has been apparent in many ways, such as the government's attitude to certain bills. I would like to mention some of them, such as Bill C-20. I cannot help but mention Bills C-50 and C-10 as well.

Bill C-50, the budget implementation bill, makes changes to the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration's powers, but that is not what the debate is about. Bill C-10, which introduces elements that allow the Conservative government—

Film Industry

[Bob Rae, Liberal, Toronto Centre, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I have the pleasure to present two petitions to the House. The first is a petition against Bill C-10, An Act to amend the Income Tax Act, which is signed by a great many people in the industry itself.

Bill C-10

[Luc Malo, Bloc, Verchères—Les Patriotes, QC]

Mr. Speaker, artists, producers and the entire film and television industry have criticized this bill, which goes against the principle of freedom of expression and could make the search for funding very difficult. In response to the parliamentary secretary, no one is fooled; we can all recognize the conservative, right-wing ideology that seeks to censor and control the industry.

Will the minister finally listen to reason and remove the censorship provisions from Bill C-10?

[Jim Abbott, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary for Canadian Heritage]

Mr. Speaker, I made note of the comments by the mayor of Montreal relative to this question and I find it rather curious because the exact same wording that is contained in Bill C-10 is the exact same wording under which the film industry in the province of Quebec works with provincial legislation. I do not really understand why the mayor would have made the comments that he made. Clearly, there must be some other motive for him to be doing that.

[Luc Malo, Bloc, Verchères—Les Patriotes, QC]

Mr. Speaker, yesterday, the mayors of Toronto and Montreal, David Miller and Gérald Tremblay, strongly criticized Bill C-10, which would enable the government to deny funding to films or television shows that are deemed contrary to public policy. According to the mayor of Montreal, this bill could kill an industry that employs 35,000 people in Quebec, and that brings in some $1.3 billion in economic spinoffs.

Will the Minister of Canadian Heritage, Status of Women and Official Languages remove the provisions in this bill that promote Conservative censorship?

Budget Implementation Act, 2008

[Derek Lee, Liberal, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

Mr. Speaker, at the end of the member's comments, he referenced the parliamentary procedures involved here. I take such strong objection to the use of “instruction” in this bill, I would almost stop at nothing to nuke it. I will also say that in another bill, Bill C-10, which passed late last year, there was another device called a “direction” which the government could give. This had to do with directions involving the production of Canadian films under the Income Tax Act.

With this whole business of finding these little directions and instructions, what is next, a phone call, or a message, or a letter? What other device is the government going to invent so that the rule of law scrutiny of the regulatory process is avoided? This is a very unfortunate step and the record ought to show that very clearly.

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

Mr. Speaker, thank you for that lovely compliment. It is rare to receive compliments in the House. I very humbly accept it.

It is my great pleasure to rise to speak to Bill C-50, particularly part 6, which would introduce immigration measures that I find somewhat unusual because they would give significant additional powers to the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration.

The government is trying to bring in these measures as part of a budget bill. If we agreed with the bill, we could let it go through, no problem. However, we do not agree with it, because it does not meet our fellow citizens' needs. As everyone knows, the people asked us to request a number of things for Quebec, and we submitted those requests.

What is even more unacceptable is that the government is trying to include these measures in bills that are not intended to change procedures within various departments. That is what part 6 of Bill C-50 attempts to do: change the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act significantly. This bill would give the minister the power to give some people priority over others. The minister would also have the power to refuse entry to some people without having to justify his or her decision.

This is troubling, particularly since we have a government that is known for breaking its promises to people. It broke its promise to women on equity and equality; it broke its promise to seniors on the guaranteed income supplement; and it broke its promise to veterans. Spouses and widows of veterans do not all have access to various programs offered by Veterans Affairs Canada to returning war veterans. All in all, this government was elected because of promises it made on major issues—promises that, for the most part, it has not kept.

We have to wonder what would happen if these measures in Bill C-50 were passed. Imagine for a moment that the ousted minister of foreign affairs became the minister of citizenship and immigration. Who would he give priority to? Who would he deny entry to? Many worries come to mind, even more so given that the minister would not have to answer any questions or provide any justification.

Conservative Party members have also made disconcerting statements about immigrants of certain ethnicities. What would happen if one of these members were appointed minister of citizenship and immigration? I would be worried about giving a minister the sweeping power to decide the validity of an application from someone who wanted to immigrate to Quebec or Canada. I find that very serious.

I even find it a bit immoral that these measures were introduced as part of a budget bill, and I wonder how many others feel this way. At the very least, we know that all of the organizations involved with newcomers, be they refugees or immigrants, are opposed to these measures, and with good reason, I might add.

We know that the committee has also made its views known. It is important to remember that the committee is not necessarily against amending the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act.

But if amendments are to be made, they must be done properly, through the usual channels. This means introducing bills, having them examined in committee, and hearing witnesses in committee to explain different parts of the bill. This did not happen here.

This amendment to the Immigration Act was sneakily included in Bill C-50, in the same way that a censorship measure was included in Bill C-10 without anyone noticing. We can see the effect that one has had, and the shock waves it has sent through the film community, in terms of copyrights and so on. Members must remember all of that and be very careful before passing Bill C-50 if it contains part 6. Giving a single person the authority and power to determine who will have the right to enter the country is inconceivable. The same thing happened with the Minister of Health with respect to public safety and quarantines. The government did not even keep its promises to those suffering from Hepatitis C. People are dying every day without receiving a cent from the government. This is a right-wing government if ever there was one.

That scares me. When a government that is so far to the right wants to introduce such measures in a bill, I believe that there is more to it than meets the eye. I do not want to have any part of it and I do not accept it. My party does not want to say yes to that. We will definitely vote against the bill. We cannot allow ourselves to give such rights to a party that has already shown its bad faith and ill will.

That was the case for Insite, in Vancouver. They prefer to let people die rather than helping them to obtain services in a place where they felt safe, where they could make important contacts and get help. They would rather let people die. And now they would like us to believe that it would be a good thing to give the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration the power to decide who can enter Canada. They should not take Canadians or Quebeckers for fools. We see the government's game plan very clearly. We know that the only reason this government wants to introduce this amendment to the Immigration Act is to have even more power and to decide what kind of immigrants will build Canada.

Some 900,000 men and women have been waiting for years to become Canadian citizens. They have been waiting patiently. They have gone through all the steps. They are entitled to be treated with dignity and respect by a government that follows the rules, not a government that changes the rules to suit its ideology and philosophy or to please voters of the same bent.

Censorship

[Luc Malo, Bloc, Verchères—Les Patriotes, QC]

Mr. Speaker, my Bloc Québécois colleagues and I are very concerned about the reasons for the dismissal of the assistant to the Conservative member for Cambridge. We are also concerned by the fact that Ms. Van Eyk provided an explanation not to justify the purchase of tickets for her personal use but to protect her boss's reputation. Talk about déjà vu.

The MP's assistant was actually fired for reserving tickets to attend the screening of a movie that the Conservatives do not seem to like because it is considered to be risqué. They believe that it is contrary to the public good. This incident confirms our fears regarding the thinly veiled censorship in Bill C-10.

The Bloc Québécois considers Ms. Van Eyk's firing as a confirmation of its members' fears regarding the Conservative government's desire for censorship in order to impose its bigoted moral view. Tartuffe, Molière's religious hypocrite, said, “Cover up that bosom, which I can't endure to look on.”

Arts and Culture

[Olivia Chow, NDP, Trinity—Spadina, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it is my honour to present a petition from ordinary Canadians. They note that the Charter of Rights and Freedom guarantees freedom of expression and that the exercise of freedom of expression is essential to democracy, the creative process and to Canadian arts and culture. They also note that the Criminal Code of Canada already contains provisions regarding pornography, child pornography, hate propaganda and violent crime. They point out that the role of the Minister of Canadian Heritage should be to promote and defend Canadian cultural and artistic freedom.

Whereas, the guidelines for government funding and support for the cultural sector, including film and video production, should be objective, transparent and must respect freedom of expression, there should not be any ability for the government, the Minister of Canadian Heritage, or any office of the government or government officials to make subjective judgments concerning artistic content that limits the freedom of expression. This type of censorship and denial of tax credits or production support may significantly hinder the making of Canadian films and the telling of Canadian stories.

That is why the petitioners are calling on Parliament to defend Canadian artistic and cultural expression, to rescind any provisions of Bill C-10 that allow the government to censor film and video production in Canada and to ensure that the government has in place objective and transparent guidelines that respect freedom of expression when delivering any program intended to support film and video production in Canada.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I present more petitions in opposition to Bill C-10.

As has been mentioned, these petitioners also call upon Parliament to staunchly defend Canadian artistic and cultural expression, to rescind any provisions of Bill C-10, which allow the government to censor film and video production in Canada, and to ensure that the government has in place objective and transparent guidelines that respect freedom of expression when delivering any program intended to support film and video production in Canada.

I am glad to also support these petitioners in this request.

[Irene Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

Finally, Mr. Speaker, I too have a petition from cultural groups and artists from across the country. They are very concerned about the provisions of Bill C-10.

The petitioners call upon the Parliament of Canada to defend Canadian artists and cultural expression, to rescind any provisions in Bill C-10 which would allow the government to censor film and video production in Canada and to ensure the government has objective and transparent guidelines that respect freedom of expression when delivering any program intended to support film and video production in Canada.

This is in support of all the artists in our communities who have so richly provided our communities with the cultural benefits of video and film.

[Peggy Nash, NDP, Parkdale—High Park, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to present a petition concerning Bill C-10, which recognizes that the Criminal Code of Canada already contains provisions regarding pornography, child pornography, hate propaganda and violent crime, but recognizes also that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees freedom of expression and that the exercise of freedom of expression is essential to democracy in the creative process and to Canadian arts and culture and that the role of the Minister of Canadian Heritage should be to promote and defend Canadian culture and artistic freedom.

The guidelines for government funding for the cultural sector include film and video production and they should be objective, transparent and respond to freedom of expression. There should be no ability for the government, the Minister of Canadian Heritage or any office of the government to make subjective judgments concerning artistic content that limit freedom of expression. This type of censorship and denial of tax credits or production support may significantly hinder the making of Canadian productions.

Therefore, the petitioners call upon Parliament to defend Canadian artistic and cultural freedom, to rescind the provisions of Bill C-10 which would allow the government to censor film and video production in Canada and to ensure the government has in place objective and transparent guidelines that respect freedom of expression when delivering any program intended to support film and video production in Canada.

Film Industry

[Tina Keeper, Liberal, Churchill, MB]

Mr. Speaker, Canadians are proud of the contributions of their artists nationally and internationally. Yesterday, at the heritage committee, David Cronenberg, one of Canada's world renowned film directors and recipient of the Cannes Film Festival's lifetime achievement award, said that the amendments proposed in Bill C-10 would be a serious blow to Canadian productions and drive filmmakers out of the country.

Why is the minister still refusing to stand up for Canadian artists and remove the amendments from Bill C-10?

Arts and Culture

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to table a petition today signed by many residents of British Columbia and Ontario who are concerned about the role of the Minister of Canadian Heritage in promoting and defending Canadian cultural and artistic freedom. They also believe that there should be no ability for the government, the Minister of Canadian Heritage, any office of government or government official to make subjective judgments concerning artistic content that limit the freedom of expression.

The petitioners call on Parliament to staunchly defend Canadian artistic and cultural expression, to rescind any provisions of Bill C-10 which allow the government to censor film and video production in Canada, and to ensure that the government has in place subjective and transparent guidelines that respect freedom of expression when delivering any program intended to support film and video production in Canada.

Canadian Heritage

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have this opportunity to speak in the debate on the motion to concur in the seventh report of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage, which is a recommendation not to proceed further with Bill C-327, An Act to amend the Broadcasting Act (reduction of violence in television broadcasts).

As we have heard, Bill C-327 was tabled by the member for Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie in response to a petition of over 1.5 million Canadians, a petition spearheaded and headed by Virginie Larivière, a 13-year-old girl who was concerned about the role of television violence in the rape and murder of her younger sister. She gathered those petitions and presented them to the Mulroney government back a number of years ago.

The petition expressed the concern of over a million Canadians about the effects of violence on television in our society. This is clearly a very strong opinion about the circumstances and that issue. Members of Parliament needed to take that expression of concern very seriously. That is exactly what the member for Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie did when he proposed this private member's bill. He did absolutely the right thing in putting forward a serious attempt to address that issue raised by so many Canadians.

Unfortunately, there were problems identified with the bill as proposed. The most serious problem members of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage faced, after listening to testimony from many organizations and individuals, was that many witnesses saw this bill as giving the CRTC the power to censor television programing in Canada. This was seen a inappropriate by most of the witnesses and the members of the committee. It was a power that the CRTC should not have in the opinion of most of us, and I agree.

I have heard the concerns expressed around censorship and the freedom of cultural expression. Many of those have been raised recently regarding the Canadian film and video tax credit in the provisions of Bill C-10, which include a very broad possibility of the Minister of Canadian Heritage using guidelines to deny film and video tax credit based on personal sensibilities about what is appropriate film or video production in Canada. We have seen a great outcry from the cultural and arts community about that aspect of the bill.

We were very aware in the committee of that context of Bill C-10 and it was clear that we could not proceed with the provisions of Bill C-327 as they were presented.

There were also concerns that disputed some of the evidence presented in support of Bill C-327, including the way the numbers were used to compare the number of acts of violence in the Laval study, which my colleague from Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie has cited. It was also clear that television violence was only one source of violence today that Canadians and children faced. The Internet and video games were also very major sources of very violent programming and violence to which children and adults were exposed.

Therefore, for those reasons, I support the concurrence motion that we should not proceed with Bill C-327 as it was originally presented and as it cleared the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage.

However, I want to point out that it became clear to me, as we worked on the bill in committee, there was the possibility for amending it to fully remove the censorship provisions and instead stress the further development of broadcast codes and media literacy education commitments. It was clear there were serious concerns in Canadian society related to violence on television and its effect on adults and children in our society.

It also became clear that media literacy education was an important approach to dealing with the concerns, an approach that deserved stronger support from government, the CRTC and broadcasters. Many organizations do that excellent work, and we heard from quite a number of them. We should ensure there is expanded access by adults, children, parents and educators to the work on media literacy and media awareness done by those organizations.

It also became clear that the development by broadcasters of codes of ethics, broadcast codes, programming standards, classification systems and related complaint mechanisms should be enshrined in the Broadcasting Act. I appreciate that private broadcasters have developed those codes, voluntarily originally. Now through the auspices of the CRTC it is more mandatory, but they belong in the Broadcasting Act.

We should also put into the act that such codes should be developed in consultation with government, the CRTC, cultural workers, media unions, media literacy and media awareness organizations, advocacy groups and interested individuals, among others, that such codes and classification systems should be formally reviewed every five years, comprehensively, independently and publicly, and that further analysis of the connections between the depiction of violence and violence in society should be part of the mandate of the CRTC and broadcasters, as should media literacy education and media awareness education for Canadians of all ages.

I proposed amendments that would do exactly those things, that would add all those aspects to Bill C-327 as originally proposed. I had an indication from the chair that my amendments would be seen as being in order.

I also had clear support for my amendments from the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, one of the groups that most clearly stated its concern and its opposition to the original bill because of what it saw as censorship provisions in the bill. It supported my amendments because it was clear that I had removed effectively all the censorship provisions from the bill.

Sadly, the Conservatives and Liberals on the committee would not even consider these amendments and then decided to recommend that the bill be abandoned without any discussion or debate on the amendments, which I had worked on, proposed and brought to the committee.

That was a serious disappointment. When we have the opportunity to consider private members' legislation at committee, we should go the whole way on that consideration. When members bring forward amendments to legislation before a committee, the committee should hear those amendments and have discussion on them. Sadly, that was short-circuited by the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage in this regard.

I would not have been able to support Bill C-327 as it was originally proposed and now as it returns to the House. That is why I support the motion before us today that the bill be abandoned, that we not proceed with the bill.

However, there was something valuable in the proposal from the member for Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie. We could have rescued the bill and found in it, with some amendments such as the ones I proposed, something that would be worthwhile for Canadians and that would serve us well in the long run, something that merited more discussion. We should have debated it more thoroughly in committee at the end of our considerations.

However, given now that the only option before us is the original form of the bill, sadly I have to concur with the full committee that we should not proceed with the legislation, given the very serious problems.

[Denis Coderre, Liberal, Bourassa, QC]

Mr. Speaker, as a member of Parliament and a father of two young children aged 12 and 15, I want to begin by commending and congratulating my colleague from Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie on his efforts. This is a typical case of a commendable initiative that does not meet the required goals in practice. A number of reasons have been given, and I agree with them. In any event, the Liberal Party of Canada will accept this report for all the reasons that have already been given.

We are parliamentarians. The testimony we have heard indicates that everyone agrees with the principle as such. We therefore need to work together to set guidelines that will enable us to reduce violence and help our young people grow and develop in a healthy environment.

We are already debating Bill C-10 with regard to film production. There will be a debate on freedom of expression, control and so on. Looking strictly at Bill C-327, we can see that it is a commendable initiative whose goals were appropriate and certainly relevant. However, these goals would not be achieved in practice.

I also agree that we should have agencies such as the CRTC and self-regulation. Our committee is working very hard to give the CRTC the necessary tools and to give it more teeth, making a cause and effect link to ensure that when there are abuses or deficiencies on the part of the broadcasters, there can be, through the Broadcasting Act, cause and effect links and actions taken accordingly.

Unfortunately, this bill, in light of everything we have done, is becoming obsolete. That is why, pursuant to Standing Order 97.1 we recommended that the House of Commons not proceed further with the bill. That does not mean that nothing was done, but that exhaustive work had already been done.

I will not get into a political debate on the Conservatives, the Liberals, the NDP and the Bloc. All of us are either good parents or extremely aware of the relevance and importance of reducing violence. I am one of those who believes that it is not our role to regulate. That would lead us to a society where there is room for the arbitrary and possible censorship. How far will this go? I agree that there needs to be some structure and that we need to give agencies such as the CRTC the necessary tools to move from talk to action.

