Bill C-22 (Historical)

An Act respecting the mandatory reporting of Internet child pornography by persons who provide an Internet service

This enactment imposes reporting duties on persons who provide an Internet service to the public if they are advised of an Internet address where child pornography may be available to the public or if they have reasonable grounds to believe that their Internet service is being or has been used to commit a child pornography offence. This enactment makes it an offence to fail to comply with the reporting duties.

Justice

[Kerry-Lynne Findlay, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice]

Mr. Speaker, it is truly a happy and good-news day for justice. I am happy to report that today Bill C-22, the government's legislation to make the reporting of child pornography by Internet service providers mandatory, has come into force.

Police forces across Canada make every effort to combat the creation and distribution of child pornography. They cannot eliminate online sexual exploitation by working alone. Our government is providing police with the tools they need. Our government makes it clear that we all have a role to play in protecting our children from this unspeakable--

Business of the House

[John Baird, Conservative, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

When members are called smug, they all cheer and applaud.

As for the business of the House, I believe the minister responsible for the Status of Women has a motion that she would like to move after I have concluded my response to the Thursday question. Following that, without anticipating the outcome of any vote of the House, there seems to be an appetite to allow members who will not be running in the next election to have two minutes each to make statements. Following these statements, we will continue with day one of the budget debate.

Tomorrow we will consider the last allotted day in this supply period. I do not know why the opposition coalition is talking about ending this very productive Parliament to force an unwanted and unnecessary election. Recent weeks have led me to conclude that this is the most dysfunctional Parliament in Canadian history.

Yesterday our Conservative government achieved royal assent for the following bills: Bill S-6 to eliminate the faint hope clause; Bill C-14 to provide hard-working Canadians some fairness at the gas pumps; Bill C-21 to crack down on white collar crime; Bill C-22 to crack down on those who would exploit our children through the Internet; Bill C-30, R. v. Shoker; Bill C-35 to crack down on crooked immigration consultants; Bill C-42 to provide aviation security; Bill C-48 to eliminate sentencing discounts for multiple murderers; Bill C-59 to get rid of early parole for white collar fraudsters, a bill the Liberal government opposed but the Bloc supported; Bill C-61, the freezing of assets of corrupt regimes; and Bill S-5, safe vehicles from Mexico. What a legacy for the Minister of Transport, Infrastructure and Communities.

The work of this Parliament is not done. There are a number of key and popular government bills that Canadians want. Next week, starting on Monday, we will call: Bill C-8, the Canada-Jordan free trade agreement; Bill C-46, the Canada-Panama free trade agreement; Bill C-51, investigative powers for the 21st century; and Bill C-52, lawful access.

Does the Minister of Justice ever stop fighting crime? He gets more and more done. In many respects, as House leader I am like the parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Justice.

Of course, we need to complete the budget debate to implement the next phase of Canada's economic action plan, a low tax plan for jobs and growth. Therefore, Tuesday we will debate day two of the budget, Wednesday we will debate day three of the budget and on Thursday we will debate day four of the budget. We have lots to do and I suggest to the members across that we turn our attention back to serving the interests of the public.

While I am on my feet, I would like to serve those interests by asking for unanimous consent for the following motion. I move that, notwithstanding any Standing Order or usual practices of the House, Bill C-49, An Act to amend the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, the Balanced Refugee Reform Act and the Marine Transportation Security Act shall be deemed to have been read a second time, referred to a committee of the whole, deemed considered in committee of the whole, deemed reported without amendment, deemed concurred in at report stage and deemed read a third time and passed.

Opposition Motion--Documents Requested by the Standing Committee on Finance

[Daniel Petit, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise today regarding two important matters.

To begin with, I would like to explain to members how crime affects us all and how it is to some degree impossible to gauge the full cost of crime.

Secondly, the steps that we are taking to fight crime cannot be measured or determined solely by their cost. We have introduced wide-ranging legal reforms in an effort to respond to the concerns of victims and to mitigate the human costs associated with crime. These are major investments, and not only on a financial level.

Crime costs victims dearly; I would go so far as to say that it costs them very dearly. Of course, crime is very costly for all Canadians, but we know that it is the victims of crime who have to shoulder the bulk of this cost.

According to a recent study by the Department of Justice, the total cost of Criminal Code offences was estimated at $31.4 billion in 2008. Since there are no data available for many variables, we know this to be a conservative estimate. Still, it equates to a per capita cost of $943 for that year.

We know that victims are those most directly affected by crime. Of the $31.4 billion in costs, $14.3 billion are the direct result of crimes committed. This $14.3 billion covers medical care, hospitalization, loss of income, school absenteeism, and theft or property damage. More specifically, the drop in productivity accounts for 47% of the total cost borne by victims. Theft or property damage accounts for 42.9% and health care costs account for the remaining 10.1%. These costs are only the tip of the iceberg since they represent recoverable and identifiable expenses, such as those resulting from loss of property or medical care. There is nothing about this that is hard to understand.

The intangible costs such as fear, pain, suffering and decreased quality of life far outweigh the material costs. It is difficult, well nigh impossible, to precisely measure the cost of the emotional and psychological suffering caused by crime, and yet it is important to try to do so.

Research has shown that victims of violent crimes experience stress after being victimized. A crime can influence how victims view the world around them and how much they trust others. It can cause pain and suffering. We know that the psychological effects of crime-related trauma can last a long time. Because of a lack of data, early studies of the costs of crime did not take into account the pain and suffering experienced by victims. The situation is starting to improve because the intangible costs to victims are much too high to be ignored.

According to the results of the study by the Department of Justice, which I mentioned earlier, the intangible costs to victims total around $68.2 billion. Thus the total cost of crime in Canada in 2008 would be $99.6 billion. If we take into account intangible costs, the costs borne by victims represent 82.8% of the total costs. It is a fact that crime is costly for the victims.

The victims are the people most affected by acts of violence, but other people suffer as well. Family members mourn the death of a loved one or must put their daily activities on hold to accompany victims to court or to doctor's appointments, for example.

Governments provide various victims' services and compensation programs to directly help victims, and they work on strategic plans on these issues.

The third-party costs take all these costs into account. In 2008, the total third-party costs were about $2.2 billion.

Why do we need to know the cost of crime and the cost borne by the victims?

We know that no amount of money can adequately compensate a victim of crime or his family, especially when it comes to homicide. No one would choose to die in exchange for $2.5 million or would agree to an assault on his child in return for $10,000.

It is important, though, to establish these estimates. We know that resources are scarce and that programs such as those to increase the number of police officers on the beat or provide funding for health and welfare, to improve the environment, or to build highways and parks are always competing with one another for a share of the public purse.

There must be several facets to our attempt to allay the enormous costs incurred by the victims of crime.

Our government is determined to enhance the safety of all Canadians and raise their confidence in the justice system. That is important. We want to start by dealing with the main concerns of crime victims, those people who have discovered how the system works as a result of an unfortunate experience and have told us that changes are needed. We listened to them.

