Bill C-26 (Historical)

An Act to amend the Criminal Code (auto theft and trafficking in property obtained by crime)

This enactment amends the Criminal Code to create offences in connection with the theft of a motor vehicle, the alteration, removal or obliteration of a vehicle identification number, the trafficking of property or proceeds obtained by crime and the possession of such property or proceeds for the purposes of trafficking, and to provide for an in rem prohibition of the importation or exportation of such property or proceeds.

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

Was that specifically on Bill C-26, the trafficking in property crime bill?

[Richard Dubin, Vice-President, Investigative Services, Insurance Bureau of Canada]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

The Insurance Bureau of Canada is the national trade association that represents Canada's home, car, and business insurers. As a national trade association, we have an investigative services division that has a staff of 59, of which I am the head. Our team includes a number of seasoned former police veterans who spend their days investigating organized insurance crimes involving staged auto collisions and auto theft. This is a very busy job for our people due to the growth in Canada of organized crime.

Insurance fraud is a big business in Canada. In just home, business, and auto insurance, it is estimated to be a $3-billion-a-year business. On average, 10% to 15% of all claims have an element of fraud. Consider for a moment that our industry paid out $25 billion in claims in 2008 and you'll see the scope of the problem. Let's be clear as to where that money has to come from; it comes from individual Canadians in the form of higher premiums.

Organized crime long ago saw an opportunity in insurance fraud. Why? Because it is a low-risk, high-profit business. The penalties are minor, and jail time is rarely handed out, even for cases involving substantial fraud. In the brief time I have here, I want to tell you about just one type of highly organized insurance fraud: staged auto collisions.

Phoney car crashes are a big business in the Greater Toronto Area, which is considered the staged auto-collision capital of Canada. These complex schemes frequently involve organized criminals linked with tow-truck operators, body shops, paralegals, and registered health care providers. I also refer to them as rehab centres or rehab clinics. In one particular investigation, which is ongoing right now, 41 staged auto collisions are alleged to have taken place involving fraudulent auto physical damage and fraudulent accident benefit claims. Further investigation suggests a possible 116 additional alleged staged collisions involving this criminal organization.

Altogether, we estimate that this one project alone could cost insurers and their customers between $20 million and $25 million in potential fraud. To date, over 200 charges have been laid against 38 individuals.

Staged collisions involve not only those intentionally causing the collision but also the innocent drivers who are placed at great risk of serious injury or death. Particularly dangerous is the “swoop and squat”, in which two cars intentionally box in the innocent driver. A third car quickly passes in front and then jams on the brakes, forcing the innocent driver to rear-end the vehicle ahead. The vehicle struck in the rear is usually carrying several passengers who paid for their seats so that they can claim to be injured. They submit fraudulent accident benefit claims, which are supported by rehab clinics.

In more elaborate schemes, a runner recruits drivers and passengers to play roles in a carefully scripted, choreographed, controlled crash. Bogus witnesses are positioned near the staged collision to support the criminals' account and to contradict the innocent driver's testimony.

IBC's investigative services investigates, on average, over 30 such projects a year. Unfortunately, those convicted and sentenced usually receive conditional sentences, and restitution is rarely ordered. In keeping up with organized crime, however, designated investigative bodies, like ours, and police and prosecutors need more tools. A strengthened Criminal Code to get tough on these types of crimes is a top priority, and we were pleased to see that the House of Commons has already passed Bill C-26 in regard to auto theft.

This legislation, Bill C-52, is another positive step that takes direct aim at the kind of organized criminals our industry battles every day. Tougher penalties for fraudsters will send a clear message that Canadians will no longer tolerate having their savings targeted by criminals.

It is time for the fraudsters' free ride to end, and Bill C-52 makes strong steps in that direction. We urge parliamentarians to pass this legislation.

Thank you. We would be pleased to answer any questions committee members may have.

Strengthening Canada’s Corrections System Act

[Pierre Lemieux, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Agriculture]

Mr. Speaker, I listened carefully to my colleague as he was speaking and while I appreciate his support for Bill C-43, I hope of course that he is speaking also for his Liberal colleagues.

I am wondering what assurance my colleague can give me that when this passes through the House, it will not be delayed, obstructed or gutted by Liberal senators in the other place. This is a very real concern I have because of what we saw, for example, on Bill C-25, which passed through the House, but which, when it reached the Liberal senators in the other place, was gutted. Actually, they defied their leader in doing so, and they did so without any repercussions.

Fortunately, Bill C-25, due to public pressure, passed ungutted, let us say, in its original form and Canadians were well served, but when the President of the Treasury Board today brought up Bill C-26 on auto theft, we saw it too being obstructed and delayed by the Liberal senators in the other place.

I hear my colleague speaking, but I would like to know what assurance he can give, not just to me and my colleagues in the House, but to all Canadians that this will make it through the Liberal senator blockade in the other place.

Business of the House

[Ralph Goodale, Liberal, Wascana, SK]

Mr. Speaker, I wonder if the government House leader could inform the House of his work program for the balance of this week and next, until the House adjournment for veterans' week.

Could he also indicate to the House when he would expect the House to acknowledge the importance of veterans' week, on which day or which occasion that will happen prior to veterans' week itself.

There also will need to be the designation of one more opposition day before veteran's week, and I wonder if the minister could do that today as well.

As well, I am sure he would want to confirm that, with respect to Bill C-26, which was referred to during the course of question period, having to do with auto theft, that the bill sat on the order paper of the Senate since the June 22. It was called once, was given second reading and is now in committee in the Senate.

Justice

[Vic Toews, Conservative, President of the Treasury Board]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for his hard work.

The best way to fight gangs and organized crime is to disrupt the criminal enterprises on which they depend. Our government legislation, Bill C-26, which has been held up in the Senate for four months, would do just that.

Our legislation would add new penalties in the area of property theft and, more specifically, the serious crime of auto theft. This would have a positive impact on my home province of Manitoba and right across Canada. Why are the Liberal senators holding it up?

[Daniel Petit, Conservative, Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, QC]

Mr. Speaker, in April 2009, our government introduced Bill C-26 to tackle the crime of auto theft, which causes losses of over $1 billion a year.

For the past four months, Liberal senators have been delaying this bill.

Yet this bill will facilitate investigations and prosecution in cases of auto theft, and will also increase sentences for serious crimes.

Canadians want action. This bill comes in addition to the measures already put in place by our government to fight organized crime.

We urge the Liberals to listen to Canadians, as we did, and to stop playing partisan politics on the backs of victims.

When will the Liberal leader tell his colleagues in the Senate to pass this important bill?

Our government is the only party that can protect victims.

Technical Assistance for Law Enforcement in the 21st Century Act

[Mark Holland, Liberal, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak again on this matter.

Before I came to this House, I was a member of the Durham Regional Police Services Board. When I was there, I had the opportunity obviously on a regular basis to talk with officers around the changing technologies and the fact that our laws simply had not kept pace. People were committing fraud online or hiding behind anonymity on Internet service providers and performing serious crimes, and the police simply could not follow them.

I was first elected in 2004 and when I came to Parliament, I was pleased to support the work of the then Liberal government to create what was the modernization of investigative techniques act. That bill which was introduced in 2005 is ostensibly what is before the House today in both bills, Bill C-46 and Bill C-47, which is now being debated. Unfortunately, in 2005 the Conservatives precipitated an election and that killed the bill.

The member for Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine then reintroduced that as a private member's bill in the next session and again that bill was killed when the Prime Minister walked to the Governor General's office and then killed that legislation.

In this session of Parliament that same Liberal member of Parliament introduced that Liberal legislation yet again. We had to wait until the end of the last session before the Conservatives finally introduced it.

As I said, just before we began question period, it is a little rich to me that the Conservatives would be going on about the imperative need to pass the bill and how much it is needed for police and how critical it is when they in fact have had four years to introduce it and are the ones responsible for killing it in various stages at various moments in time.

When they finally did introduce it, they introduced it in the last week the House was sitting before summer when there was no opportunity to debate it, there was no opportunity to move it forward. Now, it has been left until the end of October before we are finally dealing with the bill.

It shows that the Conservatives' commitment to the bill is fragile at best. In fact, we have seen what they do on criminal justice matters. They introduce bills and let them languish on the order paper. Then they wait for a scandal or a problem to hit and then they seek refuge in those same crime bills, suddenly bringing them back with great urgency saying they need to be dealt with immediately and any opposition party that dares to ask a question on them is somehow soft on crime.

The facts do not measure up. The facts are that they have allowed these things to languish for years and something that should have been dealt with, the Liberal legislation that was introduced so long ago, has meant that those people are committing online fraud and the police officers who need those additional investigative techniques and tools have been left without them as the government has completely failed them.

I think it is important to note as well that this is not the only area where we have seen this problem with the government. I spoke a great deal yesterday about the importance of these new investigative techniques for police. My intention is not today to repeat all of those comments but to make a comment more generally on the direction the Conservatives are heading on crime.