The work was comprehensive in scope. The member did a fine job, and he will be disappointed today. It is sad when a private member's bill does not pass. However, I would like to congratulate him because he contributed to moving this issue forward. He can tell his constituents and little Virginie Larivière that he did his job well, and that we all worked on this. Quite often, when our work entails creating legislation, we can have laudable objectives and present excellent proposals but, in terms of implementation, the situation as a whole must also be taken into consideration. Perhaps this is not the best approach. We did not move backwards, however. We continue to move forward. All of the members from the various parties contributed based on their own values and experiences. They shared their points of view.

It is also important to take time to read the whereas clauses.

Thus, we can see that we are all aiming at the same goal. I think that putting in all those “whereas” clauses provides the proper environment so people can understand that we have been doing our homework and that we are aiming at the same goal. However, as for the application itself, which is the legislation, we felt that in our case the Liberal Party of Canada could not proceed further.

We believe, and it is unanimous, in supporting freedom of expression, including everything regarding the media, film and television. As a start, it is important to talk about that.

Also, we believe that it is important to note the number of witnesses that came before the committee. It is not that we are deciding this in a partisan way. We have been doing our homework. We took the time to listen to the witnesses, including the children who came to tell us in their own way, with their own words, through their own experience, and with their own expertise what the application of Bill C-327 means. I think that is important to mention. I am a parent myself. There is always a need to relate that goal to education, to media literacy and clearly to parental engagement.

It was interesting when we had a little turmoil in putting together the motion, but everyone had the opportunity to put forward their words and explain clearly what they meant. I think the motion itself reflects that we have been doing a great job among ourselves.

Therefore, I truly believe that because it is the wrong means to achieve the goal, and because we believe in the goal, the Liberal Party of Canada, through Standing Order 97.1, will recommend that the House of Commons not proceed further with Bill C-327.

For all of these reasons, and for the work done by all of the members, I must say that the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage did a fine job. I did not feel a blind partisanship as I have felt in other committees. We work well in that way. Again, I congratulate my Bloc Québécois colleague from Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, and I would like to thank all of my colleagues. It is clear that we must accept this report as presented.

Arts and Culture

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I have the honour to table a petition signed by residents of Montreal and the Stratford area who are concerned about the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and its guarantee of cultural expression, noting that it is essential to democracy and the creative process and Canadian arts and culture.

The petitioners note that the Criminal Code already contains provisions regarding pornography, child pornography, hate propaganda and violent crime. They suggest that any guidelines for government funding must support the cultural sector, including the film and video production industry and that the guidelines should be objective, transparent and respect the freedom of expression.

They therefore call on the government to defend Canadian artistic and cultural expression, to rescind provisions of Bill C-10 which allow the government to censor film and video production in Canada and to ensure that the government has in place objective and transparent guidelines that respect freedom of expression when delivering any program intended to support film and video production in Canada.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Nepean—Carleton, ON]

Mr. Speaker, we will continue to encourage the artistic community with what is a very lavish and generous tax credit program that helps artists flourish in the country.

We will continue to support the Liberal draft legislation, which is in Bill C-10, that deals with the tax credit. We also will continue to thank the Liberal member for Davenport for his support of that bill and the support of the entire Liberal caucus as that bill sailed right through the House of Commons without any objection whatsoever.

I think it would be appropriate for him to take a moment and call his former Liberal deputy prime minister, Sheila Copps, not known to be an extreme right wing censor, and congratulate her for having drafted this fine piece of legislation. He could tell her that he plans to continue to support it, just as he has done from the outset.

[Mario Silva, Liberal, Davenport, ON]

Mr. Speaker, all the well-rehearsed statements about its support for Bill C-10 does not hide the fact that the government's proposed legislation threatens artistic freedom.

As has been noted by several observers, Bill C-10 is cunning in its method of censorship and its aim to limit artistic freedom. The funding for projects is threatened only after they are completed. The result is limitation and censorship up front simply because funding will be withheld after the completion of projects that are deemed unacceptable.

I join with the chorus of artist groups, civic organizations and Canadians across the country in calling upon the government to recognize the vitally important concept of artistic freedom of expression. We need to honour our cultural and artistic heritage, not restrict its growth and innovative expression.

Will the government come to its senses and encourage the artistic community, not try to control it?

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the President of the Treasury Board]

Mr. Speaker, in order to assess whether the bill was really ill-conceived, as was suggested by the Liberal member, we must ask ourselves who conceived it. In fact, it was the former Liberal deputy prime minister, Sheila Copps, who wrote the bill when she served in the previous Chrétien cabinet.

The reason she wrote the bill and the reason the Liberal Party unanimously supported it was that it was aimed at preventing murderers, like Karla Homolka, from profiting from their crimes. It was rumoured at that time that Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo would create films to glorify what they had done and that they would be entitled to public funds to finance those films. That was the concern of the previous Liberal government.

At that time, the Liberals introduced the bill and for many years it has circulated throughout the House with unanimous support in all parties. When the current government put together Bill C-10, which is, by and large, a housekeeping bill on tax law, it was natural for us to include in the bill a piece of draft legislation that had already been written and had broad support but had just never made it through the House of Commons and Senate for procedural reasons and because of elections and other interruptions.

When we introduced the bill in the House of Commons, we had unanimous support. Indeed, the member for Davenport, wisely, was a strong supporter of Bill C-10, as was the entire Liberal caucus. Today he has changed his position and now opposes the bill that he supported, and I am not quite sure why. The bill simply states that taxpayer dollars should not be used to fund pornography, extreme violence or hatred against identifiable groups.

Most Canadians would agree that there should be an unlimited freedom of expression for artists who want to create any kind of film they want but, given that there are scarce resources in the public treasury, we should direct those resources to non-pornographic films and to films that do not glorify violence for its own sake.

I would like to distinguish for a moment between incidental nudity and pornography. I take a movie like Shindler's List, which had both violence and nudity incidental to the story of the Holocaust. In other words, one could not have the movie without both of those elements included. It is a very challenging and difficult movie to watch but one of the most important we have seen in decades.

That kind of film, though it is not Canadian nor is it applying for this tax credit, would not be made ineligible by the contents of Bill C-10. However, movies that are made explicitly for pornographic reasons, where the nudity exists for its own sake and not for the sake of telling a broader story, need not be financed by the public. Censorship would be to ban them but they are still legal but they cannot rely on public funds to finance them.

I will close by saying that one man's freedom of expression does not entitle him to stick his hand in the pocket of another.

[Mario Silva, Liberal, Davenport, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the great writer George Bernard Shaw once said, “Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable”. This is a statement that members across the floor on the government benches would do well to ponder.

In his gleeful statement about his virtually unfettered access to the upper echelons of the Conservative government, the unregistered lobbyist, Mr. Charles McVety, all but jumps with excitement in proclaiming that his campaign against the arts community had found an audience within the current government.

The arts do matter. They add character and meaning to our lives. They take us beyond the utilitarian nature of life and they cause us to question, to learn and to grow as human beings and as a society.

In his recent critique of Bill C-10, the commentator John Moore wrote the following in the National Post:

The reason the arts matter is because the day man first drew a picture of a bison on a cave wall was the day life became more than a grim struggle for survival.

This is the point which the current government must come to understand. The arts are not some commodity to be contained and restrained using the power of the public purse. They are supposed to challenge our belief system and they are supposed to do so in ways that are provocative and visionary.

What the government is proposing is quite simply more appropriate in a period 200 years ago than it is today. Modern societies are enriched by the arts and by artists and do not benefit from those who would seek to limit their work.

I am sure that almost all members of the House are familiar with the writer Oscar Wilde, whose work was heavily criticized by some during his lifetime. I would defy anyone here today to name the judge who imprisoned him. We remember Oscar Wilde because his work endured; it was provocative and had meaning. We do not recall those who persecuted him because they worked to limit the human imagination rather than free it. His artistic work is timeless. Their names are long forgotten.

In my city of Toronto, the arts are an important part of our community. The arts employ 8% of Toronto's workforce.There are 21,000 resident artists in Toronto. There are hundreds of arts organizations and festivals, ranging from small venues to globally known events such as the Toronto International Film Festival.

In my riding of Davenport, there are many outstanding artists and arts organizations, such as the Clay and Paper Theatre, that are invaluable to our community's life and spirit.

Although the arts generate considerable revenue for the city of Toronto and for communities across our country, their value is measured far beyond the revenue they generate.

It is vital to ensure that the arts prosper in Canada and we can only do this by encouraging innovative, thought-provoking and visionary artistic expression. Bill C-10 has the potential to rob all of us of such opportunities to experience and to question the great ideals of human existence.

Will the government recognize the need to promote artistic freedom by withdrawing the ill-conceived and unnecessary Bill C-10, which threatens the arts community across Canada?

Food and Drugs Act

[Robert Thibault, Liberal, West Nova, NS]

Mr. Speaker, that is a very good point. It is a point that is often overlooked by the House when we approve a bill. We saw it with Bill C-10. One small element of a regulation was missed by the House, but luckily it was picked up by the Senate, as it would have led to censorship in our film and television production.

In this case, there are a number of acts, such as the Canadian Food Inspection Agency Act, the Fisheries Act, and some agricultural aspects, which the next speaker will certainly want to raise. The joint administration and the cross-regulation between the Health Act, the Food and Drugs Act and other acts necessitate all these amendments.

These are some of the things that we certainly will be studying at committee. We will ask the Library of Parliament for the analysis, which it does very well. We have had the preliminary one. As well, witnesses will appear who can show us if there will be difficulties within their areas of jurisdiction or administration.

Canadian Environmental Protection Act, 1999

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have this opportunity to join in the discussion today of Bill C-33, An Act to amend the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, 1999, regarding biofuels.

As we have been hearing, this is very important legislation. The amendment before us today is also very important, as it relates to how we do the business of the people of Canada in this place.

The intent of Bill C-33 is to enable the government to regulate renewable content and fossil fuels and proceed with plans to mandate a 5% renewable content in gasoline by 2010 and a 2% average renewable content in diesel and heating oil by 2012. This is something that we have supported in this corner of the House, although we supported it with reservations in the hope that we might see some important changes made when it was before the committee.

My colleague from British Columbia Southern Interior and my colleague from Western Arctic have worked hard to see improvements made to the legislation before it came back to the House. Unfortunately, that work was only partially successful. That is the reason we have this amendment before us today.

I should say that in committee there was some success, in that my colleague from British Columbia Southern Interior managed to ensure that a parliamentary review would be undertaken every two years on the environmental and economic impacts resulting from the biofuel industry. That was a very significant addition to the legislation.

It is certainly something that needed to be there, especially given the changing scene regarding biofuels and the concerns that are being raised more intensely with every passing day, it seems, about the effect of this industry and these fuels on our planet and on food production in particular. Achieving that review at committee as an amendment to the legislation was a very important contribution to the debate around Bill C-33 and will have an important and lasting effect should this legislation ultimately pass.

The other problem, however, is that the other amendments introduced by the NDP and my colleague from British Columbia Southern Interior did not get through the committee. They were very significant as well, in that they would have ensured that Canadian farmers benefited from any federal investment in the biofuel industry by the prohibiting of imported grains and oils for the production of biofuels. These amendments would have made sure that what is used in the biofuel industry is produced here in Canada.

The other part of the amendments that unfortunately was lost at committee called for the protection of the natural biodiversity of the environment from contamination by genetically modified trees and seeds. We have seen over and over again the concern about genetically modified foods being grown in Canada. There is a particular concern about the use of genetically modified seed and the effect that will have on agriculture in Canada. Given the interest in producing for biofuels, we wanted to make sure that there was some limitation on genetically modified seed and trees being used. Unfortunately, that did not make it through the committee either.

Finally, my colleague from British Columbia Southern Interior tried to ensure that prohibiting the exploitation of sensitive biodiverse regions for growing crops for biofuel production was part of the legislation. That seems to be a very reasonable addition. It is something we should be concerned about when we are going down this road of biofuels, but sadly that did not make it through either.

The final and most blatant statement, I think, and the most important statement of all, was that food production should come first, before production for biofuels. We wanted to see that enshrined in the legislation as a principle as well. That did not make it through the committee process.

These are all very serious issues that were raised by the NDP in the debate at committee and ours were all very reasonable and appropriate amendments to bring forward. I am sad that they did not get the support of the other parties to get them included in the legislation we are debating here today.

That being said, we are putting forward another amendment today at this stage of the debate. That amendment would ensure the scrutiny of the regulations related to the bill that are brought forward and would make sure that the appropriate committee of the House has that opportunity specifically to look at the regulations. We heard earlier from my colleague from Winnipeg that often the devil is in the details. When it comes to legislation, the details are often in the regulations.

That is why we believe it is important to pass this amendment. As well as having oversight of the overall environmental and economic impact of heading down the biofuels road, we want to make sure that we look specifically at the regulations that are brought forward by the government relating to this bill. That is extremely important. Often we do not pay the kind of attention that we should. Given the very serious concerns related to biofuels, it is important that we do that.

Without that kind of scrutiny, and given that this is broad enabling legislation, we worry that we are handing the government another blank cheque. The Conservative government seems to be very interested in those kinds of blank cheques. It seems to be very interested in promulgating legislation, guidelines and regulations that are big enough to drive a Mack truck through. We have seen this over and over again.

We saw this with Bill C-10. That bill was essentially about closing income tax loopholes, but also included a guideline around the film and video tax credit dealing essentially with the censorship of film and video production in Canada. It is a very broad guideline that gives the minister and the government very broad powers with respect to deciding, based on apparently their own personal tastes, what should or should not be funded when it comes to film and video production in Canada. We in this corner of the House and many people in the arts community and the film and video production community in Canada are concerned about that and are extremely upset about it. It is another example of putting a very broad guideline or regulation into a piece of legislation that would give the government broad powers to make decisions without being clear and transparent.

We have also seen this with respect to Bill C-50, the budget implementation bill. The bill includes similar broad powers for the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration when it comes to dealing with immigration applications from people wishing to come to Canada. It gives the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration the power to choose to ignore immigration applications. This is very inappropriate. The NDP has fought long and hard for an immigration system that is transparent, that is guided by clear regulations and clear policy. To give this kind of broad arbitrary power to the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration who can ignore immigration applications based on unknown decisions to us, such as personal preference or biases of the current government, seems unreasonable.

We see Bill C-33 as very broad legislation. It would essentially give the government a blank cheque to develop regulations around the biofuels industry. The NDP is very concerned about that. It should be more closely delineated. There should certainly be, at least as a bare minimum, more opportunity for scrutiny of the overall direction of the legislation and the impact it would have, as well as direct scrutiny of the regulations that are brought forward relating to it. That is what our amendment deals with today.

The whole question of biofuels is part of what some people are calling the perfect storm. In an article Gwynne Dyer wrote about the coming food catastrophe, he sees it as a piece of the perfect storm, related to population increase, related to the demand for food which is growing faster than the population, and to the changes in diet in countries like China and India where there is a growing middle class. It is related to global warming. Some countries are seeing changes in climate that affect their ability to grow food. Again there is the whole question of biofuels and whether they supposedly reduce carbon dioxide emissions, but because of the change in food growing patterns that they are evoking around the world, they actually may strongly increase carbon dioxide emissions. Biofuels may not be a solution to the problem, but in fact may make it worse.

Gwynne Dyer certainly sees all of these things coming together as the perfect storm. He quoted Professor Robert Watson, a former adviser to the World Bank, who said, “It would obviously be totally insane if we had a policy to try and reduce greenhouse gas emissions through the use of biofuels that is actually leading to an increase in greenhouse gases”.

National Defence

[Denis Coderre, Liberal, Bourassa, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I could have asked a question today regarding the incompetence of the Minister of Canadian Heritage, Status of Women and Official Languages, who says one thing in private and the opposite in public concerning Bill C-10. That is real minor league stuff. I could also talk about the incompetence of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, who embarrassed us in Afghanistan. Actually, he embarrasses us everywhere.

However, considering that General Hillier, the real National Defence minister, has just announced his resignation, can the other Minister of National Defence tell us why he insists on muzzling the military police complaints commission and literally destroying over a year's worth of work on the torture investigation? What does he have to hide?

Liberal Party of Canada

[Harold Albrecht, Conservative, Kitchener—Conestoga, ON]

Mr. Speaker, Canadians are finding it increasingly difficult to understand and trust the Liberal Party's divergent positions on almost every issue. Despite claims it is united, all evidence points to a number of different factions within it, all with extremely varying positions.

What is more remarkable is that the Liberal Party's own leader changes his position on issues from day to day and week to week. Who can believe anything he says when one week he is against the budget and the next week he supports it, one week he does not agree with our immigration reforms, and the next week he is supporting the government?

The Liberals voted in favour of Bill C-10, the same measure announced by the previous Liberal government in 2003, but have now changed their minds.

It is the Liberal Party that has trouble sorting out its policy. Riddled with division and frustration, the Liberals have become the party of no policy, no leadership and no credible plan for Canada.

Judges Act

[Jean-Claude D'Amours, Liberal, Madawaska—Restigouche, NB]

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased this afternoon to speak to Bill C-31. As I already mentioned earlier, this bill is extremely important if we look at the needs of our judicial system across the country. It is also very important because of the current vacancies within the judiciary. The government has come up with Bill C-31 to appoint 20 extra judges.

The government certainly has its share of the responsibility for the current situation with respect to judicial appointments. When we look at the situation, the Conservatives are certainly the only ones to blame. They cannot blame anyone else but themselves in this case.

As far as the appointment of 20 extra judges is concerned, as I have said, we must make sure that Canadians receive the services to which they are entitled. This is not just a matter of people appearing in court or before a judge because they have done something wrong. Canadians also appear before a judge or judges because they want to fight for their rights.