Canadians are proud of their justice system. It is admired the world over for its fairness. There is always room for improvement, though. Our government is determined to ensure that our justice system continues to be the envy of the world and, most of all, that it is valued in Canada.

In 2006, our government set out its plans for changes to the criminal justice system, and over the last five years, those plans have been realized. It was not easy to ensure that the key changes passed. We were and still are a minority government.

It is easy, though, to see that Canadians support our program to fight crime.

Canadians agree that the personal, financial and emotional consequences for crime victims and the public are too severe and that measures to make Canadians safer, hold offenders responsible and raise confidence in our justice systems are worth the investment.

Allow me to describe a few key legislative changes that illustrate how concerned we are about crime victims and the people of Canada in general.

Our changes were intended to make the punishment fit the crime a little better, something that crime victims and many other people had been demanding for a long time. Changes were made to protect children, our most vulnerable victims. Some changes focused on issues that affect Canadians in their daily lives, such as automobile theft, identity theft, drug-related crime, fraud and street racing.

I would remind the House of Bill C-25, the Truth in Sentencing Act, which was introduced on March 27, 2009 and passed three months later on June 8, 2009. The bill received royal assent on October 22, 2009, and the changes came into force on February 22, 2010.

In general, these changes limit the credit for time served in preventive detention to a one to one ratio. A maximum ratio of one and a half to one applies only when circumstances warrant. A maximum one to one ratio applies to the credit accorded offenders who broke their bail conditions or were denied bail because of their criminal record. No higher ratio is allowed than one to one, regardless of the circumstances.

This amendment to the Criminal Code was welcomed by those who were appalled by the two- or three-for-one sentencing credits being given to offenders who were detained before their trials.

Victims of crime welcomed this amendment, which is designed to guarantee that offenders serve their sentences. Victims do not want revenge; they want sentences to fit the crime. Bill C-25 addressed this concern.

Bill S-6, An Act to amend the Criminal Code and another Act, which dealt with the faint hope clause was recently passed by the House and the Senate and will soon be ready to receive royal assent. It will abolish the faint hope clause for individuals serving a life sentence for murder. Those who commit murder after this bill comes into effect will no longer be able to avail themselves of the faint hope clause. Family members of murder victims have been calling for the abolition of this clause for many years. We listened to them.

Our government is committed to abolishing the faint hope clause, which allows murderers who are serving life sentences to apply for parole after serving 15 years of their sentence rather than 25 years. As you can well imagine, murder victims' families could not understand how a life sentence could turn into parole after only 15 years. It was absolutely scandalous. As I said earlier, victims are not acting out of revenge; they just want the sentences to be reasonable. We listened to them.

I would also like to remind the House about Bill C-48, the Protecting Canadians by Ending Sentence Discounts for Multiple Murders Act, introduced on October 5, 2010. This bill deals with multiple murders and responds to the legitimate concerns of victims of crime, who feel that every homicide victim has to count and every sentence handed down to a murderer has to fit the seriousness of the crime. Life imprisonment means spending life in prison. It is impossible to give multiple murderers multiple life sentences since we have only one life. Nonetheless, Bill C-48 will allow a judge to impose consecutive periods of 25 years with no chance of parole for each murder conviction. For example, a person found guilty of two murders—the easiest case to understand—might have to spend 50 years in prison before being eligible for parole. Bill C-48 was passed by the House and is currently at second reading stage in the other place. This bill is another example of our goal to make the punishment fit the crime and to ensure that offenders are held accountable for their actions against victims.

I also want to talk about other reforms centred around victims. I am sure that my colleagues in this House will recall Bill C-21, the Standing up for Victims of White Collar Crime Act, which was introduced in the House of Commons on May 3, 2010 and passed by the House on December 15, 2010 and is currently before the other place. Bill C-21 provides a mandatory minimum sentence of two years for fraud over $1 million. As pointed out in the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, of which I am a member, many cases of fraud involving large sums of money already end in prison sentences greater than two years.

I would also like to point out that Bill C-21 has been long awaited by victims of white collar crime. These reforms will do more than just add a minimum sentence. They will allow the court to issue an order prohibiting people who have been found guilty of fraud from having any authority over anyone else's money or property in order to ensure that they do not defraud others. Restitution for victims of fraud will be given greater importance, and the courts will be allowed to take into account community impact statements concerning the repercussions of the fraud. Community impact statements will be a vital tool that will serve to remind the court, the offender and the public that these crimes have negative repercussions on communities and on the victims who suffer direct financial losses.

We listened to victims.

Who among us has never had their car stolen or does not know someone who has had their car stolen? Car theft is common. It is a real scourge. It has a huge impact on our daily lives. Victims of car theft feel huge frustration that is compounded by the fact that the thief is not held to account. Bill S-9, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (auto theft and trafficking in property obtained by crime), also called the Tackling Auto Theft and Property Crime Act, was broadly supported and received royal assent on November 18, 2010. That bill will come into force soon.

These changes create new offences related to motor vehicle theft; altering, removing or obliterating a vehicle identification number; trafficking in property or proceeds obtained by crime; and possession of such property or proceeds for the purposes of trafficking. In addition, it provides for an in rem prohibition on the importation and exportation of such property or proceeds.

Bill S-9 also sets out mandatory minimum sentences for repeat offenders.

I will spare you the details of the bills aimed at amending legislation that have been passed by the government. The list is too long. However, I want to point out some, in particular the ones meant to protect our children.

For example, Bill C-22, An Act respecting the mandatory reporting of Internet child pornography by persons who provide an Internet service requires Internet service providers to report any child pornography on their network. A breach of that requirement could lead to a series of increasingly higher fines and the person could be put in prison for a maximum of six months for a third infraction and for each subsequent offence. Bill C-22 was widely supported in the House.

It goes without saying that Bill C-22 addresses the concerns of victims of crime. We listened to them. The bill aims to reduce the number of new victims of Internet child pornography. The federal ombudsman for victims of crime was very clear on the need for such a law; we created that ombudsman's office.

Before I conclude, I would be remiss if I did not mention Bill C-54, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (sexual offences against children), also known as the Protecting Children from Sexual Predators Act, which was passed on November 4, 2010.

These amendments will help us better protect children from sexual exploitation because of two new infractions, namely providing sexually explicit materials to a child for the purpose of facilitating the commission of a sexual offence against the child and agreeing or arranging to commit a sexual offence against a child.

These amendments will also require the court to consider attaching conditions to sentences for offenders found guilty of committing a sexual offence involving a child and offenders suspected of having committed this type of offence to ensure that they are not in contact with children under the age of 16 and that they do not use the Internet without supervision by a designated person.

This will allow for a more consistent enforcement of sentences for sexual offences involving children.

Bill C-54 is currently being studied by the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, of which I am a member, and I suggest that, when it is returned to the House, all members show their support for protecting children by ensuring that this bill is passed quickly.

The government is proud of what it has accomplished for victims of crime and for the people of Canada. We are listening to victims of crime and to other stakeholders in the justice system, and we are making reforms that address the needs and concerns of Canadians.

Our government has listened to victims.