Today, in the public safety and national security committee we had a couple of different witnesses. One of the witnesses was Dr. Craig Jones who is the executive director of the John Howard Society of Canada. His insights into the direction in which the government is heading on crime I think is very telling. I will quote from his comments today. He said at the beginning of his statement:

My second audience is the future. I suffer no illusions that I will be able to alter the course of this government’s crime agenda--which legislative components contradict evidence, logic, effectiveness, justice and humanity. The government has repeatedly signalled that its crime agenda will not be influenced by evidence of what does and does not actually reduce crime and create safer communities.

What we heard as well from Mr. Stewart along with Michael Jackson, who wrote a report about the government's broken direction on corrections and crime, is that we are walking down the same road that the Americans embarked on in the early 1980s, when Republicans came forward and presented the same type of one-type solution for crime, which is incarceration, more incarceration and only incarceration.

If we did not have that example and the example that was in the United Kingdom, perhaps the Conservatives would be forgiven for thinking that would work. The reality of the United States is that this is a catastrophic disaster. In fact, the governor of California is now saying the state is being crushed under the weight of the mistake of these decisions, that the prisons are literally overflowing. The supreme court of California had to release thousands of offenders into the streets because the prisons simply had no room for them.

We also see that these prisons become crime factories. Minor criminals go in often for drug-related crimes, break and enters or smaller but still serious crimes, but instead of getting help for the addiction or mental health issues they face, they get sent into prison environments where they learn to be much worse criminals. We could make the analogy of putting in a butter knife and getting out a machine gun.

In fact, in committee today the director of the John Howard Society quoted an individual who deals with aboriginal inmates and said that our prison systems are turning into “gladiator schools”. He stated:

So our federal prisons have become “gladiator schools” where we train young men in the art of extreme violence or where we warehouse mentally ill people. All of this was foreseeable by anyone who cared to examine the historical experience of alcohol prohibition, but since we refuse to learn from history we are condemned to repeat it.

Everyone can imagine that as we continually overpopulate these prisons and do not provide the services to rehabilitate people, it has to come out somewhere. Where it comes out is in a system that continually degenerates.

In California the rate of recidivism, the rate at which people reoffend, is now 70%. Imagine that, 7 out of every 10 criminals who go into that system come out and reoffend, and those offences are often more serious than the ones they went in for first. In other words, people are going into the system and then coming out much worse.

We have to remember that even when we increase sentences, over 90% of offenders will get out. We can extend the length of time they are staying in there, but at a certain time they are going to get out, and it is the concern of anybody who wants a safe country or community that when people come out of these facilities, they come out ready to be reintegrated, to contribute to society and not reoffend.

The other fundamental problem with the Conservative approach to crime is that it waits for victims. Conservatives think the only way to deal with crime is to wait until somebody has been victimized and a crime has occurred, and then to punish the person.

Of course, we believe in serious sentences. We have to have serious sentences for serious crimes, but that is not nearly enough. If it were enough, if simply having tough sentences were enough to stop crime, then places like Detroit, Houston and Los Angeles would be the safest cities in North America. We know that is certainly not the case.

What the Conservatives are doing is slashing crime prevention budgets. Actual spending in crime prevention has been slashed by more than 50% since the Conservatives came into power. They have cut programs.

I have gone to communities like Summerside and talked to the Boys and Girls Clubs or the Salvation Army in different communities. They said they have either lost funding for community projects to help youth at risk or, instead of being given the power to decide how to stop crime in their own communities, they are prescribed solutions from on high in Ottawa, which is disconnected and often does not work in those local communities.

The net result is that the community, which has the greatest capacity to stop crime, has its ability removed of stopping that crime from happening in the first place, which means even more people go to these prisons, continually feeding this factory of crime the Conservatives are marching forward with.

When we look at the costs of all of this, not only does it not provide a benefit, not only does it make our communities less safe, as has been proven in the United States, but there is a staggering cost to these policies. Pursuing a failed Republican agenda on crime that not even the Republicans would subscribe to any more in most states and most quarters in the United States comes with a staggering cost.

The Conservatives are refusing to release those figures. The minister has been refusing to tell us what exactly the price tag is for all of these measures they are putting on the table. That is why I have asked the Parliamentary Budget Officer to take a look at all of these measures and their approach on crime, and tell us just what the cost is.

That bears some important questions to be asked. Where are the Conservatives going to get the money to build these new super prisons that they are talking about? Where are they going to get the money to house all of these additional inmates? Presumably, they would provide programs and services to make these inmates better. Where is that money going to come from?

If the example in the United States is any evidence, or if the example of the Conservatives' own action in slashing crime prevention budgets is any example, then we know that they will cut from the very things that stop crime from happening in the first place. Imagine the irony of that. To pay for prisons, they are going to cut the very things that stop people from going to prison. It is a backward philosophy under any logic. Upon examination of more than a minute or two, one would recognize that it is a recipe for disaster.

If that were not bad enough, and I think that it speaks directly to this bill, the Conservatives have also betrayed police. I have talked with the Canadian Police Association about the government's commitment to put 2,500 new officers on the street. That association has called that broken promise a betrayal. However, we also know that, with respect to the RCMP, the Prime Minister went out to Vancouver where he made a solemn commitment to RCMP officers that they would get the same wage as other police officers and that they would receive parity with other police officers.

Right after making that promise and signing a contract, he ripped that contract up and broke the promise. Worse, as if that was not enough of an insult to the men and women who are our national police force, the government then challenged in court the right of RCMP officers to have the choice of whether or not they wanted to have collective bargaining. The government decided to challenge a right that is enjoyed by every other police force in the country.

At the same time, the government has ignored call after call by public inquiry after public inquiry for proper and adequate oversight. The reports and conclusions of Justice Iacobucci and Justice O'Connor made it clear that new oversight mechanisms were critical to ensure that public confidence remained in our national security institutions and our national police force, yet the government ignored it. In this example, it ignored for four years Liberal legislation that had been put forward to give officers the tools that they needed to do the job of keeping our communities safe.

In all of this, the government's response is to skew the Liberal record and be dishonest about what exactly Liberals have done on crime. Here is an inconvenient fact that it does not like to talk about. For every year the Liberal government was in power, crime rates went down. Every single year that we were in power, Canada became a safer place. The communities were safer and that is because we took a balanced approach to crime.

However, the government also says that we have blocked its crime bills. That is incredibly disingenuous. Here is the reality. Maybe I will go over a couple of bills just from this session. These are bills that the Liberal Patry not only supported but moved to accelerate and tried to find a way to get passed as expediently as possible in the House.

The government caused an election, so it killed all of its own bill. When it brought back Bill C-2, it included Bill C-10, Bill C-32, Bill C-35, Bill C-27 and Bill C-22, all of which we supported. We supported and looked to accelerate Bill C-14, Bill C-15, Bill C-25 and C-26.

That is the record of Liberals in this session of Parliament on crime, not to mention the Liberal record of reducing crime every year that we were in office previously.

Today I was doing an Atlantic radio talk show with a Conservative member of Parliament who ascribed the motive to the Liberal Party that we did not care about crime, that we are soft on criminals, and that we like to let people get away with things. I will say one thing about the Conservatives. I think that they believe what they say. I think that they honestly believe that these policies will work, even though they have failed. Even though Republicans have tried them and they have been utter disasters, I do believe that the Conservatives think they will work.

However, to ascribe motive to this side of the House and to say that we somehow care less about the safety of our communities is disingenuous. To say that I care less about the safety of my children, family or community is unacceptable. This debate needs to be about who has the best approach to crime.

I would suggest that we have the best approach to stop crime before it happens, to build safe communities, to ensure we strike the right balance between being tough on those who commit serious crimes, but, most important, working with every ounce of our bodies to ensure those who begin to turn down dark paths have people who step in and intervene to ensure they do not commit those crimes in the first place. That is the type of approach we advocate on crime and it is one that I am proud of.

Investigative Powers for the 21st Century Act

[Mark Holland, Liberal, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

Madam Speaker, I find that comment by the member opposite very curious. I will start my comments by saying that I think he has forgotten who caused the last election. It was in fact the Prime Minister who walked over to the Governor General's residence and precipitated the last election, therefore killing every bill on the order paper, including a bill dealing with this very matter which was introduced by the Liberal member for Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine. I find the member's comment curious that he is blaming the frequency of elections, every single one of which the Conservatives precipitated in the last two instances, and using that as an excuse for why this was not adopted.

A point that bears mentioning is that in 2005 the Liberal Party introduced the modernization of investigative techniques act, which is essentially the same bill that we are working with here today. With very minor modifications, it is essentially the same legislation, so why would it take four years essentially to deal with the same bill that we had written so many years ago?

The member talked about things like voice over Internet protocol in terms of changes to Internet service provisions. All of those things were present four years ago when that work was done, yet the government refused to introduce it. Even recently, when this was brought back, the decision that was made by the government was to bring it in at the end of the last session. It was in the last week immediately leading up to the summer recess when suddenly this was a priority put on the order paper. It languished there for months and months and now the government is bringing it back. And the Conservatives have the audacity to try to talk about us delaying bills. The Conservatives themselves have had their crime bills sitting on the order paper, not only for months but in some instances for years, only to bring them back when they are a hit politically.