We have a rather concrete example, which I just gave, of a woman, who, thanks to the court challenges program, was able to fight for her right to be served in French by the RCMP. The court ruled that the woman's complaint was well-founded. As the House can see, Canadians do not just appear before a judge when they have done something wrong, but also when they want to stand up for their rights, the fundamental rights of this country that cannot be denied any Canadian citizen. One of the great things about our country is also the fact that we are free to speak up for ourselves, which is possible because of the judicial system.

We need extra judges, but we also have to wonder about Bill C-31. Since January 2006, since the Conservatives have been in power in Ottawa, we have had to wonder quite a bit. What we hear and what the Conservatives say are rarely the same thing. That is why I wonder about certain aspects of the bill.

One of the aspects is ensuring the independence of the judiciary. That is what the government tries to say, but the opposite happens when it comes time to make a decision. A number of examples show that we should still be worried. Sometimes, when the government introduces a bill, we wonder if they are acting with utmost sincerity or if they have a hidden agenda. I will not go on and on. I know that some members of the government will say that I am off topic, but let us look at the example of Bill C-10 and the question of censorship. That is flagrant proof that the government is trying to introduce bills containing elements that make us believe they are sincere, while in reality they are hiding elements from us.

I spoke earlier about the importance of the independence of the judiciary. I have serious issues with certain elements—I am thinking about the members of the provincial advisory councils. The Conservatives decided to appoint people in order to obtain power. In northern New Brunswick, they appear to have stacked the deck in an attempt to control the judicial system. The Conservative government is wrong to do that. The other element in terms of Canadian judicial system appointments has to do with the appointment of people who are influential within the Conservative Party.

The Conservatives say that it is important that the best people be appointed.

Yes, it is important to appoint the most qualified people, and that should guide all of the government's decisions every day. However, a closer look at the situation suggests that it might be more than coincidence.

The Conservatives have just said that the best, most qualified people should be appointed, but we have to wonder. As it happens, the Prime Minister's former campaign director for New Brunswick, the former president of the Conservative Party in Quebec, and the former chief Conservative Party fundraiser for Alberta were all awarded judgeships.

As it also happens, the Conservative government said that there must be transparency—especially on the part of the government—that the best people must be appointed and that the most qualified people must get the job. This is about fairness and about giving people a reason to have faith in the system.

However, it just so happens that high-ranking Conservative Party members got lucky. It is quite the coincidence that these people were appointed and the others were rejected.

We might think that from time to time, party supporters might get lucky and be appointed, but that is because they are the best candidates with the best qualifications, people who can demonstrate that they have the best skills for the job.

We should take a look at the situation in the provinces. I gave just a few examples earlier of very high-ranking Conservative Party members who were appointed to the Canadian judicial system.

I find these elements very troubling. The Canadian people also have concerns about this party, which is easy to understand when things like this come up. The government is trying to make itself look as though it is transparent, as though it is the political party, the government, that wants to do things with as much clarity and transparency as possible. The sad truth is that it is filling up the room and filling up the committees via the back door. What does the Conservative government want the appointees to abide by? By Conservative ideology, of course.

Canadians have every reason to fear the Conservatives. In fact, Canadians have every reason to fear the Conservative ideology, because the future of the country in many respects is certainly not currently in the right hands. People in my riding say so all the time. There are things going on, and people are afraid of the Conservatives.

When we say, myself included, that Conservatives are not transparent, that they try to slip things in through the back door, that they add things to bills to bring them in line with the Conservative ideology, we need to be prepared to back this up. Moreover, we must be able to provide even more proof to Canadians that the Conservative government is making decisions not for the well-being of the Canadian people or of minorities, but solely for the well-being of the political party currently in power.

Ethics

[Diane Marleau, Liberal, Sudbury, ON]

Mr. Speaker, tapes seem to be the Conservatives' nemesis. The Secretary of State (Multiculturalism and Canadian Identity) was taped speaking about the Sikh community. Senator Angus was taped speaking about Bill C-10. The Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons was taped speaking about homosexuals. The Prime Minister was taped speaking about the Cadman affair.

Why do they say one thing in private and another in public?

Afghanistan

[Peter Van Loan, Conservative, Leader of the Government in the House of Commons and Minister for Democratic Reform]

Mr. Speaker, our position is quite clear. What is difficult to understand is any position on almost any issue coming from the Liberal Party. We understand that because often there are many different groups and many different factions within the party that have different positions.

What is more remarkable is that it is also the leader of the Liberal Party who can take one position on issues of foreign policy one day, and then two weeks later take an entirely different position. Those members did the same thing on the tax bill, Bill C-10. They did the same thing on the immigration bill last week. It is the Liberal Party that has trouble sorting out its policies. That party has no policy, no vision and no leadership. It is all over here.

Arts and Culture

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Mr. Speaker, the Minister of Canadian Heritage, Status of Women and Official Languages is reported to have said that she hates Bill C-10. I hope she has finally joined the club.

Others continue to call on the government to use this tax measure to censor film and video production. Just yesterday, Charles McVety, the lobbyist who claims to have influenced the Conservatives to put this controversial guideline into law, said “decency trumps freedom”.

Given the concerns raised by the arts community and producers, will the minister withdraw this amendment and develop guidelines that fully respect the freedom of expression and directly address the serious concerns about censorship?

Government Policies

[Ralph Goodale, Liberal, Wascana, SK]

Mr. Speaker, tape recordings are a problem for the government, with the Secretary of State for Multiculturalism accusing the Sikh community of racism, on tape, with Senator Angus saying Conservatives are divided over Bill C-10 and censorship, on tape, and with the parliamentary secretary to the government House leader demeaning gay people, on tape. As for the Canada Border Services Agency destroying evidence of misused tasers, it was on tape until the agency got rid of it.

Is this the government strategy, deny members' own words and all that self-incrimination, destroy the evidence, and have an election before Canadians can find out the truth?

Government Programs

[Peter Van Loan, Conservative, Leader of the Government in the House of Commons and Minister for Democratic Reform]

Mr. Speaker, on the accessibility fund, the deadline has not even passed. Applications have not even been filed yet. How she has decided who has already received the grant is entirely beyond me.

In terms of matters like Bill C-10, we are trying to work together with other parties in a minority Parliament. This is why we were pleased on Bill C-10 that the NDP supported the bill. In fact, the member for Winnipeg North said this in the House when she was speaking about the bill:

Today we are dealing with a bill that arises out of concerns from the Auditor General about the perpetuation of tax loopholes and tax havens.

That is why those members were supporting it. They thought it was a good thing.

Apparently they are like the Liberals and they too are changing their minds every day on where they stand on the issues.

Canadian Heritage

[Pablo Rodriguez, Liberal, Honoré-Mercier, QC]

Mr. Speaker, the Conservative chair of the Standing Senate Committee on Banking, Trade and Commerce, which is currently studying Bill C-10, declared that the Minister of Canadian Heritage, Status of Women and Official Languages told him that she detested the bill in question. She detests it.

Can the minister tell us why she is forced to defend a bill that she detests? Is it simply because she is afraid of her boss?

[Josée Verner, Conservative, Minister of Canadian Heritage]

Mr. Speaker, naturally I appreciate your correction. I dare not, as a minister on this side of the House, point to the opposition critic with another finger, for example.

That said, I will reiterate that I have a document here that was sent to more than thirty groups in 2001 and in which all the provisions contained in Bill C-10 appear with exactly the same wording.

[Denis Coderre, Liberal, Bourassa, QC]

Mr. Speaker, in light of what is happening in the other place with regard to Bill C-10, it is understandable that the only allies of the blacklist minister are her friends from the religious right. The entire industry has rejected outright her plan to become the Canadian champion of censorship across the board.

I have learned from various sources that the office of the blacklist minister is exerting undue pressure on the industry by making any significant funding through the Canadian Television Fund dependent on it showing the expected and desired support for Bill C-10. Why?

Film Industry

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the President of the Treasury Board]

Mr. Speaker, some wealthy elites are angry about Bill C-10, which the House passed unanimously. The bill respects freedom of expression and ensures that taxpayers are not forced to pay for purposeless pornographic or ultra-violent films. Such films will continue to be permitted under the law, just not paid for by the public purse.

Today, Sarah Polley, who calls herself a socialist, indicates that she and others in her industry should have the right to spend taxpayer money on whatever they want. Ms. Polley has the right to her socialist views. In fact, she has the right to make any kind of film she wants.

Working taxpaying families only ask that she remember that they are the ones paying her bills. After all, one person's freedom of expression does not entitle him or her to reach into the pocket of another.

Budget Implementation Act, 2008

[Anita Neville, Liberal, Winnipeg South Centre, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have the opportunity today to speak to Bill C-50, the 2008 budget implementation bill, which contains many of the measures set out in the government's budget.

After over two years of lavish spending, the government decided, wisely, to be a little more fiscally prudent with this budget. We have heard many times before in the debates that this is indeed the first Conservative government to have a balanced budget since Robert Borden's government in 1912.

The only reason why the government has not plummeted into deficit is the sound fiscal inheritance of the previous Liberal government. When the Liberal government left office there were billions of dollars in surpluses. Also, the Liberals managed with eight consecutive balanced budgets. Canada had the best fiscal record in all of the G-7 economies.

This year the title of the budget was “Responsible Leadership”. It is rather ironic, I would think. We have heard from many that we are indeed on the cusp of a deficit.

The government went on a foolish spending spree when times were good. It made irresponsible tax cuts, taking $12 billion out of the fiscal framework with the two cuts to the GST, and now that the economy is beginning to slow, our financial situation becomes more precarious. Responsible leadership and sound economic management, I would say, are certainly questionable.

When the government delivered its budget speech, it appeared like a straightforward document, only for the government to deceive Canadians with the bill before us, which contains what I would call a zinger clause. With the budget implementation bill, the government has imposed upon Canadians immigration measures that would give the minister unprecedented power: unprecedented power to pick and choose, unprecedented power to determine who gets in and who stays out, and unprecedented power to play favourites.

What the government is saying yet again is “trust us, we know best, we will make the rules and you will be better off”, a pattern we have seen with the Wheat Board and the government's manipulation of processes and numbers. We have seen it with the censorship activities of Bill C-10 and with the lack of consultation on the repeal of section 67 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, and the list goes on.

In this case, the government wants to be trusted, trusted to decide behind closed doors if one's mother, father or children can come to Canada, again with no consultation, with no input from those most affected on any of the impending changes, whether they are families, settlement groups, employers or provincial governments.

Just this morning in committee, the Auditor General was before the committee and spoke to the importance of consultation in the development of any policies of government. The government wants us to believe that it will meet its goal, as articulated, of reducing the backlog with an increase in the budget of approximately 1%, and it is asking for trust.

Immigration needs to be taken out of the bill and properly studied in committee. A few years ago, I was part of the committee that revamped the immigration bill. The consultations were widespread. The chorus was not unanimous by a long shot, but everybody had an opportunity to put forward his or her position and the consequences of decisions taken and decisions not made, and I would say that we have to do that again this time.

The government plays mind games with Canadians. It talks about being tough on crime, yet it stalls its own justice bills in the House and uses them to play petty partisan games when they get to the Senate.

When I look at this budget, I have somewhat the same reaction that I did to last year's budget. A little money was spent, with a sprinkle here, a dash there, a pinch for this and a pittance for that. Once again the government tried to appeal to everyone, but has spread its funds too thinly. One of my constituents calls the Conservatives' style of government and budget making “fast-food government”.

We know that our cities and communities are in vital need of investment. We have all heard about the billions of dollars of deficit Canadian municipalities face with respect to their infrastructure. We have also heard from the finance minister that potholes are certainly not his responsibility.

My own city of Winnipeg, like other cities in members' ridings, has significant financing challenges and yet there has been no recognition by the government of these challenges faced by cities. What the Conservatives did finally incorporate was the step the Liberals promised, and that was to make the gas tax permanent, and I commend them for that.

Budget 2008 provided $500 million for public transit out of the 2007-08 surplus. However, within days of that, we learned that $108 million of it was going to restore a train service to run through the minister's riding. Nobody had asked for that and no advice had been given on it.

The government has refused to answer questions about Manitoba's infrastructure program. We know that the floodway for Manitoba is non-negotiable. We know how important it is.

It was over a year ago when funding for the floodway was announced under the Canada strategic infrastructure program. A month later, it was decided to allocate the funding under the building Canada fund, which, I might add, is full of moneys committed by the previous Liberal government. This would shortchange the province of Manitoba by $170 million in infrastructure funds that could well go to a host of other issues.

I also want to talk about Lake Winnipeg. We heard grant announcements on what we in Manitoba call “our beloved Lake Winnipeg”. We heard that an additional $11 million would be headed toward the cleanup of Lake Winnipeg, bringing the total, with moneys committed previously, to $18 million.

Examination of several websites, coupled with conversations with many researchers and scientific experts on the restoration of the health of the lake, show that few funds indeed have been forthcoming to date. Again we have heard empty words and hollow commitments.

The Conservative government continues to treat the women and children of Manitoba and this country as an afterthought. Many of the issues of importance to women have largely been bypassed. The programs that most women talk about as important and transformative, such as housing, child care, education, health care, unemployment insurance, and legal aid, are of limited interest to the government.

We hear members opposite espouse family values and talk about children as the future. We also hear members opposite talk about skill shortages and the need for skilled workers. However, social programs go hand in hand with economic programs.

I have spoken many times here in this House about the need for quality child care. What about it? Nothing is forthcoming except that cheque through the mail. Where are the promised spaces? In my riding, there are huge waiting lists. Parents are forced to leave their employment. Parents, and particularly single mothers, do not have the necessary supports.

In the last few months, the waiting list at one day care in my riding has grown from 300 to 400 children. It receives five to ten inquiries a day about spaces. The government has not made the connection on the availability of child care spaces to economic growth.

Although I do not have time to read for members an email on this, I will take another opportunity to do so. I received an email that listed all the parents with respect to that child care facility, the jobs they do, and the contributions they make to the economic growth of the city of Winnipeg. Coupled with that is the desperate need for space in their day care.

I wanted to talk about the government's shortcomings with respect to aboriginal people, whether it is in education or in how the government is ignoring them in the consultation process on the repeal of section 67. We heard in committee this morning from a group of aboriginal women who have very grave concerns about the matrimonial real property legislation, which I look forward to reviewing.

However, we know that the government has not addressed the needs of aboriginal peoples except in this piecemeal, cherry-picking, fast-food manner of a little bit here or a little bit there. We will see what we can do.

[Denis Coderre, Liberal, Bourassa, QC]

Mr. Chair, I cannot have my cake and eat it too. As my NDP colleague has rightly said, we should not report to the House and drop clause-by-clause consideration just because I want more information. I understand everyone's sensibilities.

I ask my colleague Mr. Bigras not to take this personally. I am a parent myself and I have been in the House for 11 years. No one here has a monopoly on the truth. Nevertheless, I am persuaded by the arguments of my colleague, Mr. Abbott. As I have said from the outset, BillC-10 is a problem for me because it has implications on the content of audiovisual productions. However, I defer to the arguments made by Mr. Abbott and by other colleagues. We can remove my "whereas" sections that refer to Bill C-327. I concur with that entirely. I can even, if he wishes, withdraw my proposals and endorse his. I have no problem with that.

If my NDP colleague wanted to propose amendments...In fact, the media themselves may have legitimate and valid concerns about the idea. We are playing with broadcast times. Parents also have a responsibility for the way in which their children watch television. I also understand that the government, with its regulatory power, has a responsibility here too.

So I defer to my colleagues' arguments. As the NDP, the Conservative Party and the Liberal Party, our duty was to study a bill for the House in its context. We have done our homework. Witnesses have appeared and people have done a fine job. The principles remain, except that as we do this study, we realize that Standing Order 97.1 can be applied. We feel that the Chair does not have to report to the House and that, in the light of everything we have done, we should stop work immediately. This is why I agree completely with the amendment. I will remove all the "whereases" that I proposed.

I would like to remind you that, at the outset, I said that, in my book, as Stan, the great coach in Les Boys might say, the motion was "be it therefore". But for reasons provided by the clerk, I came to understand that we also needed to give clear reasons to justify invoking Standing Order 97.1.

That is what I had to say, Mr. Chair.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Thank you, Chair.

I'm in a bit of a bind with the motion and the amendment at this moment, because I have tabled amendments with the committee that I would like to have an opportunity to see discussed at committee. My understanding is that if we vote for this amendment and this motion, it would make the clause-by-clause consideration redundant, and those amendments wouldn't be considered. That being said, should my amendments fail, I would support a motion that called for us not to report this bill back to the House, and I would support the amendment put forward by Mr. Abbott.

On the amendment, I don't believe it's fair to link the discussion of Bill C-10 with the consideration of Bill C-327. I don't think it does justice to the work of Mr. Bigras on this issue. Although it was part of the context when we heard the debate on Bill C-27 and the concerns about Bill C-10 and censorship, I think it is unfair to link the two of them in this way, as Monsieur Coderre suggested in his original motion.

So I would support Mr. Abbott's amendment and the motion, but only should my proposed amendments fail. I think it's important that we look at these amendments, Chair, because I think we heard from many witnesses that the issue of violence on television is important to many people. Mr. Bigras has already indicated who some of these organizations are, and we've heard from some others. From listening to these witnesses, we know that there was also a concern that nothing we do be seen as censorship. I think if you consider the amendments I have proposed, you'll see that I've been very careful to remove any references that might support censorship in the original bill and to replace them with suggestions that are in place through some informal mechanism of adoption by the CRTC when it comes to codes of standards and ethics by the broadcasting industry, but that also emphasize what we heard from many witnesses, the need for media literacy or media awareness education, and it adds that to this legislation.

I think it is possible to find something helpful from this bill, and I want to commend Mr. Bigras for being so persistent in bringing this issue forward, because it is something that is of concern to so many Canadians and to so many people around this table. But I would like to see us have the opportunity to discuss the amendments.