Disposition of Abolition of Early Parole Act

[Alexandra Mendes, Liberal, Brossard—La Prairie, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to participate in the debate on the motion to prevent debate on the content and substance of Bill C-59. I find it rather odd that the Bloc has supported the government's attempt to stifle any attempt at debate on the substance of this bill.

No one in the House can accuse the Liberals of not supporting the idea of eliminating parole eligibility after one-sixth of the sentence is served for economic crimes. Two years ago, my colleague from Bourassa, our candidate in Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert and our member for Lac-Saint-Louis participated in a press conference with several of Earl Jones' victims to call on the government to quickly bring forward a bill to eliminate parole eligibility after one-sixth of the sentence is served, especially for criminals who commit major fraud and have multiple victims.

No one can accuse the Liberals of not supporting that idea. I think it is really dishonest of the government to make that kind of accusation when it knows very well what the Liberals' position is. This was pointed out by my colleague from Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine.

Now I would like to talk about the debate and the fact that the Conservatives and the Bloc members want to limit the scope of the debate. Just seven months ago the members of the Bloc rose in the House to criticize the government for doing the exact same thing it is doing now with Bill C-59. The government moved a motion to block debate.

Last June, the member for Saint-Maurice—Champlain rose in the House to criticize the government for moving a motion to block debate on the Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act. The Bloc member for Hochelaga also rose to oppose a government motion to block debate on Bill C-9, the Jobs and Economic Growth Act, by imposing time allocation.

We are opposed to this time allocation motion because we believe that Bill C-59 addresses a very important issue. Furthermore, for two years now, the Liberals have been calling on the government to eliminate parole eligibility after one-sixth of the sentence is served for economic crimes like those committed by Earl Jones, Vincent Lacroix and others.

I think it is a shame that some would have people believe that the Liberals do not want to protect victims. That is simply not true. When the government introduced Bill C-21 on economic crimes and it was referred to committee, the Liberal justice critic proposed an amendment to the bill to eliminate eligibility for parole after one-sixth of the sentence in cases of economic crime. The Conservatives and the Bloc defeated the motion.

Every MP is entitled to his or her opinion on bills that we are called on to debate in the House. It is a fundamental aspect of the democratic process. The operative word here is “debate”, and the collusion between the Conservatives and the Bloc is preventing us from acting as responsible parliamentarians.

We would like to hear from experts. We want to know how this bill will truly address a gap in the law, how it will do justice to victims, how this bill will improve the chances of rehabilitation for those who once lost control of their lives.

Perhaps we should indeed eliminate parole after one-sixth of a sentence for offenders who have committed serious economic crimes and left a number of victims.

However, for non-violent criminal acts that are not fraud, we believe that evidence has shown that parole after one-sixth of a sentence has been very effective and that the rate of recidivism is much lower.

We will never know what the experts might have said since this closure motion eliminates any chance to consult experts. With this government so eager to control everything, it has become somewhat of a tradition to just pass a bill without any idea of the facts that might call it into question.

The Liberals are against this closure motion. It is not justified, and we regret that the Bloc has decided to join the Conservatives to limit the debate on this bill. As far as the substance of the bill is concerned, in the past and still today, no one could accuse the Liberals of not showing their support for eliminating parole after one-sixth of the sentence for economic crimes.

In order to illustrate the government's intellectual dishonesty, I would like to present a chronology of the Conservatives' failures in their so-called fight against crime.

I am referring here to the various bills that have died on the order paper for all sorts of reasons or that have remained in the House or at committee indefinitely.

Here they are. Bill C-15, An Act to amend the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act and to make related and consequential amendments to other Acts, died on the order paper when Parliament was prorogued; Bill C-19, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (investigative hearing and recognizance with conditions), died on the order paper before the House had a chance to vote on it; Bill C-26, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (auto theft and trafficking in property obtained by crime), also died on the order paper. It is certainly not the opposition that forced the government to prorogue Parliament.

Bill C-31, An Act to amend the Criminal Code, the Corruption of Foreign Public Officials Act and the Identification of Criminals Act and to make a consequential amendment to another Act, died on the order paper, and Bill C-36, An Act to amend the Criminal Code, on the faint hope clause, died on the order paper before being brought back this session. One committee meeting was held on Bill C-46, An Act to amend the Criminal Code, the Competition Act and the Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Act, before it died on the order paper. Bill C-52, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (sentencing for fraud), which is related to Bill C-59, the bill we are dealing with today, died on the order paper when Parliament was prorogued. Bill C-58, An Act respecting the mandatory reporting of Internet child pornography by persons who provide an Internet service, died on the order paper. The prorogation of Parliament killed many bills.

Among the bills introduced by the Minister of Public Safety was Bill C-34, the Protecting Victims From Sex Offenders Act, which also died on the order paper. The bill to deter terrorism and to amend the State Immunity Act died on the order paper. Bill C-43, An Act to amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act and the Criminal Code, died on the order paper. Bill C-47, An Act regulating telecommunications facilities to support investigations, died on the order paper. Bill C-53, An Act to amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act (accelerated parole review) and to make consequential amendments to other Acts, died on the order paper. Bill C-60, An Act to implement the Framework Agreement on Integrated Cross-Border Maritime Law Enforcement Operations between the Government of Canada and the Government of the United States of America, died on the order paper.

To date, no meetings have been held to discuss Bill C-16, An Act to amend the Criminal Code. Bill C-17, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (investigative hearing and recognizance with conditions), was given first reading 51 days after Parliament was prorogued, and the committee still has not met to discuss that bill.

Bill C-21, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (sentencing for fraud), was fast-tracked at committee in just one meeting and still has not reached second reading. Bill C-22, An Act respecting the mandatory reporting of Internet child pornography by persons who provide an Internet service, was given first reading 64 days after Parliament was prorogued, and the government delayed it for 26 days at report stage because of the debate on the short title.

Bill C-48, An Act to amend the Criminal Code and to make consequential amendments to the National Defence Act, was given first reading 89 days after Parliament was prorogued, and we are still waiting for the next step. Bill C-50, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (interception of private communications and related warrants and orders), was given first reading after 94 days, and we are still waiting. First reading of An Act to amend the Criminal Code, the Competition Act and the Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Act took place 243 days after Parliament was prorogued. Bill C-53, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (mega-trials), was given first reading and nothing more.

Bill C-54, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (sexual offences against children) only made it to first reading. Bill C-5, An Act to amend the International Transfer of Offenders Act was introduced at first reading by the Minister of Public Safety 15 days after prorogation. Two committee meetings were held and nothing has happened since. As for Bill C-23B, An Act to amend the Criminal Records Act and to make consequential amendments to other Acts, we are still waiting. After a few meetings on the subject, the minister was supposed to come back with amendments that he felt were necessary in order to make the bill more comprehensive and definitely more respectful. Bill C-39, An Act to amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act and to make consequential amendments to other Acts was introduced for first reading 104 days after prorogation and we still have not met in committee to discuss it. Bill C-49, An Act to amend the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, the Balanced Refugee Reform Act and the Marine Transportation Security Act was introduced for first reading 232 days after prorogation and there it remains. Bill C-52, An Act regulating telecommunications facilities to support investigations was also introduced for first reading 243 days after prorogation and we are waiting for the next step. The Senate introduced Bill S-7, An Act to deter terrorism and to amend the State Immunity Act for first reading 49 days after prorogation and we are still waiting for the next step. Bill S-10, An Act to amend the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act and to make related and consequential amendments to other Acts was introduced for first reading in the Senate 60 days after prorogation. Bill S-13, An Act to implement the Framework Agreement on Integrated Cross-Border Maritime Law Enforcement Operations between the Government of Canada and the Government of the United States of America was introduced for first reading 237 days after prorogation.