What they do is when there is a scandal, the most recent one being the cheque scandal, they decide to resurrect their crime bills that they have been ignoring for months on end. Suddenly it is an imperative national priority to deal with whatever particular crime bill they put on the table at that particular moment, when we all know that the real objective is to change the political channel away from whatever political troubles they are having. In this particular instance, it is the cheque fiasco. As this bill has been ignored and ignored and left to languish and we have been calling again and again for it to be dealt with, we can know that is essentially what their strategy is.

Now they have come to this bill and said that it is important to deal with it but only after we have been pushing for it for four years. I hope something does not distract them and we do not find this bill suddenly being lost yet again.

It is important to mention that the bill we have been advocating for the last four years is badly needed by police. Technology has changed and evolved in many different ways. While criminals have evolved with it, our legislation simply has not. For the last number of years while the Conservatives have been sitting on this, whether the criminals are involved in cyber fraud or are using technology like BlackBerries in the commission of crimes, to which the police cannot get access, the criminals have had a huge advantage against the law enforcement agencies.

One of the areas in which they have had a great advantage is in their anonymity. People are able to do things on line and police are not able to uncover who exactly they are, even if they know they are committing acts of a criminal nature. Police have been calling on us for years to change that and only now are the Conservatives bringing something forward to do something about it.

I have had many conversations with police, not just about things that were mentioned by the hon. member, but about other things, such as child pornography. Obviously child pornography is a deep concern and we want to root that out and give police every tool to be able to go after those individuals. I have also spoken with the police about instances where a criminal is known to have a particular phone and his whereabouts cannot be ascertained. The police want to be able to use the GPS tracking device in that device in order to figure out where the individual is. The current laws do not allow the police to do that.

I was talking to the chief of police in Calgary who was expressing deep frustration at the number of dial-a-dope operations. Individuals are using cell phones almost like a pizza service to deliver drugs to people's doors. When the police find these cell phones they are unable to access them because of the encryption software. The maker of the device is under no obligation to help open it up to reveal all of the phone numbers and the client base. It is a crime that is almost impossible to catch someone doing because it is locked behind that wall of encryption. That has been going on for years and the Conservatives have been refusing to give the police the tools they need to deal with it, even though solutions are present.

At the same time, it is important to mention that one of the things we are going to have to look at and study in committee is to ensure that there is balance. A number of people have expressed concerns that a law of this nature could be misused to allow access into people's searching history and people's personal messages or could be used maliciously by somebody to gain access to people's Internet search records and history. We have to ensure that balance exists. We have to protect individual rights to protect people's freedom to do what they want without somebody being able to go through willy-nilly, without warrant, their information. At the same time, we have to provide police with the opportunities to chase those individuals who we have reasonable grounds to believe have committed a crime.

It is worth mentioning as we talk about this bill, that the Conservative approach to crime is, I think, in general, disingenuous. We listened all day today to speeches by members about how the Liberal Party had held up a variety of bills. Of course, factually, that is entirely incorrect.

If we were to talk about the Liberal Party record in this session of Parliament in terms of bills that we have supported and helped to accelerate, I can list the following: Bill C-2, which was an omnibus bill which included provisions from Bill C-10, Bill C-32, Bill C-35, Bill C-27, and Bill C-22; Bill C-14; Bill C-15; Bill C-25; and Bill C-26. It is important to mention that in every instance we tried to get those bills accelerated and pushed forward.

That does not stop the Conservatives from talking about other parties holding up their crime bills. The problem is the facts do not match their rhetoric. In this specific instance and many others, the reality is the exact opposite of what they have said. In many instances, the Conservative crime bills have been languishing on the order paper, forgotten. They are sitting there waiting to be implemented. The Conservatives are not waiting for the right time for the public interest, not waiting for the right time to ensure there is adequate information to get the bills passed, but they are waiting for the right political moment to put the bills forward to try to turn the political channel.

If that were not bad enough, the other reality is that they are fundamentally letting down the Canadian public by only offering one solution to crime, and that solution invariably is to lock up people.

I do not have any problem with the notion of tough sentences. We have to have harsh, stiff sentences for people who commit serious crimes. However, if tough sentences were the only answer, then places like Houston, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Detroit would be some of the safest cities in North America. In fact, we know the opposite to be true.

The reality is that places with the stiffest sentences are more often than not some of the most dangerous cities in North America. Why? The Americans are being crushed under the weight of their own correctional system. They are literally in a position where there are so many people pouring into the prisons that they cannot possibly keep up with the costs of building all of the prisons, let alone the programs and services to ensure that people do not repeat offend. In fact, in California the situation has become so bad that its rate of recidivism is now 70%. They are creating crime factories. People go in for a minor crime and come out as a major criminal. It is like putting in a butter knife and getting out a machine gun.

That is the strategy the Conservatives are trying to bring here: a failed Republican strategy in dealing with crime that we know as a fact does not work. They are trying to apply it here to change the channel, to use it as a political game changer. If they are in trouble with the cheque fiasco, they talk about locking up people longer. If they are in trouble because a minister is caught in a fiscal indiscretion, they talk about locking people up longer. That is what they do.

I think most of them, I would hope most of them, realize that it is a disastrous strategy, that it leads to less safe communities, that it leads to billions of dollars in additional costs, and that it is exactly following down the road that even Republican governors say was a huge mistake to walk down. If anyone doubts that, I will point quickly to what has happened specifically with incarceration in the United States compared with Canada.

In 1981, before the United States began a similar agenda on which the Conservatives are now embarking, locking people up longer and longer, the gap between the rate of incarceration in Canada and the U.S. was much narrower. In Canada, 91 per 100,000 people were incarcerated, while the figure in the United States was 243 for every 100,000 people.

By 2001, Canada's rate had grown only slightly in terms of the number of people who were incarcerated, to 101 incarcerated for every 100,000 people, while in the United States that rate had soared to 689 for every 100,000, a rate almost 700% higher than that in Canada. In that same period of time, Canada and the U.S. had the same decline in their overall rate of crime. Imagine that.

The United States' rate of incarceration went up 500% over ours, and yet over that same period of time we had the identical reduction in the amount of crime. The only difference was that 500% more individuals were being incarcerated per 100,000 people, and it cost billions of dollars more.

In fact, if we continue to follow this model suggested by the Conservatives and we extrapolate to the same path that the Republicans took the United States, where they put them right to the brink, we are talking about roughly $9 billion a year in additional costs to have the same rate of incarceration.

As for the difference for public safety, well, unfortunately, I wish I could say it just kept it the same, that the only impact of that was the loss of $9 billion a year, but we all know that that $9 billion a year has to come from somewhere. We have already seen where the Conservatives' priorities are on crime. Let us take a look at the crime prevention budget.

Since 2005 the crime prevention budget has been slashed by more than 50%. That is actual spending. At the same time as they are increasing sentences and chasing after a failed Republican model, the Conservatives are slashing the money that is given to crime prevention. It is crazy. Anybody who would look at it objectively would say that this is a path to disaster, and yet that is exactly the road they have decided to head down.

There are opportunities here to be smarter on crime, to listen to police, to talk to them about what the real solutions are, to invest in prevention, to invest in making sure people turn down the right path instead of the wrong one. I had the opportunity to go around with the former chief of police in Regina and see a neighbourhood which is designated as one of the most dangerous in Canada. He was able to show me a home that had no septic system, no heat and where the child in that home was going to school hungry. That same child predictably, just scant years later, could be committing his or her first crime by starting to get involved in drugs.

For more than 60% of our inmates, addiction is the root cause of the problem and yet they do not get help. They get thrown into prison and forgotten about, and they come out worse because the core problem was never addressed. In this case it would be an addiction problem that sent them there. They go in for a minor crime, usually break and enter, and they have an addiction. They go into a system that is not providing them any rehabilitation services, and they come out and commit worse crimes. So goes the cycle. It is a constant cycle of things getting continually ever worse.

When we look at our prison system and we ask where these criminals come from, not often enough do we take a hard look at that. Imagine. Sixty per cent of those in prison face addiction issues. Over 10% face serious mental health issues. Not only are our prisons turning into crime factories, but the Conservatives are trying to use them as hospitals, by sending people with serious mental health issues into prisons. The prisons are so ill-equipped to deal with them that they are putting them in solitary confinement. They are often released directly from solitary confinement into the general population, only to reoffend again. Whether it is the facilities in St. John's, Grandview or different facilities across the country, we see this time and time again.

The reality here is we have a bill that has been called for by police for years. The government is only now finally bringing it forward, after its having been on the table since 2005. It is trying to use crime as a political game changer, misrepresenting what crime is really about and how to stop it, and at the same time it is taking us down a path that has been tried and failed before in the United States.

We need to do better than this. We need to be honest on crime and offer real solutions.

Opposition Motion--Business of the House

[Jay Hill, Conservative, Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to speak to the opposition day motion moved by the hon. member for Wascana, the Liberal House leader.