So Mr. Chair, given that long preamble, I'm going to support Mr. Abbott's amendment, but when we get back to consideration of the main motion, I'm going to propose that we table it, so that we can consider the amendments that I put forward. And should they fail, I'll be the first person to move that we remove this amended motion from the table so that we can consider it after that process.

[Bernard Bigras, Bloc, Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC]

Mr. Chair, I understand the spirit of my colleague Mr. Coderre's motion. I also understand that the amendments the government has decided to make are friendly, but it seems clear from the four points in his preamble that the member is trying to suggest an ill-intentioned link between bills C-10 andC-327

I have to ask members to recall that Bill C-327, right in its preamble that I invite them to read, makes it clear that the creative freedom of artists in the television industry must be protected. It is also clear that censorship is no solution. In its very principle, the bill rules out censorship and promotes freedom of expression. It is clear that, in its very spirit, my colleague's motion seeks to suggest ill-intentioned links. What does the bill do? It does not seek to become involved in the content of a production. Not one section of this bill seeks to become involved in the content of film productions.

Moreover, the bill does not seek to forbid the showing of films. It simply seeks to put limits on when some films can be shown. Some people have suggested that Bill C-327 is not the appropriate way to attain our goal of reducing violence in our society. I just remind them that the association representing Ontario school boards sent a letter to each member of this committee indicating its support for regulations requiring that films containing violence and rated 13 years and over should be broadcast after 9:00 p.m.

Furthermore, the Centrale des syndicats du Québec, the biggest education association in Quebec, clearly told us that it also wanted regulations. I deplore the link that my colleague Mr. Coderre is making. I do not know whether he is doing so because he wants to make his mark in his new portfolio, but this approach is, in my view, purely partisan, ill-intentioned and attempts to establish links that do not exist. The bill clearly rejects censorship and supports freedom of creative expression. This bill has received support from the Centrale des syndicats du Québec and the Ontario school boards association. Teachers want it, as do others who work with our children every day.

Mr. Chair, I think that my colleagues should show some political courage and at least allow this bill to be studied. That is the least we can do. How do we explain that Liberal members came out in favour of the principle of studying this bill in committee and then made a motion to put an end to all debate and stop committee study of the very same bill? It is totally unacceptable.

We are going to oppose this motion and its friendly amendments. I hope that my colleagues have the political courage to do as my NDP colleague has done and make amendments. Parliament, the House of Commons, wishes the bill to be studied here. I can understand that it may be amended, but we must remember that it is the wish of Parliament, supported by the Liberal Party of Canada, that this bill be studied in committee.

[Denis Coderre, Liberal, Bourassa, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

As agreed at our last meeting, we have a motion. My intention was to make a motion introduced simply by the words "Therefore be it", but after discussing the matter with the clerk, we decided that this would not be enough. I needed to specify the rationale and I can discuss it. I am also open to amendments.

But we must remember Bill C-10 and the fact that points have been discussed that have a direct bearing on audiovisual productions and therefore on television content. I thought that the bill would eventually make its way back here if there were amendments in the Senate. So I felt that it was somewhat redundant to continue studying the bill before us, however noble its goal. I feel that everyone is in favour of freedom of expression and that we all agree that we have responsibilities.

But given that work is presently proceeding on Bill C-10 and that this cause and effect link might cause us to amend Bill C-327, I asked, pursuant to Standing Order 97.1, that the House of Commons proceed no further with Bill C-327 and that the Chair present the report to the House. Therefore, I so move.

[Charles Hubbard, Liberal, Miramichi, NB]

One of the big costs that seems to be spoken about, from your statements today, is the cost involved with legislation that needs to be judged. The Charter, for example, has been a big cost to your department since its start.

We have had considerable concerns with some bills that come to us as parliamentarians. For example, Bill C-2 was done, I think, quite hurriedly—a very complex bill. When your legal group presents that to Parliament, are you satisfied that it's good legislation, the best legislation, legislation that will be held up in a court of law; or are you creating some legislation that would present great problems and great costs to our departments in the future?

Bill C-10 is another one we are concerned about. There is fisheries legislation; we referred here a few minutes ago to the fisheries department and the fact that a new bill is being presented to Parliament. In fact, it's there and is probably going to committee at second reading.

As lawyers, in presenting legislation—and I go back to Bill C-2 in particular.... You must have made great efforts, to present Bill C-2 to Parliament as quickly as it came. It's very complex legislation. Eventually it got through, though it was held up for a time in the Senate, as was Bill C-10.

Are we guaranteed as parliamentarians that you as a department have not only done your work but also probably have consulted some outside legal opinions, so that the legislation you come with is as perfect as possible in terms of what our country needs within its justice system?

Canadian Heritage

[Josée Verner, Conservative, Minister of Canadian Heritage]

Mr. Speaker, the member for Bourassa can grandstand all he likes, but he knows that the wording of the clause in Bill C-10 is exactly the same as what his former colleagues, ministers Manley and Copps, included in a press release in 2003.

It is exactly the same thing, but five years later, suddenly the Liberals are asking questions.

Canadian Wheat Board

[Anita Neville, Liberal, Winnipeg South Centre, MB]

Mr. Speaker, Bill C-50 rips the heart out of Canada's immigration system by cabinet orders exercised in secret. Bill C-10 is the ideological censorship of film and video productions by cabinet orders imposed in secret. Now there is Bill C-46, a sneak attack on the democratic rights of farmers to control the Wheat Board, again by cabinet orders imposed in secret.

Why does the government, which ran on accountability, have so much dirty work being done in secret?

Canadian Heritage

[Denis Coderre, Liberal, Bourassa, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am not sure that they will applaud again.

My question is for the Minister of Canadian Heritage, Status of Women and Official Languages and the former vice-president of the advertising firm, LXB.

In speaking of censorship, La Rochefoucauld said, “Mediocre minds usually dismiss anything which reaches beyond their own understanding.” Does she really wish to be associated with the “great darkness” and have our culture, creative arts and film industry be controlled by her religious lobbyist friends?

Why is she so stubbornly opposed to amending Bill C-10 and thereby preventing us from stepping back in time 50 years? Duplessis, be gone!

Film Industry

[Luc Malo, Bloc, Verchères—Les Patriotes, QC]

Mr. Speaker, at the Jutra awards, the feelings expressed about Bill C-10 were unanimous, and two of the winning producers, Luc Déry and Kim McCraw, summed it up when they said that the bill was an abomination that threatens freedom of expression.

Does the minister plan on listening to the demands of the Quebec film community, which is calling on the government to remove the reference to “public policy”, which definitely could lead to censorship?

Opposition Motion—Income Tax Act

[Jim Abbott, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary for Canadian Heritage]

Mr. Speaker, I am rather amused by the use of the terms “freedom of expression” by my NDP friend.

Apparently he does not believe there should be freedom of expression for members of Parliament who are representing the views of people they speak to when they go back home. The members for Palliser and Abbotsford were doing exactly that.

I believe that of all places in Canada, there must be freedom of expression in this place for people to express the views, the wishes, the desires, and the direction that Canadians want to go. We should not feel encumbered by the hon. member's ideas of what is politically correct to say and what is not. I say shame on him.

With respect to the guidelines, they do not exist. They cannot exist before Bill C-10 is passed. There are simply no guidelines to provide. When Bill C-10 is passed, we will be holding consultations. As a matter of fact, consultations have already begun.

With respect to the misspeak of the official from the department, he should not have used the word “update”. There is no update because there are no existing guidelines as defined by this legislation. Once the legislation is passed, the minister will direct the department to continue those consultations and the guidelines will be developed.

I have a question for the member. I am sure he must be aware of CAVCO, which is the Canadian Audio-Visual Certification Office, and I quote to him from its guidelines. He will find that there is an echo in this chamber, the echo being the words he objects to in Bill C-10 which are repeated in CAVCO's guidelines. It states that, “production for which public financial support would, in the opinion of the Minister of Canadian Heritage, be contrary to public policy”.

Those are the current--

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to have the opportunity to participate in the debate this afternoon on the motion from the member for Ahuntsic, which reads in part:

That, in the opinion of the House, the government should introduce, as soon as possible, an amendment to Bill C-10, An Act to amend the Income Tax Act...in order to remove the reference to public policy that is added by this bill to subsection 125.4(1) of the Income Tax Act, because this new provision opens the door to unacceptable government censorship of film and video production.

I thank the member for Ahuntsic and her party for giving us the opportunity to debate this issue, for putting it on the agenda and using one of their opposition days to have this important debate.

New Democrats support the motion to remove this wide open reference to public policy considerations from the guidelines related to the application of the Canadian film and video production tax credit.

We support the motion because we believe the provision is far too broad and far too easily misused. In fact, it is so large that we could drive a truck through it. We have seen that already this afternoon with the inability of government members in particular to define exactly what that clause means.

Over the last week we have seen concerns emerge across Canada about the implications of changes to the Income Tax Act with regard to the Canadian film and video tax credit. The changes to section 125.4 of the act would allow the government, through the Minister of Canadian Heritage, to deny a film or video an important tax credit.

In the provisions of this legislation it says that the minister would have to be “satisfied” that “the public financial support of the production would not be contrary to public policy”. Earlier when the minister was asked to define what it meant to be contrary to public policy, there was no answer forthcoming.

Another important provision in Bill C-10, with regard to the film and video tax credit, is it also removes development of these guidelines from the usual statutory requirements, leaving the process solely with the Minister of Canadian Heritage. It removes it from the Statutory Instruments Act to allow the minister to short-circuit the usual process, to short-circuit the usual legal import of guidelines and regulations and to develop those regulations on her own. Even though the minister said that there would be some kind of public process around this, the final decision still rests with the minister. That is another serious concern about the legislation.

This was one provision in a large bill of almost 600 pages of income tax changes. The overall intent of the bill was to close tax loopholes and deal with the question of tax havens. I admit I missed this provision when we looked at the legislation. It never occurred to me to look for a censorship measure, or a measure that could be used for censorship in legislation to deal with tax loopholes and tax havens. I think this is why all of us found that this kind of provision was buried deep inside other legislation on quite a different topic.

I now know about this provision. I have now been made aware of it by people in the arts community in particular. Now that this concern has been raised, I will do all that I can to ensure that this problem is fixed fully and appropriately. There will not be any resting until we completely deal with the matter. As of yet, I have not seen that assurance from the government.

It is important that we take responsibility for this. The motion, which calls on the government to take a measure to delete that section from the bill, is an important suggestion, and the government has that ability. As I mentioned earlier, the government has told the committee of the Senate looking at this legislation, that it will be bringing its own amendment to Bill C-10. The Conservatives have identified other problems with the legislation.

It is not only the opposition parties that have problems with the legislation. It is also the government. Therefore, the delay in the legislation now is that the committee in the Senate is waiting for the government to bring forward those amendments.

I think this is the perfect opportunity for this House to tell the government that deleting this reference to a public policy guideline should be part of the amendments that it brings forward to the Senate. I disagree strongly with the decision of the Liberals to back away from supporting this legislation, to refuse to support this motion this afternoon, saying that the government would not do it anyway. The government has the perfect opportunity to do it now. I think the House has the perfect opportunity to encourage the government to bring that forward.

This concern broke after an article appeared in the Globe and Mail last Thursday. At that time, Charles Drouin, a spokesperson for Canadian Heritage, is quoted as saying in a statement:

“Bill C-10, currently at third reading in the Senate, contains an amendment to the Income Tax Act which would allow the Minister of Canadian Heritage to deny eligibility to tax credits of productions determined to be contrary to public policy.”

Mr. Drouin also noted:

“... Upon royal assent of C-10, the Department of Canadian Heritage plans to update the eligibility requirements for the...program.”

That is the Canadian film or video production tax credit program.

Also, Robert Soucy, the director of the Canadian Audio-Visual Certification Office, the office that administers the tax credit program, has been reported as saying that the federal government wants to be more selective about the cultural products it funds.

Mr. Soucy has also suggested that a panel would be set up by his office and it would review content and have the final say on who got the tax credit after this review of content of film and video production. He is also reported in the media to have “hinted that the government was considering a 'public policy' criterion” related to film and video production and also sound recording and publishing.

That is the background of the concerns that have emerged over this past week.

I believe that the government should immediately table any draft guidelines that have already been prepared, so that we can see exactly what is planned in relation to this public policy guideline. The government should also announce a public review of the existing guidelines and a public process around the revisions of the current guidelines or the development of new ones.

I am glad to hear the minister this afternoon say that she would do that kind of process. I am not clear about how extensive that will be or what exactly the commitment was made, but she did mention something to that effect.

Why is this causing such concern? Why is a provision that may have existed for some time, that may already exist in the guidelines, that is now being talked about as being introduced as part of the income tax law itself, raising such concerns at this point?

I think that is because of comments made by members of the Conservative Party in relation to film and video production in Canada and what they think is appropriate or not appropriate. I have to say that, as a member of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage, this has been done at the standing committee.

Back on January 31 the standing committee was meeting the new president of Telefilm Canada, Michel Roy. At that time a number of Conservative members took the opportunity to criticize some of the decisions of Telefilm Canada and some of the specific decisions of funding that were made.

One Conservative member of Parliament, and these quotes can be found in the evidence from that committee meeting on January 31, said he believed that “films should be for mainstream Canadian society”. I think this is clearly a limitation on the kinds of decisions that Telefilm Canada was making.

Another member at the time talked about a film that he had seen and he said, “it focused more on recreational sexual activity than loving relationships”. He concluded that that made it “not redeeming”.

Again, another Conservative member had a definitive opinion about what might be appropriate or inappropriate for Telefilm Canada to be funding and raised it directly with the president.

No matter what we think of recreational sexual activity, I do not think it is up to a Conservative member to tell the head of an agency what in fact is objectionable or redeeming in that situation. In fact, the same member, the member for Abbotsford, this afternoon talked about the government needing to take action to ensure that objectionable and offensive content does not go forward in film and video. Again, he never defined what he meant by the words “objectionable” and “offensive”. I think these are the kinds of comments that raise that concern.

Also, at the meeting on February 28, another Conservative member argued that the minister should have the ability, and I am quoting, “to restrict the flow of Canadian taxpayers' dollars to odious and unacceptable and repugnant movies”. Who is defining “odious and unacceptable and repugnant”? Why should anyone in the government have the ability to tell a filmmaker that the story the filmmaker wants to tell is odious and unacceptable and repugnant? I have some strong difficulties with this. Concern emerges in the arts community when it hears Conservative members trying to impose their own particular sensibilities, their own values in this regard.

At the committee meeting on January 31, another Conservative member went on at length about films that he found objectionable, seemingly related to the controversial nature of words in their titles. I do not know that that is a basis for wanting to deny funding to a filmmaker or a creative person in Canada, that somehow we find the wording in a title to be provocative.

Railing against a provocative title, or talking about mainstream films, or something being not redeeming or odious and unacceptable and repugnant are all concerns for a provision in law that is as broad as this public policy provision. That is where the concern stems from, and it is Conservative members who are fuelling that concern. That is why so many people in the arts community believe that the public policy clause in Bill C-10 opens the door to government censorship.

I do not believe that any politician, not me as the member for Burnaby--Douglas, not the former minister, Sheila Copps, who proposed this guideline originally and even acted on it, and not the current Minister of Canadian Heritage, should have the ability to impose our personal tastes, our personal sensibilities, our likes and dislikes, on the creative process, on cultural activities, on films, videos, books, magazines or recordings.

If we should not have that ability, I also do not believe that any bureaucrat or public servant should be delegated that kind of authority. I would have just as much difficulty if the tax certification office and people associated with it were delegated the authority to screen film and video production and its content in Canada and make decisions based on their perception of the acceptability or unacceptability of that content.

We need guidelines to enable the operation of a government program. I do not deny that, and I do not think anybody here would deny that. Those guidelines should be transparent and objective and they should encourage the telling of Canadian stories, but they should not and must not impose subjective limits on the freedom of expression in Canada.

It is not that there are not already some key limitations in place. The Criminal Code outlaws certain activities, child pornography, for example. Those kinds of provisions are already covered by the provisions of the Criminal Code of Canada.

A loophole as large as the guideline about so-called public policy goals must be closed. It should not be enshrined in legislation, which is what is happening in the case of Bill C-10. My subjective perspective should not be the determining factor on whether or not a film or video gets made in Canada, just as the Minister of Canadian Heritage's personal sense of what is offensive or odious, or Sheila Copps' personal feelings about a particularly tragic story in Canadian history, or even Reverend Charles McVety's perspective should not be the determining factor on which Canadian film gets made.

A country as diverse as Canada must ensure that as many of our stories as possible are told and controversy must not divert us from this goal. Just because a story is controversial does not mean that it should not be told, or that it does not deserve help from the government to assist in its telling. Just because a film or video in its title is provocative does not mean that it does not deserve our support. We have to take measures to ensure that the freedom of expression is protected in Canada. We have to make sure that the creative process in Canada is supported.

Some Conservatives will say that this does not amount to censorship even if the government did deny a film and video tax credit, because the filmmaker can get private funding anyway and make the film privately. That kind of attitude severely devalues the importance of the Canadian film and video tax credit system. Anyone who has worked in film and video production in Canada will explain how important this provision is and how it allows Canada to have a film and video production industry. They will also tell us how important it is to ensure that those stories are told.

I believe that this kind of provision and this kind of discussion and the kind of suggestions that come from Conservative members also have a chilling effect on that kind of production in Canada.

There is another aspect that worries me as well. When we have this kind of debate and these kinds of suggestions are made by the government or by individual Conservative members, I think it also sets up the possibility of self-censorship on the part of the creative community in Canada.

Creators need support and should not be encouraged to self-censor to get an idea past a minister, a bureaucrat or a panel that is reviewing content, who might not share their perspective, their life experiences, their ideology or their religious beliefs. This is completely inappropriate.

To set up this kind of system could lead to the self-censorship of people working in artistic endeavours in Canada.