I am pointing this out to prove that it is not the opposition parties that are slowing the process down. For all sorts of unknown reasons, the government introduces these bill and then goes no further with them.

To conclude, I would like to question the justification for Bill C-59 and the fact that the Conservatives and the Bloc felt this was urgent enough to warrant this closure motion, which is an affront to parliamentary dialogue.

[Chris Charlton, NDP, Hamilton Mountain, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I listened closely to the comments of the member in this chamber, and I am a bit surprised, because he is actually engaging in substantive debate around the bill to which the time allocation motion applies. However, what is really before us in the House today is the time allocation motion itself and the government cutting off the amount of time for debate on the bill.

We should not be debating the merits of the bill itself at all, yet I just heard the member say that all kinds of crime bills have been stalled at committee.

Let me give the House a number of the bills that have now passed through the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights: C-4, C-5, C-16, C-17, C-21, C-22, C-23A, C-23B, C-39, C-48, C-50, C-51, C-52, S-2, S-6, S-7, S-9 and S-10. Can the member really suggest that the crime agenda of the government is being stalled?

Some of us would argue they are the only bills we have been dealing with in the House. I wish the member would return to what we are really debating here tonight, and that is the time allocation motion, not the substance of the government's crime agenda.

Standing Committee on Finance

[Marlene Jennings, Liberal, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am saddened today to feel the obligation to rise to address comments with regard to the question of privilege raised by the member for Kings—Hants on February 7.

It is like the movie Groundhog Day. Anyone is familiar with that movie knows it was very successful. American actor Bill Murray relives the day over and over again until he learns his lesson.

It appears the government is reliving the same thing and forcing all other members of the House of Commons and Canadians to relive the same days we experienced back in 2009-10 with regard to a request from the special committee on Afghanistan for the production of documents from the government. The government resisted that. It took a question of privilege to be raised in the House. It took comments from many members of the House. It took considerable reflection and study on your part, Mr. Speaker, before you made a ruling that there was a prima facie case of privilege in that regard.

Yet, again, we are faced with the exact same situation today.

If I look at the timeline, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Finance tabled its 10th report on Monday, February 7. The member for Kings—Hants, pursuant to that report, raised the question of privilege of which we are now all aware.

I want to concur with the arguments raised by my colleague for Kings—Hants, as well as those raised by my colleagues from Mississauga South and Windsor—Tecumseh on the issue.

However, I wish to note a number of points. I also wish to address, in particular, the issues of cabinet confidence and the requests with regard to all the justice bills. It is important to do so, particularly with the time of events and the government's response to date to the committee's requests for the production of documents. We have not yet heard the government's response in the House with regard to the question of privilege.

On November 17, 2010, the Standing Committee on Finance passed a motion, ordering the Government of Canada to provide the committee with five-year projections of total corporate profits before taxes and effective corporate tax rates from the 2010-11 fiscal year until the 2014-15 fiscal year, inclusive. The November 17 motion also ordered the government to provide the committee with certain financial information pertaining to justice bills, which I will enumerate.

As all members in the House know, I am the justice critic for the official opposition. Therefore, all the information, all the documents requested through the motion of the finance committee have direct pertinence to the committee on justice and human rights. Those justice bills were Bill C-4, the youth criminal justice bill, Bill C-5, Bill C-16, Bill C-17, Bill C-21, Bill C-22, Bill C-23A, Bill C-23B, Bill C-39, Bill C-48, Bill C-50, Bill C-51, Bill C-52, Bill S-2, Bill S-6, Bill S-7, Bill S-9 and Bill S-10.

The motion specifically requested:

—detailed cost accounting, analysis and projections, including assumptions, for each of the bills and Acts, conducted in accordance with the Treasury Board Guide to Costing.

Members are now aware, by the issue of privilege raised by the member for Kings—Hants, that the motion established a deadline of seven calendar days, which ended on November 24, 2010.

On November 24, Finance Canada replied to the committee, and I will read the department's response in its entirety because it is quite important, particularly to any Canadian and any member sitting in the House who takes his or her work as an elected official representing Canadians, a sacred duty in fact, to know the response. It said:

Projections of corporate profits before taxes and effective corporate income tax rates are a Cabinet confidence. As such, we are not in a position to provide these series to the Committee.

The department claimed it was not in a position to provide these documents to the committee because, according to the government, these documents were a cabinet confidence. That is the heart of the matter. Do the documents requested constitute a cabinet confidence and, if so, are they excluded from the rule of the House of Commons, the power and authority of Parliament, to require documents to be provided?

As the House knows, because it has been mentioned by others in the House who have commented on the issue of privilege raised by the member for Kings—Hants, the government has yet to speak to this issue. I understand that one of the parliamentary secretaries has said the government is taking note of all of members' comments in the House, relating to the issue of privilege, and will respond in due course.

On December 1, 2010, one full week after the deadline of November 24, 2010, the committee received a reply from Justice Canada regarding projected costs of the justice bills. I will read the response by Justice Canada in its entirety. It said:

The issue of whether there are any costs associated with the implementation of any of the Government's Justice bills is a matter of Cabinet confidence and, as such, the Government is not in a position to provide such information or documents.

That is interesting because in justice committee, of which I am a member, when we have repeatedly asked the minister for the cost analysis of a government bill before the committee, the minister has never stated that he could not give us that information because it is a matter of confidence. I would challenge members to check the transcripts of justice committee. What I did hear was he did not have the information with him or some befuddled answer that did not answer the question.

On December 7, 2010, after the government had refused to provide the information ordered by finance committee by the established deadline, the member for Kings—Hants provided the committee with written notice of a motion by which, if passed, the committee would draw the attention of the House to what appeared to be a breach of its privileges. That has been done. The committee adopted the motion and the member for Kings—Hants rose in the House to speak to the issue.

On December 10, the committee received an additional response from the Department of Finance Canada in answer to its motion ordering the production of documents relating to the projections regarding corporate taxes before profits.

In response, the department stated:

To the best of its knowledge, the Department of Finance has determined that [the] "series" or projections of corporate profits before taxes or the effective corporate income tax rates have never been previously disclosed. These projections are from a comprehensive economic and fiscal projection that constitutes a Cabinet confidence.

To reiterate, according to the second or additional response of the Department of Finance to the finance committee, the Department of Finance, acting on behalf of the government, claimed that these projections have never been previously disclosed and constitute a cabinet confidence.