The motion recognizes the role of the House in ensuring government accountability. As we know, that is the primary function of Parliament in our Westminster system.

More specifically, the motion at hand calls for three things: first, that the Standing Orders of the House be changed with respect to the scheduling of allotted days this fall; second, that the House calendar be altered to accommodate the G20 meetings in September; and third, that the government table an additional report on the implementation of the 2009 budget.

I will touch on these three points very briefly, as it is the government's intention to support the motion. I will devote the remainder of my remarks to a more general discourse on the successful functioning of Parliament and my experiences of this past session.

The opposition day motion provides for a change to the rules of Parliament with regard to how the government may allocate opposition days this fall. Since coming to office in 2006, as a general rule our government has always tried to evenly distribute the opposition days in the parliamentary calendar. In certain circumstances we recognize that legislative priorities can force a deviation from this practice. However, we do support the idea of amending the Standing Orders to ensure that this usual practice becomes a rule.

The second provision of today's opposition day motion provides for a change to the House calendar for the fall of 2009. Under this provision the House would open a week earlier than currently scheduled and it would then adjourn for the week of September 21. This will enable the government to focus on the G20 meetings in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on September 24 and 25.

The G20 is the chief forum for the world leaders, as a group, to address issues resulting from the global economic crisis, and Canada has played an active and important role in these discussions. At the fall G20 meetings, the Prime Minister and other world leaders will discuss progress in promoting economic recovery and they will consider new ways to address global economic and financial challenges.

I think we can all agree that there is no more pressing issue before Parliament than dealing with the global economic downturn, which has caused personal hardship and job loss around the world. Unfortunately, as we all know, Canada has not been immune.

Our legislative program of this past session has reflected that the economy is the number one issue for Canadians. As such, I am pleased to support a motion that permits the Government of Canada to give its undivided attention to the critical economic discussions that will be taking place at the G20 summit in September.

The third provision of today's opposition motion requests that the government table an additional report on the implementation of the 2009 budget. In the face of global economic uncertainty, this government presented a budget in January with a comprehensive economic action plan to stimulate economic growth, restore confidence and support Canadians and their families during this global recession.

This economic recovery program is unprecedented in our history, and it is working. Canada was the last group of seven country to enter recession and the International Monetary Fund expects that we will have the strongest recovery coming out of it.

The government has also taken unprecedented steps in reporting on our economic action plan. We tabled an initial budget report in March. A week ago we tabled a second budget report, which outlines how 80% of the measures in our economic action plan are already being implemented. This government welcomes the opportunity provided by today's opposition day motion to table a third budget report in September. In fact, we committed to such a report in our budget presentation earlier this past winter.

The Minister of Finance announced at the time that he would be tabling an economic report in the fall. This being the case, I commend the official opposition for echoing the government's pre-existing intention and commitment to provide quarterly reports on the economy in and through the House to all Canadians. As we debate this today, I think it is important to remember that the government was already committed to providing that report in September.

As all members in the House know, the last few weeks have not been easy in this place. In fact they have not been easy on Canadians from coast to coast to coast. During this time of economic challenge, Canadians did not want to hear about the possibility of an election. Canadians want us to continue to work to achieve results for them. They know we cannot afford an election, which would put Canada's economic recovery at risk, halt stimulus investment across the country and limit our ability to continue to implement our economic action plan for Canadians.

By avoiding an election, we have enabled the government to continue its course of doing everything possible to turn this global recession around on our own soil. The cooperation we have seen emerge over this week, spearheaded by our Prime Minister, has not only avoided a costly and unwanted election but has clearly demonstrated to Canadians that their Parliament can work for them.

Despite the partisan political drama played out during the daily 45 minutes of question period, Canadians may be surprised to know just how cooperative and productive this past session of Parliament has been. Since January, our government has worked with all opposition parties to advance many important bills that will help Canadian families. We have moved forward on our electoral commitments, and I am pleased that much more has been done.

Since January, the government has introduced a total of 54 bills. By the time the Senate adjourns for the summer next week, I expect we will have royal assent on 26 of those bills, including such important legislative initiatives as Bill C-33, which will restore war veterans' allowances to allied veterans and their families; Bill C-29, to guarantee an estimated $1 billion in loans over the next five years to Canadian farm families and co-operatives; Bill C-3, to promote the economic development of Canada's north; Bill C-28, to increase the governance capacity of first nations in Canada; and Bill C-14, a critically important justice bill to fight the scourge of organized crime.

Although much work has been accomplished, a good number of bills that continue to be priorities of our government remain on the order paper, including Bill C-6, to enact Canada's consumer product safety act to help protect the health and safety of all Canadians; Bill C-8, to provide first nations women on reserve with the same rights and protections enjoyed by all other Canadians; and Bill C-23, to open new doors for trade between Canada and Colombia.

Furthermore, our government has continued to demonstrate an unwavering commitment to fighting crime and violence in this country. Our justice minister, the hon. member for Niagara Falls, has been unrelenting in his determination to hold criminals accountable and protect victims and law-abiding Canadian citizens.

Over a dozen justice related bills have been introduced since the beginning of this parliamentary session, which include Bill C-15, Bill C-26 and Bill S-4, to help fight crimes related to criminal organizations, such as drug-related offences, identity theft and auto theft; Bill C-25, which will return truth in sentencing and eliminate the two for one credit; Bill C-36, which will repeal the faint hope clause, and Bill C-19, the new anti-terrorism bill.

Unfortunately none of these bills have completed the legislative process during this session of Parliament. Again, due to the leadership of our Prime Minister, thankfully our country will not be plunged into an election and these bills will remain on the order paper. We hope to pass them into law in the fall.

I look forward to continuing the spirit of cooperation in this place in September to accomplish this unfinished business for all Canadians. Five of these bills have already passed one chamber of Parliament and they are before the second House for consideration. On behalf of vulnerable Canadians in particular, we have to keep moving to get the job done on this important legislation.

In closing, I am pleased that the government has been able to develop today's opposition day motion in cooperation with the official opposition. This House of Commons should more often focus on what all of us have in common rather than what divides us. While I would have liked to have seen some debate on some of our newer bills that we have just introduced and passed more of our justice and safety bills, this parliamentary sitting is winding down in the age-old Canadian tradition of compromise.

We all know that this place is about debate, trade-offs, negotiations and compromise. This is how Parliament works. This is how our very country was born, has grown and continues to develop and flourish.

As I have already indicated, the government will be supporting today's motion. I again salute our Prime Minister for his leadership in staving off an election, which I think would be dreaded by the vast majority of Canadians.

Mr. Speaker, I wish you, and all colleagues in this House, a very happy summer.

Criminal Code

[Jim Maloway, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to rise today to speak to Bill S-4, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (identity theft and related misconduct).

The bill would amend the Criminal Code to create offences of identity theft, trafficking in identity information and unlawful possession or trafficking in certain government-issued identity documents, to clarify and expand certain offences related to identity theft and identity fraud, to exempt certain persons from liability for certain forgery offences, and to allow for an order that the offender make restitution to a victim of identity theft or identity fraud for the expenses associated with rehabilitating their identity.

Like Bill C-26, which we discussed the other day, the auto theft legislation, this bill is only one part of a multi-pronged approach to attack the problem of identity theft. In both cases, the auto theft legislation and the identity theft legislation, we must begin our battle with strong changes to the Criminal Code, which itself was written in 1892 and is in dire need of a rewrite. Judging by the number of lawyers in this chamber, we are shortchanging the public if we do not embark on that rewrite sooner rather than later.

The legislation will go a long way to help the police investigate and take action regarding credit card fraud. All too often I have heard constituents complain that they feel abandoned by the police after their credit card has been stolen and has been used in a fraudulent manner. When they go to the police station they are told to take a number and wait until it is their turn. When their turn comes they are told that there were 30 similar cases that day, and without tough legislation, it is better to deal with it as a civil matter.

By bringing in tough new Criminal Code legislation, we take away that argument that we should deal with it as a civil matter because we are not going to get anywhere with it anyway in the absence of the legislation. Therefore, I think this is a very positive move to deal with that important area.

This happened in a case where the complainant did his own investigation of suspicious transactions, once he found out that the credit card was being misused, and in effect identified the guilty party. He basically turned the entire documented, solved case over to the RCMP, hoping to be thanked for all the hard work and a job well done. However, in fact, the person was told to go home, that the credit card company would just simply absorb the loss and that he would not be out any money.

That certainly did not make him very happy about this whole process, not to mention all the trauma involved in actually having the credit card stolen in the first place and a lot of transactions being put on the credit card, and all the phone calls, and so on, that it takes to resolve this issue.

That type of action merely encourages criminals to do it again and tell their friends, “Don't worry. You can't get caught, and if you do get caught, nothing will happen to you”. This is not a good signal to be sending to the public. We need this tough legislation to allow the police to take action.

If we had had it, the police probably would not have had 30 new cases that morning, because the criminals would know that something was going to happen to them in the first place and they might have thought twice about stealing the credit card.