I have to reiterate that guidelines for the administration of the tax credit program must be objective, transparent, clear and straightforward. They have to support the telling of Canadian stories.

One of the Conservative members who spoke this afternoon spent most of his speech in fact saying, “This was not our measure. This was the Liberals' measure”. Therefore, the conclusion was that it must be okay, that we could not have concerns about something like this because it originated with the Liberals.

I find that a really difficult premise to accept because there is a lot that the Liberals do that I have questions about. It seems again that we have this Liberal-Conservative coalition kind of activity happening where what one does seems acceptable to the other. This is another example, this time coming from the Conservatives who are saying, “The Liberals did it, it must be okay”. I really do have trouble with that kind of perspective.

Sheila Copps did make mistakes in her day as a political leader in Canada. She did much that was good as well, but not everything she did was right and needs to be continued by subsequent governments or members of Parliament today. I think the Liberals were wrong to go down this road and I think the Conservatives are wrong to continue taking us down that road.

The Senate is still considering this. The Senate should propose an amendment to get rid of the clause. I think we should put pressure on the government to make sure that kind of amendment comes up at the Senate committee.

As I said, the Senate committee is waiting on the government to bring in its own amendments to its own legislation because the government has identified problems. Here is one more that the government should add to its list.

We must be rigorous in our defence of the freedom of expression. We cannot minimize the importance of government support or tax credits to the industry. The reality is that the film industry in Canada depends on this support and without it, the possibilities of telling a Canadian story sharply decline.

It is ironic that a reporter in the press today pointed out that a U.S. production filmed in Canada might be eligible for tax credits that are denied to a fully Canadian production due to the public policy clause. That is because the same considerations do not seem to apply or to be considered for the film and video services tax credit used by many foreign productions that are filmed in Canada.

It is ironic that we may have this different provision that does not affect foreign film producers the same way that the Canadian film and video tax credit is administered with regard to this public policy criteria.

In this corner of the House, New Democrats are prepared to take a stand on this legislation. We are prepared to say that we are here to protect the freedom of expression in Canada, that we support the creative process, that we want to encourage the telling of Canadian stories. We want to make sure that guidelines are established that are clear, transparent, objective and straightforward for this important cultural program.

We also believe that we have to spend taxpayers' dollars responsibly, but that for us does not mean that we should not say no to censorship. We also have to say no to censorship or setting up the possibility where censorship can be exercised.

I firmly believe that this is possible. These kinds of guidelines without a provision that is so broad and so open, that raises the possibility of abuse and censorship is not necessary. Another kind of proposal can be drawn up and in this corner of the House we are prepared to take on that responsibility if the government and the official opposition are not prepared to do it.

When it comes down to it, the government, ministers and MPs, must be ready to take the heat when controversy erupts about a cultural production in Canada, when controversy erupts about the freedom of expression in Canada, which it is bound to do because protecting the freedom of expression in Canada and protecting the creative process is worth that effort.

We have to be prepared, as elected officials, to take the heat, to protect freedom of expression in Canada, and in this corner of the House, we are ready to do just that.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to be able to participate in the debate.

We have evidence again this afternoon of the Liberal-Conservative government coalition in action. Earlier the member for Abbotsford spoke at length about how this was Liberal legislation, a Liberal proposal, so therefore it must be okay. In fact, he dedicated seven minutes of his speech to that.

Now we have heard from the member for Ottawa—Vanier, and I am disappointed, that the Liberals will not oppose this because they do not think the government will not do it anyway.

I am glad he talked about the Senate. The reality is the bill could be fixed in the Senate. In fact, the Senate committee that is looking at Bill C-10 is not meeting. It is waiting to hear from the government. The government has told the Senate that it is proposing amendments to fix other problems with Bill C-10. Not only did we miss this provision in this corner but, apparently, the government missed a whole bunch of other problems with the legislation that it is seeking to fix in the Senate.

Therefore, there is an opportunity to support this motion this afternoon to compel the government to bring forward a solution to this problem in the Senate. I would ask that the Liberal Party and the member for Ottawa—Vanier reconsider their position. This opportunity explicitly exists at the Senate and it is because the government will bring forward its own amendment.

[Mauril Bélanger, Liberal, Ottawa—Vanier, ON]

Mr. Speaker, on behalf of the official opposition, I would first like to say that we share the concerns of thousands of Canadians who have clearly indicated, these past few days, their opposition, or at the very least, their concern over the actions of the Conservative government with respect to funding for Canada's television and film productions.

We agree that this requires closer examination to determine the true intentions of the government, what consultations it has already conducted and what it has failed to do. We need to know where things stand. If the situation needs to be rectified, we believe it should be.

But we do not think that the Bloc's motion, or at least their proposed method for tackling this issue, is the right way to go about it. That is why we will not support the motion.

We will not support this motion for several reasons. The first is obvious: the government will not respect it. The Bloc is asking the government to withdraw a section of Bill C-10, which is now before the Senate. Earlier, I asked the minister. Even if the Bloc motion were adopted, the government has no intention of withdrawing this section from the bill or proposing an amendment. So it is not worth it.

There are many examples of times when, although the House voted in favour of various legislative, financial or other types of measures, the government ignored them. I am thinking, for example, of the court challenges program. Many times, a majority expressed that it wanted the government to restore this program, but nothing happened.

The same thing happened with environmental issues. The House even took the legislative route, but we are still waiting for the government to follow up on the majority will of the House. The same goes for the Kelowna accord.

I could go on and on. This is why we have no doubt that even if the Bloc motion were adopted, the government has no intention of following through on it.

The second reason we do not support this motion is that Parliament must do its work. Parliament's role is to legislate and to supervise the government. It must do that work. Government representatives are rubbing our noses in the fact that the House endorsed this bill. On behalf of my party, I would like to say mea culpa, as others have done.

We have to acknowledge the reality of this situation. This is an extremely technical, 560 page-long bill. It was introduced during the first session of this Parliament, and it was referred to the Standing Committee on Finance, if I am not mistaken.

However, the government must act responsibly and honourably. The Crown demands a certain sense of honour of its representatives. When the committee studied Bill C-33, which is now Bill C-10, the government's representatives did not say a word about this measure. They tried to sneak it through quietly. That approach seems to have worked here in Parliament.

With all due respect to my NDP and Bloc colleagues, this is a bicameral parliament. Canada's Parliament is made up of two houses: this one and the Senate. Today, my Senate colleagues announced that the Standing Senate Committee on Banking, Trade and Commerce intends to study the matter.

Throughout the history of this institution, we have rarely seen a better example of the usefulness and necessity of a bicameral legislature, a parliament made up of two houses. Even though the government neglected to talk about some parts of the bill, given its very technical nature, the bill was sent to the Senate. Subsequently, the issue was raised publicly, and the Senate now intends to shed some light on it.

I believe that by April, the Senate will hold hearings and listen to those who want to be heard in order to find out what is going on. That is another reason we will not support the motion. We have to give Parliament a chance to do its work. As legislators, both houses of Parliament have a duty that they must carry out.

There is another reason: the proposed motion just puts the ball in the government's court. The minister said earlier that the federal and provincial governments are having some sort of discussion. We can presume that these discussions between officials and her staff have been precipitated in the past few days, for reasons I will get into in a few minutes. With all due respect to the minister, there has not been a lot of transparency here. No one knows when these meetings were held, who attended or what was discussed. We are left to assume certain things, when Parliament has a duty to carry out.

We have to look for the opportunity—and we have it right now, or will have it in the Senate—to clarify and truly understand the relationship that can exist between legislation, or Bill C-10, regulations and guidelines.

I have a question for the House and anyone watching us today. Earlier, reference was made to the Canadian Audio-Visual Certification Office guidelines. The hon. member for Kootenay—Columbia said that clause 5 states:

production for which public financial support would, in the opinion of the Minister of Canadian Heritage, be contrary to public policy

Note that was in February 2004.

Now, if I refer to the regulations, which have more authority under the political and legal conventions of our country and our Parliament, we do not find that in the regulations of 2005. They huff and puff that this is a Liberal initiative, but it must also be recognized that in 2005, under a Liberal government, the regulations excluded this item from the conditions making a film or television production ineligible.

What is this really about? This needs to be cleared up. The Senate, or the committee in question, will give a voice to all those who want to speak up. It could call witnesses. That brings us to the heart of the matter. I hope the Senate will call and listen to Mr. McVety.

This gentleman has made some affirmations that we believe must be questioned. He has affirmed having met with two ministers of the Crown, the Minister of Public Safety and the Minister of Justice, and that he is entirely satisfied that they have listened to his concerns about guidelines, future guidelines perhaps, who knows, and that he is happy.

Another comment was made on CBC Radio this week by the Parliamentary Secretary to the President of the Treasury Board who said that the government has already decided what it wants to do and that it wants to take guidelines from somewhere else and impose them on cinematography and television productions.

When we hear the minister saying that nothing has been done, that he is waiting for the bill and then he will consult, we must be allowed to have some doubts as to what has happened and, thus, the necessity to have these hearings so it will be clear and everyone can deal with this very delicate matter, which is akin to censorship as I have said, in full knowledge of the status of the current legislation, regulations and guidelines and whether they mesh or not. I think that is an absolutely legitimate role of Parliament. I wish that it was being done in the House instead of the Senate but that is not the case. It will be done in the Senate and we support that. I think that is the way to go.

We need to have clarity in this. I have received hundreds of messages and calls, and I know it is the same for many of my colleagues, from people wanting to know what gives. Whenever we deal with censorship, the matter of freedom of speech or the matter of artistic liberty, people have deep feelings about that, as they should. We live in a society where we do encourage respect. We have a Charter of Rights and Freedoms that establishes freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and freedom of expression. Artistic expression is certainly among those.

We need to understand what the government has in mind, what it did have in mind and what its intentions are. The best way of doing that is to use the ability and tools at the disposal of parliamentarians, whether they be in this House or the next house, to do that. The Liberal members of the Senate have publicly committed to doing that as early as possible, one would suspect as early as the month of April because the scheduling will be taken up in the next few days.

There is another reason why we cannot support the Bloc Québécois motion. This is because the amendment put forward by the Bloc might not be the right one. It might be, but it might not be. Other sections of Bill C-10 would have to be checked. Perhaps the best way to address this problem, once all the information and all the details are on the table, would be to ask that the Minister of Canadian Heritage be given the authority to establish regulations rather than guidelines.

This is important, because regulations are subject to review by Parliament, while guidelines are not. The Bloc Québécois is focusing on one section in particular. But I would like to highlight another section of Bill C-10. As I was saying, it is a 560-page bill that is extremely technical and I will try to quote part of it, in the hope that it will mean something to someone.

Another section says:

The Minister of Canadian Heritage shall issue guidelines respecting the circumstances under which the conditions in paragraphs (a) and (b) of the definition of “Canadian film or video production certificate” in subsection (1) are satisfied. For greater certainty, these guidelines are not statutory instruments as defined in the Statutory Instruments Act.

In English, it says that for greater certainty these guidelines are not statutory instruments as defined in the Statutory Instruments Act. The reason I raise this is that guidelines escape the scrutiny of Parliament. Once the Senate has heard the witnesses, convened officials and had a full airing of this matter, perhaps other sections may or may not need to be amended. Certainly, if there are to be guidelines at some point and anywhere, perhaps these guidelines should be a statutory instrument and therefore subject to parliamentary scrutiny. That would not be the case. There are a number of possible amendments that the Senate could make.

In the same spirit, if we were to rely on the Bloc's motion, we would be asking the government to present amendments. We have clear indications from the minister that the government has no intention whatsoever of providing such an amendment.

Therefore, if we rely on our own, as parliamentarians, be it this House or the next, ability and authority to review legislation and propose amendments, should that be the case, the amendments would come back to this House and we would have a chance to look at them, as I hope we do. That is another reason that I believe the Bloc's proposal is not the best way to go and we will not be supporting it.

I will quickly summarize the situation. We have a bill that has gone to the Senate. Tens of thousands of Canadians and nearly the entire artistic community are extremely concerned about certain statements made by some people to the effect that the government intends to change the guidelines concerning the payment of tax credits. This has created huge uncertainty within the industry.

Apart from the matter of possible censorship and the limiting of artistic freedom, another concern is the financial structure of productions for television or films. If we spend all the money and at the end we are told we cannot, then we cause incredible grief.

That is another consideration that must be addressed. I think the Senate, as my colleagues in the Senate have promised this afternoon, will provide an opportunity for those who wish to be heard, those who wish to express their concerns and those who wish to understand all of the complexities between text of law or a law, regulations and guidelines and how they interrelate. We have a duty as parliamentarians to ensure that is all on the table in a very transparent way.

The way the Bloc is proposing to do this would not provide that at all. It would not provide an opportunity for parliamentarians to do what should have been done in the first place. However, because we are a bicameral Parliament, we have an opportunity in the other House, in the red chamber, to do that.

Therefore, we will not support the Bloc motion, although we share the concerns expressed by tens of thousands of Canadians as to what the intentions of the government are. It is incumbent upon us to use whatever methods we have as legislators to shed the light on that. I am very happy and very proud that my colleagues in the Senate have undertaken to do just that and we will see where that leads us.

[Luc Malo, Bloc, Verchères—Les Patriotes, QC]

Mr. Speaker, if people in the film industry are pointing to potential censorship by the Conservative government, it is undoubtedly because there are examples to prove that the members of the Conservative Party are tempted to act in that manner.

I am referring to the recent appearance of the Chairman of the Board of Telefilm Canada before the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage. The member for Palliser listed movies which, in his opinion, Telefilm Canada should not have funded. This concrete example speaks for itself.

I am also thinking of the guidelines. The government told us that they once existed but that they no longer exist and that they will be issued after the bill is passed by the Senate and receives royal assent.

Does the member not think that, in order to eliminate these concerns, it would be better to remove this contentious passage from Bill C-10?

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I would be glad to answer that question.

Had the hon. member been listening, I reminded my colleagues in the House that four provinces actually have exactly the same wording that we are proposing in Bill C-10. Three others have similar wording and all hope to achieve the same goal.

If in fact the legislation would violate some human rights legislation in Canada, surely there would have been challenges in some of the other jurisdictions.

I also remind the member that this matter has been before the House. He had an opportunity to address this matter at committee, if he had chosen to do so. He did not raise the issue of human rights.

[Keith Martin, Liberal, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

In view of our conversation, Mr. Speaker, on Bill C-10, I wonder if the hon. member would ask his party to look at whether or not the human rights committee would take a look at human rights commissions in Canada and specifically section 13.(1) of the act.

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Andrew Scheer]

I think the hon. parliamentary secretary makes a good point. The motion before the House is very specific with regard to Bill C-10 and proposed amendments.

I did not hear anything in the question that had to do with this subject, so I think we will move on to another question, unless the hon. member can tie it in somehow.

The hon. member for Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca very briefly, if he can tie it into the motion.

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have the opportunity to engage in this debate on Bill C-10. My sole purpose today is to correct the public record regarding this bill.

As we know, Bill C-10 is a very specific amendment to the Income Tax Act and it clarifies our government's support for the Canadian film production industry. The bill simply permits the federal government to refuse to issue film tax credits where there are sound public policy reasons for doing so.

Regrettably, the debate has been muddied by unfair and inaccurate information emanating primarily from the opposition parties in this House.

From the outset, let me correct the public record by saying that, unlike what has been suggested this past week, the indisputable fact is that this proposal did not even originate with our current Conservative government. For anyone willing to actually examine the issue, it is abundantly clear that this proposed legislation originated with previous Liberal governments, going back to 1995.

As this fact seems to have escaped some of my conspiracy theory colleagues on the opposition benches, it might be helpful to review the historical record of this legislation.

As I have just stated, the very first time a previous Liberal government suggested a public policy limitation on the certification of films or video productions was back in 1995, some 13 years ago. The original release of the draft film tax credit regulations by the previous Liberal government provided discretion to the Minister of Canadian Heritage to refuse eligibility for film or video tax credits if the provision of public financial assistance--in other words, taxpayers' hard-earned dollars--would, in the opinion of the minister, be “contrary to public policy”.

Then again in 2002, the federal Department of Justice recommended to the then Liberal government of Jean Chrétien that such ministerial discretion be authorized in the Income Tax Act. In response, some amendments to the Income Tax Act were released for consultation by John Manley, who at that time was the Liberal minister of finance.

These amendments created a ministerial discretion to deny assistance to a film or video production on the grounds that granting such assistance would be “contrary to public policy”, exactly the wording that is in today's Bill C-10.

At the conclusion of that consultation period, final amendments were published on November 14, 2003. They were published jointly by then Minister Manley and the then Liberal minister of Canadian heritage, Sheila Copps, including the following provision:

“Canadian film or video production certificate” means a certificate issued in respect of a production by the Minister of Canadian Heritage certifying that the production is a Canadian film or video production in respect of which that Minister is satisfied that

public financial support of the production would not be contrary to public policy.

That provision released by the previous Liberal government is exactly the same provision, verbatim and word for word, that is included in the current Bill C-10, which we are debating today.

I would also like to quote a Liberal government news release that was issued jointly in 2003 by both John Manley and Sheila Copps. It stated:

Today's proposal results from ongoing consultations with all sectors of the film industry, which were undertaken by the Departments of Finance and Canadian Heritage....

To those in the film and television community who now plead ignorance to the introduction of these amendments, let me read a portion of the Canadian Film and Television Production Association press release from November 2003, a release that was still posted on its website the last time I looked, for all the world to see. It stated:

After almost three years of complex negotiations, the Department of Finance and Department of Canadian Heritage unveiled draft amendments to the Canadian Film or Video Production Tax Credit, which affects Canadian content production....

“This is going to help a lot of producers, and it's exactly what the industry needs right now. Making Canadian shows and films is tough in the current international markets. While financing is never easy, this is what the doctor ordered”, says Guy Mayson, acting president and CEO, Canadian Film and Television Production Association.

Everybody bought in when a Liberal government was in place.