As pointed out in this chamber before, but which bears repetition, I would suggest to any Canadian to Google the phrase, “Corporate tax profits before taxes”, and restrict their search to the domain of the Department of Finance Canada. That Canadian would get exactly two results: the HTML and PDF versions of “The Economic and Fiscal Update“ from November 2005. In that update, we find precisely the information that the Department of Justice, in its December 10 additional response to the finance committee, claimed had never previously been disclosed because it constituted a cabinet confidence. In fact, it was disclosed in the November 2005 economic and fiscal update that was issued by the previous government comprised of the Liberal Party of Canada's elected members of Parliament.

Therefore, the assertion on the part of the government, through its Department of Finance, justifying its refusal to obey, respect and act on the order of the finance committee to produce the documents is an outright fabrication.

The government department could have said that in the past the information had been released, but that the policy had been changed with a new interpretation of what constituted a cabinet confidence and, as a result, would not be releasing those documents to the finance committee. However, that was not the reason given by the department, by the government, for refusing to release that information. The reason given to the committee for not providing that information, that it is a cabinet confidence, is pure nonsense.

What is the state of legislation regarding cabinet confidence?

As mentioned, one can look to the Access to Information Act and the law of evidence act, and one will find that the government does not have a leg to stand on, and in fact does not have two legs to stand on.

Any reasonable Canadian reading the pertinent sections of the Access to Information Act and the law of evidence act would see that the two responses given by the Department of Finance and the response given by the Department of Justice are nonsense.

As I said, we know that in 2005 the previous government recognized that projections of corporate tax profits before taxes were not covered by cabinet confidence. Such projections are not considered a cabinet confidence when, as is the case with Finance Canada's revenue model, these projections are used by the department in a manner not exclusively related to cabinet operations.

What has changed between 2005 and 2010-11? On what grounds is the government now claiming that these projections constitute a cabinet confidence when there was no such assertion in the past and governments in the past have in fact provided and disclosed that information?

The costs of the justice bills are also important because the Department of Justice, as well, replied to the finance committee by claiming cabinet confidence as a justification for not releasing that information to the finance committee.

We know that due diligence would have required that cabinet consider the cost implications of each justice bill before making a decision to proceed with each bill. We know that under normal practices, an analysis of the cost implications of each justice bill would have been included with the memorandum to cabinet prepared for each justice bill.

Why do we know this? We know it because the Liberal Party of Canada has formed government in the past. We know that when we came power the government that preceded us, the one formed by the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada, had done that as well. So these are normal practices. These are practices of a prudent, diligent and competent government.

No diligent, prudent and competent government would consider an issue, whether amendments, or a justice bill bringing in new legislation to the Criminal Code or amending existing sections of the Criminal Code, because that constitutes government policy, would do so without informing itself of the cost of those changes.

That is what previous governments have done, because those previous governments, whatever their faults, have followed prudent, diligent and competent practices with regard to taking decisions on issues brought before cabinet.

As I said, we know that under normal practices, an analysis of the cost implications of each justice bill would have been included with the memorandum to cabinet prepared for each justice bill.

Now let us look at the legislation that deals with what is, or is not, cabinet confidence and whether or not something that falls into cabinet confidence can be accessible.

If one looks at section 69 of the Access to Information Act, it tells us that such analysis and background information is not, and I repeat, not, a cabinet confidence, if the cabinet decision to which the analysis relates has been made public.

A cost analysis of the implications of a justice bill should have been included, and I believe was included, in the memorandum to cabinet, as it is on each and every justice bill.

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

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a question of privilege in relation to the 10th report of the Standing Committee on Finance.

In our system of responsible government, the government must seek Parliament's authority to spend public funds. Parliament, in turn, has an obligation, a responsibility to hold the government to account and to scrutinize the government's books.

Recently, this government impeded the work of the Standing Committee on Finance by hindering its attempts to better understand the federal government's budget projections.

As you know, Mr. Speaker, Standing Order 108 empowers committees to send for persons, papers and records. House of Commons Procedure and Practice, second edition, describes Parliament's right to order the production of documents as a right that is “as old as Parliament itself”.

On November 17, 2010, the Standing Committee on Finance passed a motion ordering the Government of Canada to provide the commitment with five-year projections of total corporate profits before taxes and effective corporate tax rates from the 2010-11 fiscal year until the 2014-15 fiscal year, inclusive.

The November 17 motion also ordered the government to provide the committee with certain financial information pertaining to justice Bills C-4, C-5, C-16, C-17, C-21, C-22, C-23A, C-23B, C-39, C-48, C-50, C-51, C-52, S-2, S-6, S-7, S-9 and S-10.

Among other things, the motion specifically requested:

detailed cost accounting, analysis and projections, including assumptions, for each of the bills and Acts, conducted in accordance with the Treasury Board Guide to Costing.

The motion established a deadline of seven calendar days, which ended on November 24, 2010.

On November 24, the Department of Finance replied to the committee with the following. I will read the department's response in its entirety. It stated:

Projections of corporate profits before taxes and effective corporate income tax rates are a Cabinet confidence. As such, we are not in a position to provide these series to the Committee.

The government provided no further information to the committee before the deadline.

On December 1, 2010, one full week after the deadline, the committee received a letter from the Department of Justice regarding projected costs of the justice bills. Again, I will read the department's response in its entirety. It stated:

The issue of whether there are any costs associated with the implementation of any of the Government's Justice bills is a matter of Cabinet confidence and, as such, the Government is not in a position to provide such information or documents.

On December 7, 2010, after the government had refused to provide the information ordered by the committee by the established deadline, I provided the committee with written notice for a motion by which, if passed, the committee would draw the attention of the House to what appeared to be a breach of its privileges.

On December 10, 2010, perhaps in response to the written notice I had written on December 7, the committee received an additional response from the Department of Finance.

In its response, the department stated:

To the best of its knowledge, the Department of Finance has determined that “series” or projections of corporate profits before taxes or the effective corporate income tax rates have never been previously disclosed. These projections are from a comprehensive economic and fiscal projection that constitutes a Cabinet confidence. As a result, the Department of Finance has not been in a position to provide these "series" to the Committee.

This response appeared somewhat dubious. For, if any member of the House or if any Canadian wishes to Google the phrase “corporate profits before taxes” and restrict their search to the domain of the Department of Finance's website, he or she would get exactly two results: the HTML and PDF versions of “The Economic and Fiscal Update” from November 2005, in which they would find, on page 83, that the previous Liberal government had actually published projections of corporate profits before taxes from 2005 until 2010.

At this time, I would like to seek unanimous consent to table page 83 of “The Economic and Fiscal Update” from November 2005.

Protecting Children from Sexual Predators Act

[Yasmin Ratansi, Liberal, Don Valley East, ON]

Mr. Speaker, as I mentioned previously, there were pieces of legislation that the opposition had already agreed to.