The next area is to properly resource the police. In Manitoba's case, the parallel I draw is the gang suppression unit and the auto theft suppression unit of the police force. It is basically setting up a special unit in the police department that is resourced and tasked to deal with the problem at hand, to target the highest risk-level of offender. In the case of the auto theft group, I believe level 4 is the highest group. We are not talking about a lot of people. We are talking about perhaps 50 people in the high-risk groups.

We have to dedicate a special unit to go after identity theft.

As with the auto thieves, we are looking at a very small group of people. I would submit that is the situation with identity theft. When I go to one of the seniors' homes in my riding where there are 500 people, it would be safe to bet that not one of them would contemplate committing identity theft, stealing or misusing a credit card, or anything of the sort.

If we eliminate those people and other large groups, we come down to very small numbers. My submission would also be that those small numbers would be the repeat offenders who are doing it essentially as a profession, as a job. We have to aggressively target these offenders.

As I indicated in the case of the debit card and the bank card skimmers, often gangs with overseas connections may be operating here because it is easy. They have little chance of being caught, and certainly they are not treated very badly when they are caught.

There was a ring uncovered in the last couple of years, I believe from eastern Europe. The members of the group came to Canada for the sole purpose of going to various banks and credit unions across the country and putting credit card and debit card skimming equipment on ATMs. Over a three- or four-hour period they collected several hundred pieces of people's information. Using that information, they then proceeded to clean out people's bank accounts and make new copies of credit cards for further use.

In addition, clearly more consumer alerts are required. Part of the answer is getting consumers up to speed in this whole area.

I have had many tea parties in seniors' homes in my constituency of Elmwood—Transcona over the years where I have invited a member of the police force to talk about this very problem. The constable always has the same message: “Don't carry a big purse when you go out. Leave your ID at home. You're only going to Safeway. You're only going across the street. Why do you insist upon carrying a big purse with all your identification and enough contents to go on a trip somewhere when you are going to be back in a half hour?”

In some ways, we are all easy targets for thieves.

Fortunately we are seeing an explosion in the use of shredders. People are shredding more of their documents, and we can all agree with that. They are not throwing their bills out in the garbage like they used to; they are shredding them, which is a good sign.

However, I also juxtapose that to other people, maybe the same people who are happily shredding their documents, who attend the boat shows, the garden shows and the home shows at the convention centre in Winnipeg. I see them there on the weekends happily giving out their personal information when they are filling out applications for different free draws that exhibitors have. They do not consider that this information could be used improperly.

There are a number of other things we are told we should not be doing. Certainly mailbox fraud is a big area, and it is dealt with in the bill. Nowadays a lot of people have their mailboxes locked. That is a very good thing , because people do steal other people's mail and use that information for bad things.

On the last day of debate on this bill, a number of people mentioned we should reduce the number of mailed statements to our houses, that maybe we do not need monthly statements from our financial services people, that perhaps we could get by with quarterly statements.

They also suggest that sensitive information should be kept in a locked box. All too often we see people leaving information out. I guess the government has had some very bad experiences itself over the last couple of years with some members of Parliament leaving information in places when it should have been returned to its rightful place and locked up. We should be more organized in all of that.

Having said that, I may be one of the worst offenders, so I really do not want to go too far there.

It is also recommended that we do not let our credit cards out of sight at restaurants and gas stations. The reality is that we do this every day. Are we supposed to tell a waiter at the restaurant, “Sorry, I have to follow you to the machine to make sure you do not clone or skim my card”?

Another point was not to give credit card information over the phone unless one actually knows the person.

What is the answer? Clearly there is a bigger solution we have to deal with, and that is the whole area of technology and the inception of smart card programs.

I have followed this issue for a number of years. I recall back in 1990 or 1991, the Ontario NDP government at the time, led by somebody in this House I cannot mention, embarked on the first smart card idea. By the way, it was an idea that was way ahead of its time. Only France had embarked on a rudimentary smart card program at the time.

The Ontario government at that time set up pilot projects in Fort Frances and Windsor. It was trying to track the number of Americans who were coming across the border, getting OHIP cards, Ontario health cards, and then coming for free operations and health care.

At the end of the day, the project determined that Ontario had issued more OHIP cards than it had residents in the province. Beyond that, though, the government decided not to proceed further with the smart cards. I am not sure why it did not proceed; perhaps there was a change in government.

The NDP government was succeeded by the Harris government, which announced a new smart card program to run parallel to the program that was being introduced by the big banks at the time. I met with representatives in Toronto, and they gave me a tour through their nice new building. They had a very impressive program.

The government was going to start issuing smart cards at around $10 apiece. There was to be a health card on there and I think a driver's licence. Members should understand that these cards have the potential to have about five different things on them. Smart cards can have a driver's licence, a health card, a fishing licence, and a number of things. The government's plan was to roll out the program at a cost of $8 to $10 a card. Over time the price of the cards dropped, as we know.

While all of this was going on, the banks were going to roll out their system. They actually put off rolling it out for a few years, all the while knowing that people were being victimized. It was cheaper for the banks to pay the losses from the thefts and the misuse of the cards than it was to bring in the smart card technology. They were directly responsible for letting people go through all sorts of anguish for an extra five or six years because they did not want to put out the extra dollars. It was cheaper to lose the hundred million dollars, or whatever it was, per year in the thefts. We could have done something a long time ago in terms of smart cards because the technology was there, but it was going to be a little more expensive at the time.

In fact the banks are just rolling out their cards at the moment. Some members may have them, but if they do not, they certainly will be getting them within the next few months or the next year. I believe they had a plan where they were rolling out in certain areas a year or two ago, but the mass rolling out is just beginning.

These cards are a huge improvement over the old striped cards. The old cards are essentially obsolete and should be phased out as quickly as possible, because they are the easy ones to skim and counterfeit. Hopefully this will drastically reduce the credit card and debit card fraud and give consumers a breather, until these criminals can figure how out to compromise those cards. We may be ahead of the curve for a little while.

I am hoping we are going to have a huge overnight reduction in credit card and debit card fraud, similar to Manitoba's experience with its auto theft program. These cards, as I have indicated, are the answer in the same way that the immobilizers on cars were the answer in stopping auto theft.

Once again, the NDP are supporting actions that actually work. We do not want to head off on crime legislation like the Conservatives do, bringing in a bunch of things that have been proven not to work in other jurisdictions. We want to promote and initiate good ideas that actually have a history of working somewhere else.

We have a multi-pronged approach. We have tough criminal legislation. We have, for example, the auto theft suppression unit of the police, which is working well in Winnipeg and it could be working well nationally. We have the constant monitoring of suspects. We have to do that here as well. There is the whole idea of the mandatory immobilizers in the cars, and the GPS ankle bracelets.

To my friend from B.C., because I know he is upset about this bait car idea that I am not highly supportive of, I want to extend an olive branch. Since we are all trying to get along here in the House, I want to tell him that if he brings that bait car to Winnipeg in February and he can get it to actually work, I will be very happy to support his idea that we should try that as well. I do not think we want to exclude good ideas. Some ideas work better in some parts of the country than others.

In terms of identity theft, once again we have the tough criminal legislation in Bill S-4. We are reasonably happy with this bill. I think there are a couple of changes we would like to see, particularly for lawyers. It was pointed out yesterday that the whole area of mortgage fraud and so on is not covered by this bill. Lawyers across Canada have to be vigilant about that, because they are being presented with false identification from people attempting to get mortgage funds.

Once again, the police identity theft suppression unit has to be set up. We need more consumer alerts, which I have indicated, and the education programs, which we delved into. There is always room for more ideas. I do not think we should in any way exclude anybody with a good idea. Better smart card technology is the key here, because we have to keep ahead of the curve.

One of the members mentioned yesterday that we are dealing with almost $2 billion of losses. In fact identity theft has become so common that insurance companies have been selling identity theft coverage as an extension to house insurance policies for some four or five years now. Insurance companies would not do that if there was not a big market and a considerable demand for these programs. These programs are costly to set up. They need to have negotiations for re-insurance for the whole program.

Clearly this is a program that people are buying, because insurance companies are selling it. It pays to restore people to where they were before the loss. There is a considerable expense involved in trying to get credit cards and ID restored. Has anyone tried to get a driver's licence or a birth certificate replaced? It is a lot of work.

A lot of the identity theft is aided and abetted by the Internet. Criminals trade in stolen information. None of this existed 20 years ago. As one member mentioned yesterday with his Commodore 64, we did not have Internet access in those days and we did not have to worry about these things. The Internet and computers today mean we have a whole new exposure that we did not have before.

The criminals are passing on the information about where to buy these skimming machines and devices on how to clone credit cards. All this information is readily available to up-and-coming criminals who want to expand their lines of work.

Yesterday, the member for Winnipeg Centre asked about requiring the credit card companies to pass on to customers the results of their investigations. I agree totally. It is not included in the bill, but it is an important issue.

If people steal the identities of other people and use their credit cards, the credit care company will not give them any information about where they are at unless they investigate it. They are left to wonder who did it. It can be as traumatic as having one's home broken into and not knowing who did it.