I encourage people to go to that website and check out that news release. Anyone who reads the press release will note the absence of any serious concern with the discretionary power afforded under Bill C-10. There is nothing about censorship, nothing about it potentially devastating the industry.

As I have stated, these very amendments are now included in Bill C-10. In fact, the bill before us was first introduced in the last session of Parliament as Bill C-33.

In that previous session the bill had completed third reading in the House of Commons with all party support: NDP, Bloc, Liberal and Conservative. Of course, that session came to an end and the bill died on the order paper.

When the second session started, the bill was introduced as Bill C-10 and again received unanimous support from all parties in the House. It passed at second reading, went to committee, came back for third reading, and now it is in the Senate.

During that long process, the bill has been thoroughly reviewed time and time again by the NDP, the Liberals and the Bloc, both in this House and at the House and Senate committees. No objections were raised by parliamentarians from any opposition party, Liberal, NDP or Bloc, or even by film or television industry representatives.

Let me be perfectly clear. From November 2006 until very recently no expressions of concern regarding the amendment were raised. There were no fears regarding censorship or devastation of the industry. This is an industry all parliamentarians are proud of and want to thrive, an industry that not only serves a vital cultural role in Canada but an important economic role as well.

That is the history of Bill C-10. I trust that I have been able to dispel once and for all the absurd notion that the bill is a secret plan to introduce censorship. It is just not true.

Quite frankly, I am offended by that suggestion coming from the opposition parties. This is their bill. They introduced it. They thoroughly reviewed it a number of times. They approved it not once, not twice, but at least three times. In fact, this Liberal proposal goes back 13 years.

Now that I have firmly established the Liberal origins of the bill, I would like to turn to the central question. Why is it that both previous and current federal governments support this legislation?

Let me first note that restrictions on funding eligibility for films are not uncommon in cultural policy. Throughout the years most federal funding programs that support cultural works have included guidelines stating that certain materials, such as hate propaganda, excessively violent material, or pornography, is not eligible for government assistance. Most taxpayers find that eminently sensible. Somehow today, the Liberals, the NDP and the Bloc, who used to support this legislation, do not find it eminently sensible.

In the same way, Bill C-10 addresses only the most extreme and objectionable of film and video productions. What Bill C-10 does not do is in any way ban or restrict cultural productions which are privately funded.

We simply want to ensure that public funds, in other words taxpayers' hard earned dollars, are not invested in productions which are highly objectionable and offensive in their content. In fact, Bill C-10 simply implements long established practices in this regard.

For example, I note that four Canadian provinces have exactly the same wording in their film tax regimes as does our bill and three additional provinces employ very similar concepts, yet the Liberals and the Bloc and the NDP have not been jumping up and down about those jurisdictions having implemented this kind of legislation.

Despite the histrionics from the opposition parties, the Canadian film and television industry can be assured that it has the strong support of our Conservative government, especially the support of our fine Minister of Canadian Heritage. Canadian producers will continue to have great flexibility in the kind of productions they want to produce.

In short, the bill has absolutely nothing to do with censorship and everything to do with ensuring that taxpayers receive good value for the productions that they and their tax dollars subsidize.

[Josée Verner, Conservative, Louis-Saint-Laurent, QC]

Mr. Speaker, surely the hon. member must know that we are talking about rules that are already being applied in the book and magazine industry. One thing is certain, the famous guidelines will be set. As I said in my speech, we will hold consultations with industry people. We will take their comments into consideration and set the guidelines, as we should, after Bill C-10 is passed.

[Mauril Bélanger, Liberal, Ottawa—Vanier, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I listened carefully to the minister's remarks, and now I would like to ask her a question.

The motion we are considering today, if passed, would require the government to propose an amendment to Bill C-10—which is now before the Senate—to remove a certain clause.

If I understand and interpret the minister's remarks correctly, the government has no intention of following up on the House's wish in this regard. Do I understand correctly what the minister said about the motion before us today?

[Josée Verner, Conservative, Minister of Canadian Heritage]

Mr. Speaker, I will share my time with the member for Abbotsford.

I am pleased to speak today to Bill C-10. I will start by saying that over the last few days, we have heard a lot of false information about the purpose and scope of Bill C-10, An Act to Amend the Income Tax Act, in connection with tax credits for the production of films and videos.

I would like to take this opportunity to set the record straight and to discuss several things.

First, Bill C-10 is in no way a form of censorship. It is not our goal to interfere with freedom of expression, as the opposition would have us believe. Absolutely not. This bill would ensure the integrity of the tax system. The objective of this bill is to reassure taxpayers about the way public funds are spent. Since the Conservative government is responsible, this issue is important to us.

As some hon. members are aware, the Minister of Canadian Heritage has discretionary power to refuse to issue a film or video production certificate if, in the minister's opinion, the use of public funds is contrary to the public interest. This discretionary power has been in effect since 1995 under the Income Tax Regulations.

The proposed amendments in Bill C-10 come as no surprise to Canada's audiovisual industry. They were announced first in 2002 by the former finance minister in the Liberal government, then in 2003 by that same minister and the former Canadian heritage minister in the Liberal government. We therefore have a hard time understanding why the Liberals and now the Bloc seem to be opposed to the amendments. This is not the first time they have changed their minds, though.

Our government submitted exactly the same amendments to the House of Commons and they were approved by all parties on October 29, 2007, four months ago. All the parties approved the bill last fall. Moreover, four of the 10 provinces use the same wording in their system of tax credits for film production. Three other provinces refer to very similar concepts. In addition, Telefilm Canada, the federal cultural agency that provides financial support for Canadian audiovisual production, also refuses to finance some productions for similar reasons.

Many people have said that Bill C-10 will threaten freedom of expression. Nothing could be further from the truth. Our government continues to passionately defend freedom of expression.

The establishment of reasonable measures, such as the ones contained in Bill C-10, is designed to provide as much opportunity to freedom of expression, as it is consistent with the limits of the law and public policy.

Bill C-10 is about government accountability. It is about responsibility. Our government is a responsible government. A fundamental responsibility we have, as members of Parliament, is to ensure that Canadians are represented in these matters. I believe Bill C-10 does just that.

Bill C-10 also includes many other amendments to the Income Tax Act for which the film industry has asked. For example, amendments to section 241 would permit some disclosure of information to strengthen transparency in the administration of the programs in support of Canada's audiovisual industry.

The proposed amendments will allow the publication of recipients of tax credits, along with the names of the key creative personnel associated with the production. Other amendments simplify the tax credit and hence its benefits.

These measures are in keeping with our government's commitment to transparency, to streamline administrative processes and to reduce unnecessary red tape to make these programs work better for Canadians and, at the same time, make sure that the funds are managed effectively and efficiently.

Beyond the scope of this bill, our government has always demonstrated that it believed in the importance of culture.

We believe that it is important that our programs to support the arts, music, theatre, literature and audiovisual production reflect our country's history and Canadians' experiences. We believe that it is important for Canadians' voice to be heard, just as we believe that everyone should be able to hear it.

Our government has confirmed that commitment in many ways. We recently announced additional funding for festivals, the Canada Council and national museums. Moreover, budget 2006 granted a capital gains tax exemption for donations to public charities, many of which are active in the arts and culture.

Our commitment to culture is also evident on the international scene, as we sponsor and support the UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions.

In addition, our government promotes the creativity of Canada's audiovisual industry every day through many established programs, including the Canadian Feature Film Fund, the Canadian New Media Fund and the Canadian Television Fund.

We are also supporting this industry through co-production agreements and tax credit programs that have proven their worth.

We are also supporting various key organizations that stimulate the creativity of the audiovisual industry. Telefilm Canada, the National Film Board, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission come to mind.

In 2006-07, our government invested more than $765 million in Canadian audiovisual content: $74 million went to the National Film Board, $96 million to the Canadian Feature Film Fund, $252 million to the Canadian Television Fund, $14 million to the Canadian New Media Fund and $330 million to two tax credit programs.

Although public funds play an important role, we believe that they are not the only means available to develop the audiovisual industry. To stimulate the industry, we need policies, legislation and institutions. Important legislation, such as the Broadcasting Act, the Investment Canada Act and the Income Tax Act, along with other policies and regulations, contribute without a doubt to the success of our audiovisual industry.

Bill C-10 is about fairness and transparency. Many critics have said that the process is unfair and not transparent. With the passage of Bill C-10, the next step is for the Department of Canadian Heritage to conduct consultations with industry groups, as it did informally on March 3, and take full consideration of their comments and concerns. We will ensure that this will not have a negative effect on financing practices within the film industry.

In conclusion, let me address more specifically the audiovisual content. At the CFTPA convention, I stated the importance of content. In an open, global and multi-platform world, reaching Canadian audiences with Canadian content is the single most important objective.

This is why the creation of and the access to high calibre Canadian content that appeals to Canadians are the main drivers of our government's support. This is further evidence of our government's commitment to diverse cultural expression. Canada needs risk-takers to deliver this content and to capture the Canadian audience.

Our government firmly believes in its duty to support artists, creators and everyone who plays a key role in our cultural industries.

I would like to remind all Canadians that our government will continue to pursue this course with passion, respect and transparency.

[Maria Mourani, Bloc, Ahuntsic, QC]

moved:

That, in the opinion of the House, the government should introduce, as soon as possible, an amendment to Bill C-10, An Act to amend the Income Tax Act, including amendments in relation to foreign investment entities and non-resident trusts, and to provide for the bijural expression of the provisions of that Act, in order to remove the reference to public policy that is added by this bill to subsection 125.4(1) of the Income Tax Act, because this new provision opens the door to unacceptable government censorship of film and video production.

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to rise here today to introduce this motion to counter the Conservative government's desire to censor film productions.

The motion calls on this government to introduce, as soon as possible, an amendment to Bill C-10, An Act to amend the Income Tax Act, including amendments in relation to foreign investment entities and non-resident trusts, and to provide for the bijural expression of the provisions of that Act, with a view to remove the reference to public policy that is added by this bill to subsection 125.4(1) of the act.

We must ask the question: why should the expression “public policy” be removed? Well, this expression is so vague that it is open to interpretation. I will give a few over-the-top examples to demonstrate how it could be interpreted in various ways.

For instance, would a film that shows someone burning the Canadian flag or insulting the Queen conform to public policy? That is one question. What about a film that criticizes the Conservative government or questions our presence in Afghanistan or promotes sovereignty in the middle of or prior to a referendum, for instance? Would such a film conform to public policy? We must ask the question. Thus, the words “public policy” could be taken even further still.

With respect to Bill C-10, what is the Prime Minister telling us through the Minister of Canadian Heritage, Status of Women and Official Languages, of course?

Here is the first argument they keep repeating endlessly: given that this bill has already been passed by the House, and is presently being studied by the Senate, we should have acted earlier. That is true.

Nobody pointed out this section on criteria for film production credits. This section is buried in a 560-page bill to amend the Income Tax Act.

When I say nobody, I really mean nobody. The three opposition parties did not see it and the Senate did not see it at first or second reading. It is now at third reading stage. We can even assume—and I did say assume—that the Minister of Canadian Heritage did not see it because it was her colleague, the Minister of Finance, who was responsible for this legislation.

We must humbly acknowledge, and simply say, that a mistake was made and that we are prepared to rectify the situation. That is the important point: let us rectify the situation.

Yet we see that the government continues to make these kinds of arguments.

The second, and not the least important, of its arguments is that this government does not view it as a censorship mechanism. It would serve to prevent the state from funding pornographic movies, child pornography, hate propaganda and so forth. It is true that the state should not fund these types of productions.

We heard the Minister of Canadian Heritage blithely repeating in all the media and even in this House that we must not fund such productions and that the purpose of the section was to prevent such horrors.

I realize that the Minister of Canadian Heritage may not be aware that such movies are not funded in Canada or in Quebec. It is true that we do not have to know everything. In fact, either the Minister of Heritage is acting in bad faith or she is not aware that we have a Criminal Code that prohibits such things. Personally, I prefer to think that she just is not aware of it.

For the benefit of the Minister of Heritage, allow me to briefly summarize the offences found in the Criminal Code in this regard.

Section 319 of the Criminal Code includes provisions on hate propaganda and incitement of hatred. The maximum prison sentence is two years. Section 163 of the Criminal Code on offences tending to corrupt morals prohibits the production and distribution of child pornography and obscene publications.

I could cite other provisions. The famous subsection 163(1)(a) states: “—makes, prints, publishes, distributes, circulates, or has in his possession for the purpose of publication, distribution—”. This all has to do with child pornography.

Subsection 163.1(2) addresses the production of child pornography. Production itself is therefore covered. It also provides for maximum sentences of 10 years for the distribution of child pornography. The Criminal Code also covers other offences, such as defamation and slander.

I also want to remind the minister that the criteria for granting film certificates were changed in May 2005. Section VII, newly created by the Regulations Amending the Income Tax Regulations (Film and Video Productions), stipulates that all pornography is excluded. Child pornography is clearly defined in the Criminal Code. Under this new Section VII created by the Regulations Amending the Income Tax Regulations (Film and Video Productions), productions exclude all pornography. In other words, no tax credit is given to that type of film.

What current events have prompted us to amend the legislation in question? Why were these clarifications added? In my opinion, the question must be asked. Does this legislation not include hidden objectives that reflect the government's desire for censorship? I believe that people are inherently good and I can believe that the government is well-meaning. I am simply proposing that this bill be amended. It is not too late.

We all agree on one thing: the state must not provide funding for pornographic films. The state must not provide funding for child pornography or hate propaganda films either. We all agree on that.

I have good news for everyone: my colleague, the hon. member for Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, has tabled a bill to have the CRTC regulate violence on television. He would like violent programs to be broadcast after 9 p.m. when children are already sleeping. The purpose of his bill is to get the CRTC to do its job as a regulator. Broadcasters are currently required to regulate themselves voluntarily. This bill offers a way to control violence on television without having to censor anything.

I would like to bring up an interesting argument from a press release issued by the minister's office. The press release contains something I found rather unusual and it really left me wondering. So I wanted to take a closer look at it. According to this document, the creator of a film that includes content that may be subject to prosecution under the Criminal Code “could technically still be eligible for a film tax credit under the Income Tax Act.” The release goes on to say:

This is a legal absurdity; a loophole that successive governments—first Liberal, then Conservative—have worked to close.

I must admit I am rather surprised that a creator who produces a work that includes content that may be subject to prosecution under the Criminal Code could receive a tax credit. That is unthinkable. Let us assume that this creator produces pornographic movies. Child pornography is subject to prosecution under the Criminal Code. We do not pay for these kinds of things.

The creator would not receive a tax credit.

I must admit that I am rather shocked by this argument, which makes no sense, and just goes to show that the government is flailing around and saying any old thing.

I think that the Conservative government—and I am sure many members will agree—is still using the back door to impose its far-right values. The Minister of Canadian Heritage is accusing us of blowing this out of proportion, and is saying that the film industry is panicking for nothing. If that is the case, the Conservatives should reassure us and simply amend the bill. We will have been wrong, we will have blown things out of proportion, and they will have fixed this little problem.

Unfortunately, our Minister of Canadian Heritage is powerless. She does not make the decisions in her department; they are made by her colleague, the Minister of Finance. I think she is so powerless that she is strongly supporting aberrations that are taking us back to the time of censorship. Now that is really something. It is very sad, but I think this is the only concrete action the minister has taken for the film industry, which is an action against the film industry. It is truly sad.

Indeed, this minister's record when it comes to the film industry is absolutely terrible, pathetic even. Let me explain. She is a minister from Quebec and she still refuses to recognize the existence of the Quebec film industry. She is the first minister to have abandoned the International Centre of Films for Children and Young People, whose head office had been in Montreal since 1990, and which had to move to Johannesburg, South Africa.

I would also remind the House that there was absolutely nothing for the film industry in the recent budget. Out of a $240 billion budget, she could not convince her colleague in the finance department to reinvest $50 million in the Feature Film Fund or the Television Fund. Furthermore, she still does not want to establish a $10 million documentary feature film fund, as called for by the film industry. It is so unfortunate and I am very sad to have to tell the cultural community that we have a heritage minister who is merely an extra.

Yes, the cultural community should be worried. As Pierre Even, producer of C.R.A.Z.Y, said, and I quote: “Despite the numerous representations we have made over the past two years to make the government aware of our needs, there was absolutely nothing in this budget for the film industry ... The government understands nothing about culture or how cultural institutions operate”.

This is very sad, indeed.

Here is how CTVM's newsletter summarized the general impression of this community, and I quote: “Our federal minister does not appear to like our movies”. We love movies. Does the minister not like movies? We would have to ask her. What I would say to the film community is that the Minister of Canadian Heritage is not showing any leadership in this file and is merely a powerless representation of a minister in power, even though she has none. She is a powerless minister.

[Jim Abbott, Conservative, Kootenay—Columbia, BC]

I have a quick matter to deal with, which I've asked the chair under a point of order. I had told the committee I was going to be getting back with the response from the department with respect to the guidelines in Bill C-10. This is the response I got. The guidelines do not exist, cannot exist, before Bill C-10 is passed. There are simply no guidelines to provide the committee. When Bill C-10 is passed, we'll be holding consultations on the guidelines.

With respect to the department official who was quoted on Thursday, he simply misspoke when he implied that there were guidelines in existence that the department was working on. There are no guidelines; he misspoke. After Bill C-10 is passed, once the legislation is passed, the minister will direct the department to begin consultations with industry officials and stakeholders, after consultation guidelines have been discussed.

Thank you.

Arts and Culture

[Maria Mourani, Bloc, Ahuntsic, QC]

Mr. Speaker, once again, the Minister of Canadian Heritage, Status of Women and Official Languages, who is powerless, is not answering questions. The solution is for the government to introduce an amendment to Bill C-10 as soon as possible to remove the reference to “public policy”, which opens the door to censorship.

Will the government promise to do so immediately?