The government tries to say it has a tough on crime agenda, or a crime agenda, and we sit here wondering what crime agenda does it really have. If it were really tough on crime, if it really cared about issues, if it really cared about the safety of Canadians, the safety of kids, it would not be proroguing Parliament on a regular basis, because the legislation on the order paper disappears. Private members' bills do not, but those other ones go to zero.

Yes, there has been an impact on Bill C-54 and Bill C-22, and these are the bills that really need to be reinforced and introduced quickly, because we need to protect kids.

[Yasmin Ratansi, Liberal, Don Valley East, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member's question is disingenuous. Every time the government introduces legislation and opposition parties agree to go along with it, the government prorogues. I think out of 16 pieces of legislation, 10 were passed. Take Bill C-22, for example, which would protect children. It took the government 90 days after the resumption of Parliament to even introduce it.

The Liberals are smart on crime. The Conservatives are called stupid on crime for the basic reason that they cannot keep on introducing the same legislation over and over again, 16 times, without really being committed. The Conservatives are not committed. They keep on introducing the same legislation. I wonder if there is going to be another prorogation.

[Yasmin Ratansi, Liberal, Don Valley East, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the purpose of Bill C-54, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (sexual offences against children), is to increase the mandatory minimum penalties for certain sexual offences with respect to children.

I will digress a little and explain what a child is. A child is any person from the age of 0 to 16 years. It was the Liberal opposition that pushed this age of consent and finally drove the government to pass this legislation.

Bill C-54 was introduced on November 4 by the Minister of Justice. It would increase or impose mandatory minimum penalties for certain sexual offences with respect to children.

When one looks at the various changes to the subsections of the Criminal Code and one looks at the minimum penalties for different offences, it is important that the bill, which we support, goes to committee. A lot of issues need to be addressed and a lot of witnesses need to be called. It is important that everybody speaks from the same page because children are a very important asset. We have heard about heinous things being done to children. Not a day goes by without hearing a report on sexual activities against children. It is important that the bill is sent quickly to committee so we are able to really put into effect protection for children.

The bill would impose mandatory minimum penalties for certain sexual offences with respect to children. It would also prohibit anyone from providing sexually explicit material to a child for the purpose of facilitating the commission of a sexual offence against that child.

With the proliferation of things going back and forth on the Internet at such high speeds, it is very important that we look at this issue very critically. With the providing of sexually explicit materials to a child for the purpose of facilitating the commission of a sexual offence against the child, one needs to figure out how that child would be implicated, how the adult was involved and one needs to figure out through what means this was done.

The bill would also prohibit anyone from using any means of telecommunication, including a computer system, to agree or make arrangements with another person for the purpose of committing a sexual offence against a child. Too often we have seen the ramifications of child pornography where children are used as sexual toys for the pleasure of adults who have absolutely dehumanized them.

This is an important aspect of the bill because we need to understand how we would catch the perpetrators, how we would ensure that children are protected and how we would ensure that a child understands because children aged 0 to 16 are naive and vulnerable. They are our asset that needs to be protected. They believe in people.

I attended a memorial service for the victims of the December 6 massacre. I listened to Stevie Cameron talk about girls, about the fact that children are taught that they can do anything possible, that they are the masters of their destiny, and about how we protect these children and then suddenly somebody takes their life away.

With this bill, I am hoping we are able to not only ensure that the laws are in place but that we have a mechanism in place that will enforce the protection of our children, not only in Canada but worldwide because if we look at what is happening in today's age, we see child trafficking across the globe.

If we look at the sex trade or visitors who go to places like Thailand to have sex with little children, it is pornography that gives them that problem. It is the access to pornographic sites on the Internet that dehumanizes the poor child. Therefore, it is important that when we are looking at all of these aspects we are consistent in our enforcement, in what we do.

The third thing that the bill will do is ensure consistency among those two new offences and the existing offence of luring a child. Here I would like to bring to bear what happened to Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French. They were unsuspecting kids who were lured by a pedophile, and we reflect upon how this bill may have protected them or given a harsher sentence to Karla Homolka.

The fourth thing that the bill would do is expand the list of specified conditions that may be added to prohibition and recognizance orders to include prohibition concerning contact with a person under the age of 16 and the use of the Internet or other digital networks, and expand the list of enumerated offences that may give rise to such orders and prohibitions.

That brings me to what has been happening currently. Our kids go onto computers and they are more computer savvy than their parents. They access Internet sites and the parents are probably not aware of it. These may be latchkey kids or they may be kids whose parents are at home, but when they are locked in their rooms and they are on Facebook, they have no idea who they are communicating with. It is important that we have checks and balances in place that go after the providers of Internet services to ensure the protection of these kids, to ensure the traceability of the information.

The protection of children is a priority for the Liberal Party. As a party, we have stood firmly against the proliferation of online child pornography for over a decade. In 2002, the former Liberal government made it illegal to deliberately access a website containing child pornography, rather than just having possession of such materials, and it was the Liberal government that put into place Cybertip.ca, an online reporting tool for child pornography. Cybertip is an important tool because, as I mentioned, with the Internet and its proliferation, it is important that we know how to trace the source, to ensure that our children are safe, to ensure that we find the children who have been abducted for the purpose of the sex trade, and to find the perpetrators.

Making laws without having the tools or the means to enforce them does not make for good law, so I hope that when this legislation goes before committee, it will be calling on numerous witnesses so that they can have a wholesome discussion and a wholesome production. I am pleased to see that Bill C-54 introduces a series of new minimum penalties for crimes against children, but as I mentioned, the bill has so many other permutations and combinations that it is important that it be looked at properly at committee. The Liberals will be supporting this legislation to go before committee, in order to hear from a variety of witnesses, and we will assess at that time whether the Conservatives have introduced sufficient penalties or whether additional amendments are required.

As I mentioned earlier, what comes to mind here is the Paul Bernardo case. When he and his wife abducted two kids, Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French, it horrified Canadians. It horrified the whole country to know that such heinous crimes could be committed, that we had such disturbed individuals in our midst.

My question would be does the bill do enough to ensure that what happened with Karla Homolka, who was able to reduce her sentence through plea bargaining, cannot happen again? We all want safe communities. We all know that there are sick minds that access the Internet and pornographic sites that dehumanize children and women. This dehumanizing makes victims be treated as objects of pleasure.

If one looks at the five things that the bill has introduced, I would love to see a very strong enforcement tool that would allow police officers, or people who are given the duty to ensure enforcement, to be able to access the material, to be able to trace the source, be able to ensure that protection takes place, be able to facilitate that information whether it be across Canada or with Interpol or other agencies, because this type of crime, as I mentioned earlier, is not only done in Canada but is worldwide.

Children being abducted for the purpose of sex slavery is a horrendous crime and it is a crime against all children. In countries in the developing world where they do not have the same protection we need to ensure that when we enforce legislation we have a global approach to it because the globe is where we need to look at. A troubled mind will do anything.