I will proceed with the rest of my speech during the question and answer period.

The House resumed consideration of the motion that Bill C-26, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (auto theft and trafficking in property obtained by crime), be read the third time and passed.

[Guy André, Bloc, Berthier—Maskinongé, QC]

Mr. Speaker, it is with considerable interest that I rise today to speak to Bill C-26, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (auto theft and trafficking in property obtained by crime).

This bill, introduced on April 21 by the Minister of Justice is almost identical to Bill C-53, which was introduced in the second session of the 39th Parliament, but which was not debated in the House. We know why. There has been an election since then. As with Bill C-53, the Bloc supports Bill C-26, which we are currently studying at third reading. As always, we carefully studied the bill in committee and now look forward to its passing.

In justice matters, as parliamentarians we are very concerned about public security. Clearly we want an effective justice system ensuring everyone's security. It is from this perspective that we worked with this bill.

Although their numbers have decreased since 1996, the number of auto thefts is still too high and their social and economic consequences remain too heavy a burden for both the individuals involved and society as a whole. The Bloc is certainly not opting for an ideological approach in justice matters, like some of our colleagues opposite. It recognizes that targeted measures aimed at improving the Criminal Code, if combined with measures linked to crime prevention, may be appropriate, indeed vital. Prevention remains the best tool, in our opinion, for fighting all forms of crime.

In addition, the Bloc notes that Quebec society, where wealth is the most evenly distributed, has lower rates of murder and violent crime. This is definitely something worth thinking about, since providing better protection for the public means attacking the root of the problem, the causes of delinquency and violence. Poverty, inequality and the feeling of exclusion provide fertile soil for the growth of crime. Better wealth distribution, better social integration and a focus on rehabilitation are proven ways to prevent crime.

When we in the House refuse to help people in a time of economic crisis by doing something about the waiting period for employment insurance, I believe we are encouraging crime and forms of delinquency. People sometimes get involved in crime in order to meet the needs of their family. This is why it is vital to provide support to individuals, families and children when we want to fight crime.

This bill also tackles a real problem affecting Quebec, but more so the western provinces, that is the theft of vehicles for joyriding. There are young people who, often just for the fun of it, steal a car to impress their friends or take their girl for a spin and return it later. They go off with a car, and the consequences for that are major too. It is in this perspective that the Bloc supports Bill C-26.

This Bill C-26, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (auto theft and trafficking in property obtained by crime) was introduced by the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada and passed first reading on April 21, 2009. Although the bill focuses primarily on the theft of motor vehicles, it also has to do with the trafficking, export and import of any property obtained by crime.

It provides for four new offences and makes corresponding changes to the Criminal Code. In short, it creates a distinct offence of motor vehicle theft, punishable by a maximum sentence of 10 years of imprisonment and, in case of a third or subsequent offence, a minimum sentence of six months. It creates the offence of tampering with a vehicle identification number, punishable by a maximum penalty of five years of imprisonment. It also creates the offences of trafficking in property obtained by crime and possession of such property for the purposes of trafficking, punishable by a maximum sentence of 14 years of imprisonment. Finally, it allows the Canada Border Services Agency to prevent property obtained by crime, including stolen cars, from crossing the border.

Bill C-26 is basically a repeat of former Bill C-53, with the addition of the offence of motor vehicle theft and the ability to use electronic listening devices in investigations into the new offences created by Bill C-26. Former Bill C-343 would also have created a distinct offence of motor vehicle theft, but it died on the order paper before it could be passed by the Senate. Finally, former Bill C-64 would have created the offence of tampering with a vehicle identification number similar to the offence in Bill C-26, but it died on the order paper at the end of the 38th Parliament. It has been a long process, but this bill is still opportune.

Motor vehicle thefts have major repercussions for vehicle owners, consumers, police, insurance companies and governments. The Insurance Bureau of Canada estimates the financial losses resulting from this crime at more than $1 billion a year. This includes theft of uninsured vehicles and costs related to health care, the courts, police forces and lawyers, and personal expenses incurred by the vehicle owners who were victimized by these thefts.

In 2007, four stolen vehicles in 10 were not found by the police, which leads one to think that a considerable proportion of these thefts are linked to organized crime. In 2007, the province of Quebec, unfortunately, had the lowest rates of vehicles recovered, specifically in Montreal, the Saguenay, Sherbrooke and the region I represent, Trois-Rivières, or one part of Trois-Rivières. Winnipeg had one of the highest recovered vehicle rates in Canada.

I would like to take a few moments now to explain the situation a bit. As things currently stand, the Criminal Code does not specifically mention vehicle identification numbers. This bill will change that.

Although all vehicles in Canada must have a vehicle identification number to clearly distinguish one vehicle from another, there is no specific offence of tampering with it. However, changing this number is one of the easiest ways to disguise a stolen car and resell it.

At the present time, people caught altering or removing a vehicle identification number are charged under the Criminal Code with possession of goods obtained by crime or some other theft-related offence.

Tampering with a vehicle identification number will henceforth be considered evidence with respect to the offence of possession of goods obtained by crime.

The Criminal Code defines a vehicle identification number as any number or other mark placed on a motor vehicle for the purpose of distinguishing the motor vehicle from other similar motor vehicles.

Bill C-26 contains two major amendments. Clause 5 of the bill amends the section relating to possession of property obtained by crime. More specifically, it creates the offence of trafficking in property obtained by crime, which is punishable by imprisonment for a maximum of 14 years.

The clause defines trafficking:

...“traffic” means to sell, give, transfer, transport, export from Canada, import into Canada, send, deliver or deal with in any other way, or to offer to do any of those acts.

Another important point is that the new clause prohibits the importation into Canada or exportation from Canada of the proceeds of crime. The purpose of this is to allow the Canada Border Services Agency to prevent the cross-border movement of property obtained by crime.

Clause 3 adds, after section 353 of the Criminal Code, a specific section on vehicle identification numbers. It does, however, give one example of a legitimate excuse: it is not an offence to alter or remove a vehicle identification number on a motor vehicle during regular maintenance or any repair or other work done on the vehicle for a legitimate purpose,

This new offence is punishable by imprisonment for a term of not more than five years.

As a Bloc Québécois member, I would like to take a moment to explain the situation in Quebec at present. Quebec is not distinct just because of its language and culture; its crime also presents a very different picture.

According to the insurer's organization, Groupement des assureurs automobiles, there were more than 38,800 vehicle thefts in Quebec in 2006. That is the equivalent of one every 14 minutes, and $300 million of insurance companies' money, which has a direct impact on our insurance premiums. Despite the size of those figures, Quebec is far from the worst. In fact, per capita, the figures are far lower than in the western provinces. Quebec's emphasis on prevention and creating public awareness gets results. Comparing the number of vehicle thefts per 100,000 inhabitants in 2006, Quebec had 507, Alberta had 725 and Manitoba had 1,376. The average across Canada was 487 per 100,000 people. In all of Canada, approximately 160,000 vehicles were stolen in 2006.

Behind the figures, however, the situations in Quebec and the western provinces are different. In Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan, a majority of thefts are crimes of opportunity—they are committed by people who are not necessarily looking to derive a pecuniary benefit from their theft. Such thefts are known as joyriding. They are often committed by young people experimenting with driving a car. They are committed for fun or on a dare, or to use a vehicle to commit a crime. A majority of these thefts are committed by young people, as I said before.

In Quebec, and to a lesser but similar extent on the Ontario side, the picture is different. In fact, thefts are not committed for the same reasons as in the West. A larger proportion of thefts are committed for the purpose of trafficking in vehicles. This factor can be clearly seen when we read a statistic about the recovery rate for stolen vehicles. In 2002, for example, the stolen vehicle recovery rate in the greater Toronto region was 75%, as compared to only 56% in the Montreal region. Clearly, that means that the vehicles, whether intact or as parts, are leaving Quebec in large numbers. Of course, the regions most affected are mainly greater Montreal and Laval. The rates in those regions are 723 and 852 thefts per 100,000 population, respectively.

Apart from enacting more punitive measures in order to improve public safety, I think we must also tackle the root of the problem: the causes of crime and violence, as I said earlier.

We also have to understand that poverty, inequality and exclusion are very important factors in the emergence of this criminal behaviour, and so it is important to adopt social policies that do more to promote the sharing of wealth, social integration and rehabilitation. Filling our prisons and building new ones is not the way the federal government is going to bring the crime rate down.

Regardless of how harsh a bill may be, if we do not do something to prevent youths and other people from committing crimes, we will get nowhere. Investing in ways to combat poverty means investing in families, in preventing crime among young people and children who are often living in very vulnerable family situations. It also means investing in fighting crime; we must never forget that. And informing the public and promoting awareness are simple precautions we can take so people can avoid having their vehicles stolen. That is also important.

As I said earlier, however, we will be supporting this bill. When it comes to justice issues, I recognize that if targeted measures to improve the Criminal Code go hand in hand with crime prevention measures, they may be appropriate, and may even be necessary.