[Maria Mourani, Bloc, Ahuntsic, QC]

Mr. Speaker, to justify its desire for censorship, the Conservative government is trotting out its old line that people who disagree with the government are promoting child pornography, defamatory libel and hate propaganda. These are already prohibited by the Criminal Code. The Minister of Canadian Heritage, Status of Women and Official Languages is even accusing the industry of creating a tempest in a teapot.

Will the Minister of Finance agree to amend Bill C-10 to ensure that these new provisions do not lead to any censorship?

Bill C-10

[Maria Mourani, Bloc, Ahuntsic, QC]

Mr. Speaker, Quebec's cultural community is worried. Bill C-10 on tax measures contains a clause that redefines the conditions for obtaining a film production credit. This highly vague provision is a mistake and must be corrected.

Can the Minister of Canadian Heritage assure us that she will intervene to correct this mistake immediately, a mistake that does not reflect the intention of the legislators?

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Thank you, Chair.

I'm glad we're having this discussion. I think this is a very important concern, and I'm glad that the parliamentary secretary has committed to bringing us more specific information on this.

He spoke about the need for ministers to make judgment calls, and that may well be true. But I think that in an area like this we have to understand on what basis that judgment is being exercised, and what are the guidelines in place that the minister would avail herself of to make that kind of decision. That's why I think it's very important that we understand what guidelines have been developed by the department to interpret this particular clause of Bill C-10.

I still hope that if this bill is before the Senate, the Senate might pay some attention to this particular clause and send a reworking of it back to the House of Commons to be looked at again, because I do have very serious concerns about how easily we can go down the road of censorship.

I hasten to say that even Mr. Abbott's example of a film or a story told about the odious crimes of Paul Bernardo may not mean that a film or video presentation about that story is in itself odious and repugnant. What Mr. Bernardo did certainly was repugnant, and as a society maybe it's important that we understand what happened there, and that it may be a particular role for creative people to tell that story. But if we're going to decide before that story is told that it's odious and repugnant, I do have some concerns.

So I think it's very important that we see what guidelines are in place, what the changes have been, and to act responsibly as the committee that's responsible for Canadian Heritage and the creative process in this regard, so that we understand completely what's happened here.

[Jim Abbott, Conservative, Kootenay—Columbia, BC]

Mr. Chairman, I welcome the opportunity to address this issue. It's always interesting to read newspaper articles where people from the heritage ministry are quoted saying one thing, and then, somehow, somebody else comments who doesn't necessarily have any knowledge of what's going on and has no connection whatsoever with the government, and then ends up speculating on the comments of the heritage official. It becomes kind of a mixed bag.

I think it's important to take a look at Bill C-10 from the point of view of its history and understand why it is the way it is. It basically started in a budget announcement in 1999 under the then Chrétien Liberals. A number of other ways and means motions were brought forward that never actually came to fruition until, as Mr. Bélanger has indicated, sometime in 2003. It then carried on and was reintroduced in the Paul Martin government, fundamentally unchanged. It was picked up by our government and was then run through. I think it's very important to note that this was run through the House of Commons with all-party support, so we all had an opportunity to take a look at this.

With respect to the clause that is of concern to Mr. Bélanger, I'd note that the original legislation was introduced by John Manley at Sheila Copps' request, and you wonder why. Well, the move, which she wanted, was sparked by a request for tax credits on a film based on the Paul Bernardo story, and the minister didn't have the ability to deny the credit. There are times in Canada when we have to trust our government, be it a Liberal government, a Conservative government, whatever government. There are times when the ministers of the crown have a responsibility to the people of Canada to make some decisions that may be censorship. Censoring the potential of public money going to a Paul Bernardo film is something that I would have absolutely no difficulty whatsoever in justifying. As a matter of fact, I would have difficulty in justifying Canadian taxpayers' money going to such a film.

So it was on that basis that the Liberals originally decided this was going to be part of this bill, and it's something on which I would hope there wouldn't be any difference in Canadians' minds in terms of the level of responsibility that a Liberal Minister of Canadian Heritage would show over a Conservative Minister of Canadian Heritage. In other words, the law is the law, and there is a responsibility on the part of the government, representing the people of Canada and the values of the people of Canada, for a minister to be able to make these judgment calls.

I guess what I quite frankly find odious is the presumption, somehow, on the part of some of the commentators in this story that God forbid a Conservative heritage minister would have this power to actually make this kind of judgment and be able to restrict the flow of Canadian taxpayers' dollars into odious, unacceptable, and repugnant movies such as what would come of the Bernardo story. That's really the background to it.

I would offer to test the veracity of this story. The official—I believe it is Charles Drouin—is quoted as saying that the department “has recently standardized and updated the list of illegal and other ineligible content.”

I would offer to go to the minister and ask the department to give us those lists, if those lists exist, and I would be very happy to see that those lists are tabled at the next meeting. But that said, I think we have something rather spectacular here, some journalism that maybe could have been a little bit better, and we probably have a little bit of a tempest in a teapot at this particular point.

[Mauril Bélanger, Liberal, Ottawa—Vanier, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I wanted to bring up a matter that has been brought to my attention today, the newspaper article related to Bill C-10 that is currently before the Senate, I believe in third reading. I gather it is a budget implementation bill that contains a variety of matters, including changes to the Income Tax Act that would result from an announcement made on November 14, 2003--and I quote from Bill C-10--“to simplify and better target the tax incentives for certified Canadian films”.

The article in today's paper--and I would quote portions of it--is what causes some concern. This is The Globe and Mail on page 1, and I'm quoting from that article: “A spokesman for the Heritage Ministry last night confirmed the change.” That means the change that the--and I'll quote the title of the article--“Tories plan to withhold funding for 'offensive' productions”.

Then the article after that says--and I'm quoting it:

“Bill C-10, currently at third reading in the Senate, contains an amendment to the Income Tax Act which would allow the Minister of Canadian Heritage to deny eligibility to tax credits of productions determined to be contrary to public policy,” Charles Drouin, spokesman for Canadian Heritage said in a statement.

Continuing on:

Upon royal assent of C-10, the Department of Canadian Heritage plans to update the eligibility requirements for the [Canadian Film or Video Production Tax Credit] program. He said the department "has recently standardized and updated the list of illegal and other ineligible content."

Mr. Chairman, I've read the announcement and the background to the announcement of November 14, 2003, from the then Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance, John Manley, and from the Minister of Canadian Heritage, Sheila Copps. It deals with technical matters of credits that can be claimed for these productions, percentages for raising the labour expenditures that can be claimed from 48% to 60%, and the nature of that labour expenditure.

So it's essentially a technical matter, and it doesn't deal, that I can tell, with any matters that some people would believe might be akin to censorship in terms of the nature of the productions or the content of the productions other than Canadian content and so forth.

I don't see that Bill C-10 does that. It doesn't give the government the capacity to do that. That's a matter, Mr. Chairman, that I think we need to clarify. I wanted to bring this up today to ask Mr. Abbott, as the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Canadian Heritage, indeed what the intention is, if there's any intention of the government to introduce any regulations or to change any definitions that would indeed do what the article affirms. I think we need, as a committee, to address that. I, for one, would have significant problems regardless of who's in government if that were indeed the outcome of such amendments to the Income Tax Act.

Bill C-219

[Tom Lukiwski, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons and Minister for Democratic Reform]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order respecting the procedural acceptability of Bill C-219, An Act to amend the Income Tax Act (deduction for volunteer emergency service), which is currently on the order of precedence in the name of the hon. for Malpeque.

Without commenting on the merits of the bill, I would ask the Speaker to rule on whether the bill conforms to the procedural requirements for tax legislation.

Briefly stated, the Income Tax Act has been amended since the introduction of Bill C-219, so that the bill now has the unintended effect of increasing taxes.

Although the bill was in order when it was first introduced, I will be arguing that the bill should have been preceded by a ways and means motion when it was reinstated in the current session of Parliament.

I will therefore be arguing that the bill should be withdrawn from the order paper.

Bill C-219 proposes to amend the Income Tax Act to allow volunteer emergency workers to deduct $1,000 from their taxable income if they performed at least 100 hours of volunteer service and $2,000 if they performed at least 200 hours of volunteer service.

Bill C-219 was first introduced in the House during the previous session of Parliament on April 10, 2006.

On October 16, 2007 the bill was deemed to have been introduced and read a first time in the current session of Parliament pursuant to Standing Order 86.1 which provides for the reinstatement of private members' business following a prorogation.

As the Speaker knows, bills that increase the level of taxation must first be preceded by the adoption of a ways and means motion. The 22nd edition of Erskine May states at pages 777 and 778 that matters requiring authorization by a ways and means resolution include “the repeal or reduction of existing alleviations of taxation, such as exemptions or drawbacks”.

Bill C-219 proposes to amend the Income Tax Act to provide a tax deduction for voluntary emergency workers. Erskine May makes clear at page 781 that bills that alleviate taxation do not require a ways and means motion.

I therefore recognize that the bill was properly before the House when it was first introduced in the previous session of this Parliament. However, since Bill C-219 was first introduced, the Income Tax Act has been amended and as a consequence Bill C-219 will now have the unintended effect of increasing levels of taxation.

Let me take a moment to explain why.

Bill C-219 would add proposed paragraphs 60(y) and 60(z), and proposed sections 60.03 and 60.04 to the Income Tax Act. As I noted earlier, after Bill C-219 was introduced, the Income Tax Act was amended by Parliament in ways which affect Bill C-219.

First, paragraph 60(y) of the Income Tax Act was added by subsection 174(1) of the Budget Implementation Act, 2006, which received royal assent on June 22, 2006.

The effect of this new paragraph is to provide a deduction equal to the amount of any universal child care benefit that a taxpayer is required to pay. The deduction is necessary because when the taxpayer initially received the universal child care benefit the amount is required to be treated as income. As such, it is taxable.

However, if the benefit is to be repaid, taxes would be paid on an amount the taxpayer did not get to keep. That is why the deduction is required. Without it, more taxes are paid. Therefore, removing the deduction would have the effect of increasing the taxes paid.

Proposed paragraph 60(y) contained in Bill C-219 would set out the new tax deduction proposed in the bill but would also have the effect of replacing existing paragraph 60(y) in the Income Tax Act. Therefore, as currently drafted, Bill C-219 would result in a greater tax burden.

The same could also be said for proposed paragraph 60(z), contained in Bill C-219. Section 105 of the Budget and Economic Statement Implementation Act, 2007, which received royal assent on December 14, 2007, has already added paragraph 60(z) to the Income Tax Act.

Paragraph 60(z) provides for the deduction of any repayment of any grants or bonds paid under the Canada Disability Savings Act. Bill C-219 would remove that deduction.

The third change to the Income Tax Act to which I wish to draw attention is proposed section 60.03 which was added by section 5(1) of the Budget Implementation Act, 2007, which received royal assent on June 22, 2007.

Section 60.03 of the Income Tax Act allows a couple to split their pension income to permit them to take advantage of a lower effective marginal tax rate.

The proposed section 60.03 of Bill C-219 sets out the evidence taxpayers are required to submit to be eligible for the new tax deduction proposed in the bill, but would also have the effect of replacing the existing section 60.03 in the Income Tax Act. In other words, Bill C-219 would repeal the pension splitting provisions and therefore result in a greater tax burden for seniors.

We have with Bill C-219 an unusual circumstance. A ways and means motion was not required when the bill was introduced in the previous session because the bill did not have the effect of increasing taxes at that time.

However, Bill C-219 amends the Income Tax Act, which has since been amended. The provisions of the Income Tax Act, which are being repealed by Bill C-219, were for the benefit of taxpayers. By removing these provisions, we would be adding to the tax burden. Consequently, I would suggest that the bill should have been preceded by an adoption of a ways of means motion at the time of reintroduction in this session and that the bill is therefore now improperly before the House.

I note that in this session the government tabled ways and means motions and had them adopted by the House before the reinstatement of two government tax increase bills from the previous session, namely Bill C-10, the income tax bill, and Bill C-12, the bankruptcy and wage earner protection bill. The government would have tabled a ways and means motion for any new government bill to increase taxes which would remove provisions added in previous budget bills.

In addition, I suggest that the requirement for a ways and means motion is not limited to the introduction of a bill, but also to any motion that would increase taxation. For example, it is clear that motions to amend bills that have the effect of increasing taxation require a ways and means motion. Citation 982 of the sixth edition of Beauchesne's states that, “No motion can therefore be made to impose a tax”.

It could therefore be argued that the motion for second reading of Bill C-219 is out of order, as the bill would have the effect of increasing the levels of taxation.

Finally, Mr. Speaker, if you were to find that Bill C-219 is now improperly before the House, as I argue, I believe you would be obliged to direct that the order for second reading of the bill be discharged and the bill be withdrawn from the order paper, as you did in the case of Bill C-418 earlier in the session, on November 28, 2007.

Tackling Violent Crime Act

[Serge Ménard, Bloc, Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak in this House on a subject to which I have devoted most of my professional career. When I left university, I became a crown attorney, first at the provincial level, then at the federal level. Then I became a defence attorney. I was even the president of the Association des avocats de la défense. I was the Bâtonnier of the province of Quebec, and then minister of justice and minister of public safety. As you can see, I have long thought about crime in general and effective ways to fight it. I have also thought about the bogus solutions that are sometimes proposed and that have produced disastrous results in neighbouring countries. I would not want this country to follow in its neighbour's footsteps only to end up with the same results.

From the outset, I would say that I think we all share the same goal, and that is to fight crime. Where we differ is in how to go about it. I give my opponents credit and they should give me credit as well, especially since my past has shown that, in situations where I really had power, I could fight crime effectively. Our major victory over the Hells Angels in Quebec is a very clear example of that.

Nevertheless, I often heard from the other side that we were filibustering on Bill C-2. I do not know whether the people who said that know what a filibuster is. In French, the word is “filibusterie”. The word “filibuster” comes from the French word “filibustier”. This tactic was first used in the U.S. senate by an elderly senator who had serious objections to a bill. At the time, there was no limit on speaking time, as there is now in all legislatures, thanks in part to him. To express his disagreement with the bill, he decided to speak without stopping. He even took the Bible and read long excerpts from it, and he kept on speaking.

Today, we have measures to prevent filibusters and systematic obstruction. We have a set amount of time to present our arguments. Filibustering means using every possible procedural means to prolong a debate.

Bill C-2 groups together five bills that were introduced during the previous session, including the bill on bail. The motion at third reading was adopted unanimously, without a vote, on June 5, 2007. I therefore do not see how we could have delayed that part of Bill C-2.

Bill C-32 on impaired driving died on the order paper, even before the report stage. Once again, I do not see how anyone could accuse us of filibustering.

Bill C-27 on dangerous offenders also died on the order paper, in committee. What does it mean when a bill dies on the order paper? It means that ordinarily we should have resumed the deliberations that were interrupted in late spring, but the session was prorogued. The government prorogued it. It was the government that aborted the process these bills had to go through before becoming law. As a result, these bills could not be discussed any further.

The same is true of Bill C-22. Even worse, this bill had been adopted at third reading. Once again, it had received unanimous approval.

We voted in favour of these four bills. Where, then, is the filibustering, this tactic where members try to prolong the debate so that a bill they disagree with goes nowhere?

One major bill remains, Bill C-10, which provides for minimum sentences for offences involving firearms.

We were against it for a number of reasons, but the bill was passed at third reading on May 29, 2007.

The government decided to group these five bills together for one reason: none of the bills elicited systematic opposition. Knowing that we have some objections to Bill C-10, which I will discuss shortly, the government is trying to say that if we vote against Bill C-2 because we are against this part, we are also against all of the other parts.

This argument keeps coming up in this House, and I do not think it is well founded. I cannot understand why all of the parties keep using this argument. I myself have never used it and probably never will. However, when we vote in favour of blocks of legislation—such as the throne speech, which contains numerous measures—that means we support some measures, but are against others.

We weigh the measures we support against those we oppose. We explain why we vote as we do. For a throne speech, when the negatives outweigh the positives, we vote against it even though we support some of the measures it contains. It is utterly unfair to say that since we voted against a group of measures, we must oppose all of the measures in that group.

The same goes for the budget when they criticize us for voting against measures that we actually want to see in place. We voted against the budget because the cons, the measures we did not support, outweighed the pros. The same applies when we vote for a budget, which does not necessarily mean that we support every single measure in it.

The argument is a faulty one, but the government has come to rely on this tactic to influence public opinion during the coming election, an election that the government seems to want as soon as possible. For example, they will say that we are against changing the age of consent, even though the bill passed unanimously, and so on.

Let us get to the heart of the matter: minimum penalties. We have some objections in principle to minimum penalties. Based on my personal experience, I believe that minimum penalties do not influence crime rates. I think many people who have long been studying crime would agree with me.

First, I think that no member in this House would be able to tell me how many minimum penalties there are in the Criminal Code. People do not know the minimum penalties. In Canada, the most glaring example is marijuana. I passed the Bar exam in 1966. I started working as a crown attorney at the provincial level, and that was the first time I heard talk of marijuana. There was not much at the time. Throughout university, I do not remember hearing about anyone smoking pot. I did not even know that expression, and I was obviously not the only one.

I then became a crown attorney at the federal level and I started to work on cases related to these issues. Let us talk about marijuana and hashish from Indian hemp. The Indian hemp growing here had no hallucinogenic properties. So at the time, all marijuana, hashish and Indian hemp that people have been smoking since the late 1960s to the present day came from somewhere else.

Does anyone know what the minimum penalty was for importing marijuana into Canada? I am sure that people do not know, just like people at the time did not. The minimum penalty was seven years in prison for importing marijuana. It is one of the harshest sentences in the Criminal Code. But it was while we had that minimum penalty that marijuana use started growing, reaching peaks in the 1980s.

Since that time, levels of marijuana use have remained very high. We can clearly see that minimum sentences had little effect. The problem is that people do not know what the minimum sentences are.