We need to also invest in areas like mental health and education. The Liberals unconditionally supported Bill C-22, which would make the reporting of Internet child pornography mandatory for Internet service providers and other persons providing Internet services. In fact, we believe that the government took too long to bring this to bear and we need to ensure that if we are serious about crimes against children, if we are serious about protecting them, if we are serious about ensuring that children have safe lives, that we live in safe communities, that we are not always looking over our shoulder, or over the Internet to ensure the safety of our children, then we need to see that Bill C-54 be sent quickly to committee and be looked after.

Today, December 6, is a day of remembering the 14 women who were gunned down by a crazy person. These were students at university. Violence against women is not just violence against women themselves, but it is violence against children as well. When a woman is abused it affects the child and the psychology of that child. It affects the whole family. It makes the family dysfunctional. Violence against women that results in death at the hands of a spouse, or common-law partner, or a deranged person still makes society unsafe.

It is important that the government not speak from both sides of its mouth. If we want smart solutions for violent crimes then we need to ensure that our gun laws are strict, that registration is there, that women and children are protected.

I would urge the government not to just see things in silos but to take a holistic approach to this bill. I would ask the government to ensure that we have a wholesome discussion on the bill and that we find a solution relevant to the whole community.

[Bob Dechert, Conservative, Mississauga—Erindale, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for his question and the statement he made earlier today on Bill C-22 that all hon. members agree and have an interest in making our laws more restrictive to ensure that no child is ever sexually abused in Canada.

With respect to his specific question, I can assure him that the department did look at the way the definitions of child pornography mesh with the provisions of material to a child for the purposes of grooming the child for sexual abuse. It is the view of the government and the department that both will withstand any charter challenge.

Business of the House

[John Baird, Conservative, Leader of the Government in the House of Commons and Minister of the Environment]

Mr. Speaker, we will continue today with the opposition day motion by our friends from the New Democratic Party. Pursuant to an order made earlier today, the vote on the NDP motion will be deferred until the end of government orders on Tuesday.

Tomorrow we will consider a great bill proposed by the Minister of Justice, Bill C-22, protecting children from online sexual exploitation. The Minister of Justice has another great bill, Bill C-54, protecting children from sexual predators, which we will then debate. We will then move to Bill C-33, the safer railways act, on which the Minister of State for Transport has done a lot of very good work. Next is Bill C-21, the standing up for victims of white collar crime act, which is another strong justice bill brought forward by the Attorney General of Canada.

Next week we will continue with business from Friday.

I am pleased to report that there are ongoing constructive, and even harmonious, discussions among the parties, so the list of business that I mentioned may change.

Next week, each and every day we will be debating great bills that will do great things for Canada.

Also I will return to the House at a later time to designate the last allotted day.

[John Baird, Conservative, Leader of the Government in the House of Commons and Minister of the Environment]

Mr. Speaker, before I respond to the hon. member's question, I want to say that at our House leaders meeting just two weeks ago, the government raised the issue of one of the Liberal members calling a minister of the Crown a “slime” five times.

The House leader for the Liberal Party is seeking to raise the decorum and the quality level of debate in this place. The member is a senior member of the Liberal shadow cabinet. Before I answer the normal Thursday question, I wonder if the member could update us on where we are on that.

The House leader of the official opposition has also been very passionate in wanting to reduce the amount of heckling in this place and yet we was rather egregiously heckling the Minister of Finance yesterday on Walkerton. I spoke with the member who represents that constituency and that community takes great offence at the continuing vilification of the name of their town. Maybe we will get that next week with the slime comment.

Today we will continue the opposition motion from the Bloc Québécois.

Friday we will debate Bill C-41, strengthening military justice, and Bill C-43, the RCMP labour modernization.

On Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday of next week we will call Bill C-49, action on human smuggling; Bill C-47, sustaining Canada's economic recovery; Bill C-22, protecting children from online sexual exploitation; Bill C-29, safeguarding Canadians' personal information; Bill C-41, strengthening military justice; Bill C-43, the RCMP labour modernization; Bill C-54, child sexual offences; Bill C-33, safer railways act; Bill C-8, Canada-Jordan free trade agreement; and, Bill C-20, an action plan for the National Capital Commission.

Thursday will be an allotted day for our friends in the New Democratic Party.

[John Baird, Conservative, Leader of the Government in the House of Commons and Minister of the Environment]

Mr. Speaker, let me make an undertaking to my colleague, the House leader of the official opposition, to make enquiries into that and respond to him in short order.

The House will continue today with the opposition motion.

Tomorrow we will continue debate, and I know the NDP will be excited about this, on Bill C-10, Senate term limits; Bill C-19, regarding political loans; followed by Bill S-3, tax conventions implementation.

On Monday and Tuesday of next week, we will call Bill S-3, tax conventions implementation; Bill C-3, gender equity in Indian registration; Bill C-28, fighting Internet and wireless spam; Bill C-22, protecting children; Bill C-29, safeguarding personal information; and Bill C-30, response to the Supreme Court of Canada decision in R. v. Shoker.

On Wednesday and Friday we will call Bill C-41, strengthening military justice; and Bill C-43, RCMP labour modernization.

Thursday will be an allotted day. I believe this allotted day will go to the Bloc Québécois.

With respect to a take note debate, there have been discussions amongst the parties. There have not been a lot of take note debates. Two weeks ago we had one on veterans issues. I believe next week we will be having one on the issue of pensions, which I know is a concern for all of us, but particularly this was brought forward by the House leader for the official opposition. I believe we are looking at Tuesday night for that.

I appreciate the co-operation we have had from all parties. This gives members an opportunity to bring issues relevant to their constituents forward in the House.

Protecting Canadians by Ending Sentence Discounts for Multiple Murders Act

[Paul Szabo, Liberal, Mississauga South, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for his suggestion. One of the things I have learned about this place is that people think that for every complex problem there is a simple solution, and that is wrong.

Some of the things that we deal with in this place on a criminal justice basis are very similar and probably should be dealt with in an omnibus bill. A number of bills propose changes to sentencing. Rather than having a separate bill for car theft, or another one for some other issue, et cetera, an omnibus bill tends to make the place inefficient. I would agree that if the government was serious about its crime agenda it would have brought like items together. The committee work could happen at the same time and the same witnesses could appear.

The member also raised another interesting point about the government being serious about its justice agenda.

Back in 2005, Internet service providers appeared before justice committee to say that they disagreed with being obligated to report matters related to the exploitation of children on the Internet. In 2006 the Conservatives took office and today we are still debating that bill, all because they want to have a silly, pissy short title for the bill. Rather than dealing with that directly they called an election and prorogued. The bill was Bill C-58 at one time and is now Bill C-22.

This shows that even on a straightforward issue such as dealing with the sexual exploitation of children through the Internet, the government is still spinning its wheels. Since 2006 the Conservatives have been holding up this bill. They are still holding it up just because they want a short title that says they are doing the job and getting tough on crime. This is outrageous. It is irresponsible.

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

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak to Bill C-48.