[James Lunney, Conservative, Nanaimo—Alberni, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I listened to the member's speech with some interest. At the end of his speech, he talked about working together and collaboration. I was a little disappointed to hear the member basically apologizing and making excuses for the people who commit auto theft, not once or twice but sometimes dozens of times. One person alone in B.C. was responsible for more than 1,000 car thefts.

I heard him mention that insurance companies should perhaps transfer responsibility to car owners by forcing them to buy immobilizers, as was tried in a jurisdiction he referred to. It seems to me that is lazy politics. It is wrong-headed. It is like the gun registry, which penalizes the honest people.

Bill C-26 creates a separate offence for theft of a motor vehicle. It calls for a prison sentence of up to six months for conviction of a third or subsequent offence, and there is a new offence for altering or destroying a vehicle identification number. It makes it an offence to traffic in property obtained by crime, and it makes the possession of such property for the purposes of trafficking an offence.

Why does this member and his party not get on board with Canadians who are tired of this kind of theft and do something that will actually make our communities safer?

[Jim Maloway, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to speak to Bill C-26, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (auto theft and trafficking in property obtained by crime). This enactment amends the Criminal Code to create offences in connection with the theft of a motor vehicle, the alteration, removal and obliteration of the VIN, vehicle identification number, the trafficking of property or proceeds obtained by crime and possession of such property or proceeds for the purposes of trafficking and to provide for a new prohibition and the importation and exportation of such property or proceeds.

As my colleague, our critic in this area, pointed out in his speech half an hour ago, the NDP supports the bill, a bill that is long overdue. In fact, it would have been passed had the government not been so busy calling an election last fall. The Prime Minister passed legislation setting fixed terms for elections, which would have been this October. Then he went back on his promise and called the election, which effectively killed all the bills on the order paper at the time. Therefore, the government has only itself to blame for no action being taken on the bill. It could have easily been passed had he not called the unnecessary election last year.

The issue of auto theft is a very complicated issue, an issue that has been around with us for a long time. In Manitoba, particularly in Winnipeg, we had a front line view of the problem, having three times the theft rate of any other place in Canada. While it was a long time coming, and there were a number of reasons why things turned out the way they did, three or four years ago the Manitoba government developed what turned out to be a very effective approach to deal with the whole problem. This is basically our argument on some of the approaches in crime legislation with which the government deals.

The NDP is willing to support items that work. If the government can show us that something works, then we will probably say it is a good idea. We did not support the mandatory minimums on a crime bill last week. We know from the history. For over 25 years the United States have tried it and it has not worked. It has ended up in a huge development of prisons and the crime rate is as high as ever. Clearly that is not an approach we want to follow. It has be demonstrated that it does not work. We would like to deal with issues in a way where we can develop programs that works.

On September 13, 2007, the Premier of Manitoba pressed Ottawa for tougher sentences and action on auto theft. Representatives from the Manitoba NDP government, Attorney General Chomiak, the Liberal leader, the Conservative leader, the mayor of Winnipeg, the mayor of Brandon and a number of people came to Ottawa to meet with the then minister to advocate for tougher action on this whole area of auto thefts.

Manitoba's approach to reducing auto theft and youth crime is focused on a number of issues. One of the big issues we are involved in is the whole idea of prevention. We believe if we can prevent the crime from happening, it is a much cheaper and more effective way of dealing with it than trying to deal with the consequences of the crime after it has been committed. In the last nine years we have set up a number of lighthouse programs for young adults. There are roughly 50 of them now in operation. There are friendship centres, education pilot projects and, as I had indicated many times before, the vehicle immobilizers program.

With regard to the immobilizer program, it was not established in isolation from the other programs. There was an operational gang suppression unit that concentrated on the most high risk criminals. Car thieves are classified by level one, level two, level three, level four and special attention was paid to the highest level, the level four, offenders. We are only talking about maybe 50 people.

The gang suppression unit of the police targeted these individuals. It visited them every three hours or so to find out where they were. A number of approaches involving police activities were provided to try to deal with this problem. That was one of the ways it was dealt with, but then the immobilizer program was also brought in.

When the immobilizer program was brought in, the Manitoba Public Insurance announced it and for a period of 10 months it was basically a voluntary program. It gave what I believe was an $80 reduction in people's insurance rates for the first year and then $40 afterward, but they had to pay for the immobilizer. The uptake on that program was not extremely high.

Sometimes there are programs in government that we think should work. When we try them out, they do not work as well as they should. It boils down to a bit of tinkering to make them work correctly. We knew we had the right program, but it was not working, probably for the reason that people had to pay for the immobilizer.

After 10 months, the Manitoba government made an announcement that it would make the program mandatory. It identified a number of cars that were at the highest risk of being stolen based on theft statistics. It announced that as of September 1, 2007, people could not renew their insurance unless immobilizers were installed. The installation was free and the customer would receive an $80 reduction in insurance and a $40 reduction in each subsequent year.

It was that action, combined with the gang suppression unit's activities, that caused a huge drop in auto thefts in Manitoba. It was not only the immobilizer program alone that did it. It was the combination of working with police. We also understood that we had to go to Ottawa to ask for tougher laws. It is a multifaceted approach to deal with auto thefts.

We know the problem over the long term will solve itself. The federal Liberal government back in 2003 announced that effective September 1, 2007, all new cars sold in Canada would need factory-installed immobilizers. However, it would probably take 10 to 15 years before we would solve the problem.

Clearly, from a Manitoba point of view, we applauded the federal government for announcing that in 2003 and for the Conservative government bringing it in September 1, 2007. However, we were not prepared to wait those 10 to 15 years for the problem to solve itself. While we were happy with that, we wanted to deal with the other more immediate problems of auto thefts today.

Members have compared the Manitoba auto theft rates with Montreal. In Montreal the recovery rate was only about 30%, which would indicate that there is criminal gang involvement, where vehicles are stolen and exported to other countries for resale. In Manitoba the recovery rate was about 80%. Therefore, we could conclude that people were joyriding, that they were using the cars to get from point A to point B.

It is true that a lot of that is going on and the cars they are stealing are usually older, but the fact is we have had an alarming increase in the number of stolen vehicles involved in police chases. The vehicles are involved in police chases that invariably end with serious accidents that have resulted in a number of deaths. Auto thieves have stolen cars, become involved in high-speed cases and ended up killing a number of people. Last year we had a situation where so-called joyriding thieves actually tried to run down joggers on the road.

We saw this as a very serious problem that needed an extremely aggressive approach. It was only when we took the mandatory steps to force people to put in immobilizers in order to insure their car, at the insurance corporation's cost, that we had compliance and saw an almost immediate drastic drop in the car theft rate.

That is an idea that should be transplanted to other jurisdictions. I am wondering why that has not actually happened at this point. The member from B.C. asked about the bait car program, and I told him we did look at that. We do not have a monopoly on good ideas here; there are other ideas, like the bait car program, that could be used.

Manitoba looked at the bait car program and for whatever reasons decided it was either too expensive or, as some may know we have cooler temperatures for parts of the winter, perhaps the bait car would not work properly at 40 below in January.

Nevertheless we did adopt a GPS program, which has been used successfully in Nova Scotia for a number of years. We have tested that for over a year now, and there was some slippage with it. I think it has worked out okay. We outfitted a number of high-risk car thieves with a tracking device. They were followed around and monitored, and evidently that was helpful.

It seems surprising that we can have a system that works in one place and we cannot replicate that with any kind of swiftness across the country. I look at the whole history of the auto thief program, and 20 years ago consumer groups were asking the auto industry to install immobilizers. The car industry resisted. It did not want to do it. It did not want to do it because it was going to add $30 to the cost of manufacturing the car. It had all kinds of time and money for putting in extra cup holders and all sorts of other features that would not add to the safety of the vehicle the way putting in an immobilizer would.

It was not until 1997, I believe, that the Ford Motor Company started installing the number one approved immobilizer of the different types that were available. Then again, it only installed them in the high-end, not the lower-end vehicles. It was something that was necessary at the end of the day, but it certainly took a long time for the auto industry to start an effective immobilizer program.

Now a couple of the other car companies use a different standard, and the standards are at odds with one another. The Manitoba Public Insurance Corporation will not give a discount to people with immobilizers that are not of the highest standard. Constituents of mine have insisted they had the right immobilizer on their car, but found out they did not. Several kinds of immobilizers are available and not all of them meet the standards.

I have the definition of what is required with respect to meeting the highest standards. Approved immobilizers have to meet a national standard, Canada ULCS338/98. Immobilizers of this standard meet a number of requirements for immobilizer technology. Transponder base technology is the key to this.

The transponder is a radio frequency chip located in the key or key fob. When the chip is near the ignition it sends a signal to deactivate the immobilizer thereby allowing the vehicle to start. The vehicle will not start without the signal. When someone walks away from the vehicle with the key or key fob, the immobilizer is armed and the vehicle cannot be started.