On the other hand, we have an example of success, but it still needs to be taken a little further. I am referring to impaired driving. The minimum sentences have not been increased, but we have seen awareness campaigns and increased education. People know that it is a crime to drive while impaired. I remember when I finished my studies and I was buying my first car, no one talked about it. Our attitude was to consider if the person was capable of driving and we did not really see it as a criminal act. This is no longer the case.

The public has become much more aware and we have seen a decrease in impaired driving charges. In fact, they have decreased significantly. When authorities began conducting the first tests on our roads to see if people were driving while impaired, it was not uncommon to stop about 10% of drivers. When road tests are done today, with the same sample chosen in the same manner, less than 1% of drivers are found to be impaired. People have become more aware. I think of my children who drive and who, when they go to parties, have a designated driver, everyone taking their turn. These are habits they have learned without the fear of prison.

Thus, as we can see, the simple fear of a sentence does not have an impact. Plus, people do not know what the minimum sentences are. We must know a little about how the criminal mind works. I practised criminal law long enough to know a little about the subject. Does anyone really believe that criminals think seriously about the sentence they might have to serve if they are caught? First of all, most crimes are committed on impulse. What people want to avoid and what prevents them from committing crime is not the penalty, but rather the fear of getting caught. If there is a good chance they will be caught, people change their behaviour.

I also had another experience in my personal and professional life. When I began practising law in Montreal, it seemed to be the capital of armed robbery. Some of those listening may remember the famous movie called Monica la mitraille. It was a very good movie. I do not remember her real name, but I did see her in court. She was the leader of one of the groups who committed armed robberies in Montreal. There was about one a day at the time.

Does anyone remember the last armed bank robbery committed last year? I am convinced that almost no one does. Is it because thieves are now more afraid of the sentence than back when it was harsher? Why did they do it? Why has the number of these robberies decreased considerably? It is because of intelligent preventive measures. Banks are built differently and there is no longer access to large amounts of money. The risk of being caught in relation to the anticipated profits is not worth it. Furthermore, all kinds of measures have been put in place in banks and the efforts of bankers has also decreased the menace of armed bank robberies.

Putting in place a series of measures resulted in a true decrease in crime. Fear does not stop people from committing crimes.

The third example I can give is the death penalty. We abolished the death penalty in Canada 25 years ago. Since then the number of homicides has declined steadily rather than increasing.

I am not saying that we should not have sentences. We must have sentences and for certain crimes in certain circumstances they must be severe. However, the use of minimum sentences does not work.

I have another philosophical problem with minimum sentences and it is worth talking about. A judge hears a case and arguments, then weighs all the factors that need to be taken into consideration when handing down a sentence, such as individual and general deterrents, the seriousness of the charge, the seriousness of the crime, the circumstances under which the accused committed the crime, his involvement in the crime, recidivism if any, his home life, his responsibility or the influence others may have had, and so forth.

Implementing minimum sentences forces a judge, who went over all these circumstances in his heart and soul, to conclude that, even though that person should get 18 months in jail, the minimum sentence is 3 years. He is required by law, in that case, to commit an injustice. I have heard judges say that when they hand down minimum sentences.

We often forget that when we want to impose minimum sentences we are thinking about the worst offenders. When I listen to the examples given by the members opposite who defend this bill, I know full well they are thinking about the worst cases. We have to realize that minimum sentences do not apply just to the worst cases, but also to less serious cases.

I will give an example that I witnessed in my career. This will show that, although the members opposite claim that seven-year minimum sentences are not being handed out, a number of people have, at one point, served seven years in prison for importing marijuana.

I remember a young woman whose capacities were diminished after an accident. She had a daughter and her husband had left her. She met a charming, smooth talking American fellow with an education, like her, and she fell for him. He was willing to live with her handicap. He was very attentive towards her. They were in love. He seemed to have a income, without being very wealthy. One day, he left, saying that he would be sending her parcels. It was not immediately clear to her what he was talking about. Parcels did start arriving. Based on telephone conversations between them, it is obvious that she suspected that the parcels contained something illegal, because he asked that she not open them. She did not import anything. She simply stored parcels in her home. But because she suspected that there was something illegal going on, under the doctrine of wilful blindness, she was undoubtedly guilty, like him, of importing narcotics.

I wonder what sentences my colleagues in the House would hand down to that man and that woman respectively. Does it not seem profoundly unfair that the same sentence be imposed on both of them just because the minimum sentence prescribed is seven years? Since the offence involved relatively small amounts of hashish, the least dangerous drug, he may not have deserved a seven year sentence and she certainly did not. This goes to show how minimum sentences result in unfair situations. Different situations have to be considered.

In addition, the examples of cases raised in the House often appeared very serious, based on the two or three reasons for which the judge imposed such sentences. I doubt, however, that this was the case. The judge probably cited 10 reasons or so, which are not listed, for coming to the decision which is described to us as unacceptable. It is entirely possible that a few of the thousands of sentences rendered every day in Canada seem too heavy handed. In the case of a truly unacceptable sentence, the potential remedy would not come from Parliament, as is suggested by our discussions, but from the appeal courts.

In none of the arguments put forward in support of increasing sentences was an unreasonable decision by an appeal court ever mentioned.

Finally, the most important thing to know concerning firearms: in the United States, they incarcerate seven times as many people as we do, and guns roam freely, so to speak. As a result, three times—

[Robert Bouchard, Bloc, Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have this opportunity to address the bill that amends the Criminal Code and makes consequential amendments to other acts. As you know, I come from a region, Saguenay—Lac-Saint-Jean, where the crime rate is very low. Still, I want to take part in today's debate to raise an issue that is a major source of concern for people in my region and in my riding.

It goes without saying that the Bloc Québécois worked actively and positively in committee to improve some of the provisions of Bill C-2. Incidentally, I want to congratulate in particular the hon. member for Hochelaga, who did a great job at the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, and also the hon. member for Châteauguay—Saint-Constant, for her contribution.

Based on what we heard from a large number of witnesses, it is obvious that many Quebeckers and Canadians want some changes to the current justice model.

The committee's consultation process and the message conveyed by our fellow citizens showed two things. First, a large part of the population is concerned about the current justice system and, second, it does not want an American type of justice system.

We believe that the American justice system has produced disastrous results. The Bloc Québécois deemed appropriate to propose a series of amendments to Bill C-2. Unfortunately, the Conservative government kept none of the six amendments that we proposed, even though some of them enjoyed the unanimous support of the public security ministers in Quebec and in the provinces. It is unfortunate that the Conservative government does not take into consideration the fact that this is a minority government.

I would like to briefly mention the six amendments that reflect Quebeckers' values. In my region, the Minister of Labour, who represents the riding next to mine, said that Bill C-2 reflects the public's will. The Minister of Labour should have said, rather, that Bill C-2 reflects the ideology of the minority Conservative government. That is what he should have said first and foremost.

The Bloc suggested, therefore, that parole after one-sixth of the sentence has been served should be abolished. We should also put an end to virtually automatic statutory release after an inmate has served two-thirds of his sentence. The Bloc proposed another amendment as well to the effect that there should be a formal evaluation by a professional of an inmate’s overall risk of re-offending.

In addition, the Bloc suggested that onus of proof should be reversed in the case of criminals found guilty of the offences of loan-sharking, procuring, robbery, fraud over $5,000 and counterfeiting in order to facilitate the seizure of assets that are the product of crime.

We also said that the police needed better tools to deal with the problem of street gangs, especially longer warrants for investigations carried out by means of tailing with a GPS.

It should be against the law to wear any symbol, sign or other mark identifying the wearer as a member of a criminal organization that has been recognized as such by the courts.

Finally, we should eliminate the rule that the time spent in pretrial detention counts double when sentences are determined. Sentences should be deemed to have started on the first day of detention, rather than when sentences are passed.

The minister labour thinks that Canadians want new justice legislation. I agree with him to the extent that the Bloc supports the principle of these changes. This does not mean, however, that Quebeckers and Canadians agree with everything in Bill C-2. When bills are introduced, some changes can be made without changing them completely. We need to adapt to the realities of life in Quebec and Canada.

As I said, the Bloc Québécois supports Bill C-2 in principle and takes crime very seriously. However, when five bills are amalgamated into one, it is only to be expected that some doubts will arise. The Conservative minority government has a duty not to play partisan politics with an issue as important as the justice system.

The Bloc Québécois believes that what really needs to be attacked first and foremost are poverty, inequality and exclusion. They aggravate the frustrations and crime in our communities if not dealt with by the government on a priority basis.

The Bloc Québécois knows very well that many changes must be made to the current justice system and that some adjustments to the Criminal Code are essential. The government has a duty to take action and use the tools at its disposal to enable Quebeckers and Canadians to live safely and peacefully.

The measures introduced must have a positive impact on crime. They must be more than rhetoric or a campaign based on fear. We must avoid copying the American model, which yielded much less positive results than anticipated.

Crime has been steadily decreasing in Quebec, as it has in Canada for the last 15 or so years. Statistics Canada recent stated that in 2006, the overall crime rate in this country hit its lowest in 25 years. Quebec had its lowest homicide rate since 1962.

Unfortunately, there will always be crime in our society. We can never fully eradicate all crime. But statistics show that the current approach should not be discarded in favour of the US model. This means that we must look for improvements while keeping an open mind about the realities facing Quebeckers and Canadians.

In the past, Quebeckers have relied on individualized justice based on a judicial process that is flexible and suited to each case, with positive results. The homicide rate in Quebec is one of the lowest in Canada and is four times lower than in the United States.

Bill C-2 brings together old bills that we largely supported, such as Bill C-10, Bill C-22, Bill C-27, Bill C-32 and Bill C-35.

Justice is an important issue, and this model must truly correspond to the realities facing Quebec and Canada.

In conclusion, I would like to say that Quebeckers and my constituents from Chicoutimi—Le Fjord do not want a justice system based on the U.S. system.

[Brian Murphy, Liberal, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure, at report stage of Bill C-2, to deliver some comments to the omnibus crime bill.

I have had the experience of serving on the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights and also the legislative committees that were involved with the former Bills C-10, C-22, C-27, C-32, C-35 and C-23, which is not part of the omnibus bill.

I speak with experience at least with respect to the bills and I understand how we came to be here today to speak about what the bill contains. A lot of discussion took place in the debates of the House and in committee with respect to the direction we should take with respect to our criminal justice.

It is important for us, as parliamentarians, to consider what we do when we amend the Criminal Code and its corollary acts. We are dealing with the Criminal Code. It is an organic document. It changes with the times. It is copied and exemplified by one of Canada's justice ministers and prime ministers, Sir John Thompson, from eastern Canada. It has certainly changed with the times as has our society.

In the 1890s the crimes that were top priority might have been things like cattle and horse theft, murder and some common ones. However, with the changing times, we have seen a proliferation of gang related violence, e-crimes, things that would not have existed at the turn of the century.

The point of raising that is as our society changes and the code changes, we owe it to this place, to the committees, to the law enforcement official, which include prosecutors, policemen, probation workers, corrections officers, people in the correction system and judges, quite a fraternity of people involved in the criminal justice system, to say that we looked at these various laws. We looked at how Canada was changing and at the end, we did the very best we could to keep track of what tools would be best to tackle the new problems that exist in society. It is not as if we are inventing new aspects of law. Many of these bills represent an evolution or a progression of laws that already exist.

Just briefly on the guts of the bill, if you like, Mr. Speaker, Bill C-10, which is now part of C-2, was of course dealing with the mandatory minimum provisions which were increased by the introduction of this bill, but they were not increased as much as the government had wanted them to be originally.

I would like to thank the hon. member for Windsor—Tecumseh and the opposition Bloc Québécois critic on the committee as well as the Liberal members on the committee who fought very hard to have some sense reign over the debate with respect to the evidence that was adduced at the committee hearings regarding the efficacy of mandatory minimums in general.

A review is in order. Mandatory minimums existed before the Conservative government was elected. Mandatory minimums were in place for serious crimes with the known aspect of repeat offenders and with some hope, which studies will show one way or the other, that there might be a deterrent and a safety to the public aspect of mandatory minimums.

At least on this side we joined with the Conservatives who, I would say, were very sparse in their acknowledgement that mandatory minimums existed before they came into office, but we joined with them and said that these are good tools for the law enforcement agencies and good tools in the realm of criminal justice.

It is a matter always of how far we go. How far do we go in disciplining our children? Do we take away their favourite toy? Do we ban them from seeing their friends for two weeks? Are we less severe or more severe? Many of us are parents and we deal with this every day. It is our form of the justice system that rules in our own house.

With respect to mandatory minimums, it is a question of calibrating to what extent the mandatory minimums are useful, to what extent do they work, and to what extend should they be increased, if at all.

During the debate process we were very successful in getting the government to get off its basic premise, which is if it is good for the six o'clock news and sounds robust, steady and law and orderish, then it has to be good in the Criminal Code. That is where the slip from the cup to the lip occurred, where it was obvious 90% of the witnesses were saying that the severe mandatory minimums that the government side were proposing would be inefficacious.

We can be as tough as we want, but if it does not work, if it does not make society safer, then we have not posited a good solution to the problems that face our community, and that was the case when we looked at mandatory minimums.

The happy medium that exists in Bill C-2 I think will be borne out, but it is very important to remember that this is an organic process and we could be back here some day soon, perhaps, looking at mandatory minimums in general.

How more timely could it be than in today's Ottawa Citizen, a report called “Unlocking America” is reviewed. In this report, it makes it very clear that the mandatory minimums, one of the many tools used by the American government from the 1970s on when it was felt that the rise in criminal activity was abhorrent, was not as effective as the Americans would have hope it would have been. It left the United States with 2.2 million people behind bars, more than China. The nine authors, leading U.S. criminologists, said that they were convinced that they needed a different strategy.

I am happy to report that as a result of the efforts of the NDP, Bloc and the Liberal Party in general at committee, we did not go as far as the Conservative government wanted to, which was close to where the United States had been which now New York State and New York City admits, is ineffective.

The three effects of imprisonment, and emphasis only on imprisonment, at the cost of crime prevention dollars, if you like, Mr. Speaker, is that the heavy, excessive incarceration hits minorities very hard. In the United States, 60% of the prison population is made up of Blacks and Latinos.

We heard evidence at our committee that there is a preponderance, an over-exaggerated percentage, of first nations and aboriginal people in our jail system, according to their population, which is deplorable. It is overwhelming and undisputed that the negative side effects of incarceration outweigh the potential. That is the two bits on Bill C-10,

On the other bill, Bill C-22, the close in age exemption, was never brought up. Despite all the rhetoric from the government, nothing would save Bill C-22. The issue of sexual consent being given by a person of tender years has never been put forward by any member of the opposition while the Liberal Party was in power.

The close in age exemption was never put in there, so for members of the opposite side to say that finally we dealt with the issue of sexual exploitation of 14 year olds is simply not accurate. The close in age exemption, five years between a person of the age specified, will save many relationships that should not be criminalized.

Lastly, I noted that Bill C-23 was not included in Bill C-2. I have to wonder why.

I live in Acadia. And Bill C-23 included many improvements with respect to choosing the first language of prosecutors during a trial. French is the language spoken by most people in my province. That element was very important to us in Acadia, but the government overlooked this fact.

Why did the government turn its back on the francophone people of New Brunswick in this country?

[Andy Rady, Director, Canadian Council of Criminal Defence Lawyers]

Thank you.

Good morning to all. I'm here along with Evan Roitenberg on behalf of the Canadian Council of Criminal Defence Lawyers. I want to thank you all for allowing us to attend and be witnesses this morning. I'm going to make a few brief opening remarks and then Mr. Roitenberg will continue.

For those of you who aren't familiar with our organization, we are a council of defence lawyers from across Canada, including the territories, of 17 persons. We represent criminal law associations in all of the provinces; they all have a member on our association. So we respond on matters of national interest to the defence bar as a whole. We've been doing this since 1992, and we've appeared before this committee and other committees over the years.

Bill C-2 consisted of five other bills in the previous Parliament, and we've already made representations on those: Mark Brayford from Saskatchewan on Bill C-32, Bill Trudell on Bill C-35, Mr. Trudell and myself on Bill C-10, and Mr. Roitenberg was set to speak on Bill C-27 before Parliament dissolved.

It is our position that the current system of dangerous offender legislation in the Criminal Code works and need not be changed. We have concerns with Bill C-2. Our concern is that if society is going to seek to lock someone up indefinitely, the burden must in all cases be on society to show that this should occur. In other words, we're talking about what we call the reverse onus provision of Bill C-2 with respect to dangerous offenders.

It is our position that this new section really provides a false sense of security and nothing else to what we already have, which is a very careful system, because dangerous offender designations result in perhaps the most draconian penalities that we know in our law. We are concerned as well that what the burden-shifting does is place it on the defence and on the accused person. One of the things that appears not to have been considered is the effect this is going to have on legal aid plans throughout the country. Obviously, if the convicted person is going to have to try to demonstrate why they should not be declared dangerous, the kinds of resources they are going to require from legal aid plans are going to be very high. We're concerned that there isn't a corresponding amount of funding for that.

We also have some concern with respect to the fact that it would appear that aboriginal offenders represent--at least a few years ago--21% of all dangerous offender designations. This is not reflective of the overall aboriginal population. Again, that may have to do with a cost situation in terms of being able to defend dangerous offender applications. One of the things we read indicated that it takes the crown approximately 600 man-hours to put one of these together. If that burden shifts to the accused, we're going to see more dangerous offenders simply because they're not going to have the resources to meet this reverse onus test.

Mr. Roitenberg.

Income Tax Amendments Act, 2006

[Jim Flaherty, Conservative, Minister of Finance]

moved for leave to introduce Bill C-10, An Act to amend the Income Tax Act, including amendments in relation to foreign investment entities and non-resident trusts, and to provide for the bijural expression of the provisions of that Act.

Mr. Speaker, pursuant to the special order made previously, I would like to inform the House that this bill is in the same form as C-33 at the time of prorogation.

(Motions deemed adopted, bill read the first time and printed)