By contrast, some non-approved immobilizers have the deactivation system in the steering column. In addition, many non-approved immobilizers only disable two systems in the vehicle, while approved immobilizers must disable three. Thieves have become skilled at defeating less effective systems, and as a result, theft of these vehicles is on the rise.

If the immobilizer is installed according to the proper standards, it cannot be defeated. Until a year ago, there were zero car thefts because of Ford's high standard.

A number of people in my constituency were quite incensed about the whole idea of installing an immobilizer in the first place. They feel that it is not their responsibility to protect their vehicle. They feel that people should behave themselves and be law-abiding, as they were when they grew up. They feel they should be able to leave their cars unlocked in front of their house with the keys in the car, as they did in the 1950s. People did not steal things in those days.

My constituents are quite incensed, and they have been phoning my office to complain about putting an immobilizer in their cars to prevent people from stealing them. They feel we should lock people up and the problem would be solved. We know that locking people up is not the correct approach. They will come out of jail as better criminals unless we have preventative programs, training programs, educational programs and incentives.

The previous Conservative government in Manitoba tried making auto thieves pay for stealing cars. Legislation was introduced, maybe it has been passed by now, requiring parents to pay for damages caused by their children. I heard the other day that some other jurisdiction is looking at this right now. Young people who are stealing cars are not concerned about paying for damages.

We also looked at the idea of having the auto corporation put on liens to make sure car thieves could not renew their driver's licences. Most of them do not have a driver's licence, so the lack of a licence would obviously not stop a person from stealing a car and driving in the first place.

We looked at a prohibition against car thieves getting a driver's licence. We were hoping young people would think twice about stealing a car because having a licence is important to them. Some people might actually have been deterred from stealing a car because of that.

I am not saying we should not do these things, but the last thing young people are worried about when stealing a car is whether they are going to get a driver's licence on time or they are going to have to pay for the damages they cause.

Another big area of auto theft is that thieves are not only stealing cars for joyriding, they are stealing them in order to commit more crimes. We have found that people steal cars, go out and break into houses and then use the vehicles to transport stolen goods they then sell.

This is a very complicated and huge area. If we were to work together to try all the different aspects that work in different jurisdictions, we could actually get a handle on this, albeit about 20 years later than we should have.

[Marc Lemay, Bloc, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like my colleague from Abbotsford to ask me that same question relating to minimum prison sentences during the period reserved for questions and comments. I will have what I think is a wholly appropriate response under the circumstances.

For those who are listening to us, these are pretty impressive figures. I have the statistics for 1999, but I do not want to dazzle our audience with a whole lot of numbers. I would just like to demonstrate why the government must attack this scourge and why the Bloc Québécois will be supporting Bill C-26. As a criminal lawyer for a number of years, I have, as my colleague from Hochelaga said, experienced this with a number of my clients, and I will come back to that.

In 1999, 161,388 vehicles were stolen in Canada. Nearly 10 years later, in 2006, the figure was 159,944. Let us round that up to 160,000. So there has been just a slight drop. Only 1,000 fewer car thefts in close to 10 years,so we have a major problem.

Let us look at the situation in Quebec. In 1999, 43,068 vehicles were stolen, and in 2006, 38,821. So yes, there has been a drop, but we still have a problem.

I have some good news for our audience. In 2006, the car the most often stolen in Canada was—and if someone has one of these, they would be wise to keep a close eye on it—the two-door 1999 Honda Civic. It is followed by the two-door 2000 Honda Civic. Third, the four-door all-wheel drive Subaru Impreza. Fourth, the two-door 1999 Acura Integra. In fifth place is the 1994 Dodge Grand Caravan/Voyager, and in seventh the 1994 Dodge Plymouth Caravan Voyager. In eighth place we have the two-door 1998 Acura Integra. Ninth place is held by the two-door 2000 Audi TT Quattro Coupé 2000, and tenth by the two-door 1994 Dodge Shadow Plymouth Sundance hatchback. Why did I list all those? Because there really is a problem, most definitely a problem with auto theft.

When I look at the bill we have before us, which the Bloc will be supporting as I said, we see that there are three types of car theft. A theft is always a theft, I agree on that, but there are three different categories.

Let us talk about the theft of an idling vehicle by a young person aged 15, 16, 17 or 18. How many times do cars get stolen when the owner has just run into the convenience store for two minutes to get a newspaper? They leave the keys in the ignition, the motor is running, and the young person happens by. He has decided he wants to go downtown, so he takes off with the car, and when he gets downtown he abandons it in a public place and just goes on about his business. That is what is known as a joyride. Kids who just take cars to drive around in. They have no intention of doing any harm to them, or anything else. They just want to take a spin for a little while. That is the first kind of theft, and it is unacceptable.

I live in a region that is 600 km from Montreal, and some 500 km from Ottawa, and cars are a necessity in regions like mine. There is little if any public transit in small places such as ours. In the riding of Abitibi-Témiscamingue, the only place with municipal service is Rouyn-Noranda. There is none anywhere else.

When someone is deprived of the use of his car, it is a problem. No offence to my hon. colleague from Hochelaga, with his metro and other public transit, but we have nothing like that. So it is very unpleasant to lose your car, I would go so far as to say unacceptable. Very often, the young people who take a car just for a joyride do not even realize they are depriving someone of his means of transportation. They need an appropriate sanction. I will return to this later if my hon. colleague from Abbotsford will ask me the question. The problem with these young people will not be solved with jail time. There may be an underlying problem but generally, if they are taken to youth court under the young offender legislation and given community service—like painting or washing vehicles in garages or at the municipal vehicle pound—the problem solves itself.

There are two other types of theft that this bill provides a strong response to. That is why, I would repeat, we will be supporting it. I am referring to motor vehicles being stolen for parts. This is what happens. Generally, an individual sees a vehicle and knows a place where someone can strip the vehicle for parts. We were told, in our practice, that quite often this is done to fill an order. A young person is told that they need a 1978 or 1980 Volkswagen windshield, or a particular kind of radiator. Very often, the individuals receive an order and go out and steal a vehicle, which they bring back to a specific place. The vehicle is stripped and only the parts are kept. I will come back to this during in-depth consideration of the bill, but quite often, the vehicle is stripped for parts. It is broken down into pieces. I have seen Audi TT transmissions completely stripped. Vehicles are stolen for a spoiler. There was a time when vehicles were stolen for the windshield, because it had wires that could be used to receive radio signals. Completely unacceptable things have happened. It has become totally unacceptable.

I am not going by order of seriousness, but I think this point is the most serious. Generally, someone who steals vehicles for parts is not necessarily part of a ring. The person does it for the parts. They steal two or three. Yes, they may be part of a ring. With no disrespect to my hon. colleague from Hochelaga, this really happens more in big cities like Montreal, Toronto, Calgary or St. John's, where we see vehicle thefts with definite organization and where organized crime has already started to be in evidence in places where vehicles are stripped. In regions like mine, Abitibi-Témiscamingue, or even Saguenay—Lac Saint-Jean, criminals tend to do it more to fill orders.

There is a third kind of offence. This one was less visible in recent years, but it is being seen more and more and it is very important. Earlier, my colleague mentioned the number of vehicles that had been stolen in recent years, and in particular the number of those vehicles that had not been found. That is extremely dangerous. An order is sent out. Someone says: “I want a Porsche 911. I want a 2006 Volkswagen Jetta. I want an Audi TT. I want an Acura.” And so on.

Why? Because organized crime has in fact set up a system where vehicles are taken for export. What do they do? Obviously, it takes an entire organization. There has to be good planning to know how they can be exported. Generally, organized crime controls the supply chain from the outset, from when the order is placed to the final step. I will give an example, something that has happened several times. Someone wants a Porsche 911 or a Porsche Carrera. Why? Because the Porsche Carrera will end up somewhere in Russia, or somewhere in Afghanistan—maybe not—or in other countries, but in very specific places. To organize that kind of theft, that kind of crime, you need a well oiled, well run organization. That is where Bill C-26 is going to be useful.

I want to get into the details of the bill. It contains a particularly important provision. This bill would amend section 353. It would create a hitherto non-existent offence. My colleague from Hochelaga is very young and, sadly for us, has not yet been called to the bar. Unfortunately, he only recently found his calling in the law. However, those of us who are older remember a time when the stolen parts market was booming. What happened was that a guy would steal a car, go to a chop shop and have it broken down into parts. The charge was having voluntarily, directly or indirectly, encouraged an individual to commit an offence, or having directly or indirectly possessed an object known to have been stolen. What did people do? They went to the chop shop, had the car broken down into parts, and then sold the parts.

Now there is a new section that reads as follows:

Every person commits an offence who, without lawful excuse, wholly or partially alters, removes or obliterates a vehicle identification number on a motor vehicle.

I said that I would say it at least ten times during my speech, so I will once again refer to the member for Hochelaga. He does not own a car—and I respect that—so he does not know this, but next time he takes the metro in Montreal, which he often does, or travels on VIA Rail, as he does every week, he should take a look and he will see that every car has an identification number. Generally it can be found inside the car—I would hope—just below the windshield. It is a very long number that usually includes several letters.