I also believe that this is a very important bill and that it is very difficult to play political football, as I call it, with this long-awaited bill. This is the reincarnation of Bill C-54, which died on the order paper in late 2009. We are now dealing with Bill C-48 which, when we first looked at it, seemed to be a very difficult bill. When I saw it for the first time, my initial comment was that it did not make sense and that, as usual, it was being sneaked in the back door by the Conservatives. I said that because I had read the first clause of the bill, which is the short title and which really does not make sense, “Protecting Canadians by Ending Sentence Discounts for Multiple Murders Act”. I can say that this first clause will obviously not get through committee.

I concur with the hon. member who spoke before me; we will not play political football with this bill. The subject of this bill requires us to study it and vote in favour of it. The Bloc Québécois will vote in favour of this bill so that it can be studied in committee as quickly as possible. I am putting the House on notice that clause 1 of this bill is not acceptable. We are not going to do more advertising and say that we are concerned about the victims when that is not the case. That is not the intent of this bill. It is rather surprising, but its intent is rather heretical. Yes, there are mistakes. I respectfully affirm that there mistakes in the Criminal Code. A person who is found guilty or who pleads guilty today to two, three or four murders, will serve no more than 25 years. That is odd because it is one of the things not found in the Criminal Code. If someone pleads guilty to one, two, three or four break and enters or automobile thefts, the judge will generally say that he has understood nothing, that not only did he commit a break and enter, but that since he committed two, three or four, he should be given additional sentences.

If my memory serves correctly, in 1976, when the death penalty was abolished, the government said the most serious crime was murder. Since it is the toughest sentence, a mandatory minimum sentence of 25 years would be imposed and after that, if the individual is rehabilitated, the subsequent articles state he or she could return to society. Except that people forgot about—and this is what Bill C-48 aims to correct—repeat offenders and multiple murderers. Now, people have the nerve to call these sentence discounts. I do not believe they are sentence discounts, with all due respect to my Conservative colleagues who are completely on the wrong track. I believe that when section 745 was created—and I will quote it in a moment—something was overlooked. Perhaps it was not intentional. I was not here in 1976; I was arguing cases, so I do not know. I think it is a mistake that must be corrected today.

People need to understand what happens in a murder case. When an individual is found guilty of murder, his or her trial is generally held before a jury, and it is the jury that reaches a verdict and determines whether the accused is guilty of first or second degree murder.

First degree murder is premeditated murder. If someone plans a murder, he or she will be found guilty of first degree murder. Second degree murder is an unplanned murder. It might involve someone who, in a fit of anger, picks up a guns, shoots someone and kills that individual. I am summarizing quickly, but that is called second degree murder.

Subsection 745.21(1) of Bill C-48 is extremely interesting. It states:

Where a jury finds an accused guilty of murder and that accused has previously been convicted of murder, the judge presiding at the trial shall, before discharging the jury, put to them the following question:

You have found the accused guilty of murder. The law requires that I now pronounce a sentence of imprisonment for life against the accused.

Freeze the picture here. The judge is required to impose a minimum sentence of life in prison. If an individual is found guilty of murder, he will be imprisoned for life. The judge's question continues:

Do you wish to make any recommendation with respect to the period without eligibility for parole to be served for this murder consecutively to the period without eligibility for parole imposed for the previous murder?

That is the crux of the change, which has been requested by a number of jurisdictions over the past few years. I have an example of the sad case of a woman who made a suicide pact with her husband. They had two children and they decided to end their lives. It is sad, but so it goes. Unfortunately in life, things happen. The woman ingested the same drugs as her husband and two children. The three of them died, but unfortunately she survived and was convicted of a triple murder.

The interesting thing about this bill is that it does not provide additional automatic minimum sentences. It provides the judge with the possibility to ask the jury what it thinks. I am utterly convinced that a jury would never have asked a judge for an additional sentence. The woman has to serve 25 years because it was a premeditated murder. The jury will be consulted and the judge could impose an additional prison sentence. This bill is interesting because it focuses on the victims.

Regardless of what our Conservative friends, especially the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice—and I point the finger at him—might think, the Bloc Québécois is concerned about the victims and is voting in favour of this bill. I hope my dear colleagues and the parliamentary secretary are not going to phone Go Radio X FM in Abitibi to say that we are voting against Bill C-48, because they will be mocked, just as they were on Bill C-22.

That said, I suggest that they listen when we speak and that they listen in committee. We will vote in favour of this bill, except with respect to the short title in clause 1.

These things need to be said. When we are talking about someone who has committed multiple murders—think of Colonel Williams or Pickton or Olson—I think that even if this bill had been in force, they would still serve 25 years in prison. That seems highly improbable. That is what the Conservatives do not understand because they have never or rarely worked in criminal law. They have never made a request. They have never, especially not the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice, appeared before the National Parole Board. They have certainly never appeared before a Superior Court judge to request a sentence reduction in order to be able to apply.

I will explain because I am sure that he does not understand. I will explain how it works. Someone who is found guilty of murder is sentenced to life in prison. End of story. The Conservatives, and especially the parliamentary secretary, should stop twisting words. The person is sentenced to life in prison and must serve at least 25 years. That is what the law currently says. After 17 years in prison, that individual may make a request to a judge, in the jurisdiction in which he was sentenced, to have the sentence reduced. That does not mean that it will be reduced. On the contrary. There are figures, and I will be able to share them in another speech, but it is clear: there are currently over 4,000 people imprisoned for murder in Canada, and of these 4,000, 146 have made a request and only 123 of those have been allowed to appear before the National Parole Board.

That is what my Conservative colleagues do not understand and, with all due respect, neither does the parliamentary secretary. Not just anyone can apply and Bill C-48 will not change that. It is not true. An eligible person will still be eligible, but the court, taking into consideration the horrible crime—because murder is always horrible—decides. Does someone who committed a double or triple murder deserve an additional prison sentence? That is up to the jury. Obviously we need to make a distinction between a hired assassin, a psychopath and a woman who, in a moment of acute distress, kills her husband and her two children. The Conservatives do not understand that. They will not understand it, but they need to.

That is exactly what Bill C-48 does, regardless of what our Conservative friends might say: it gives a jury that has found someone guilty of a second murder the possibility of recommending to a judge that the person serve an additional five or ten years. That means that the person serves 30, 35 or even 40 years instead of 25. Consequently, that person's chance of applying for parole could be pushed back. With all due respect for my colleagues across the way, there has never, through all these years, been an individual convicted of murder who has been released and then committed another murder. I hope that they understand that and that the people watching understand it as well.

That has never happened, whether my Conservative friends like it or not. We asked the parliamentary secretary about this, but he could not say anything about it. We asked the justice minister to provide us with the figures, but we obtained the figures from the parole board, because we are examining other related bills, including the famous Bill S-6. I hope the parliamentary secretary will have the nerve to rise to ask me about Bill S-6, because I will give him the answer.

I agree with my Liberal colleague, for whom I have a great deal of respect and whom I listened to carefully. I agree that we must not play petty politics with Bill C-48. I agree, we will not politicize it, except for clause 1. We will do so because that is what the Conservatives are doing. Clause 1 must be changed. I hope the real parliamentary secretary, not the one from the Quebec City region, but the other one whom I am not allowed to name—I can name him but I am not able to name his riding—understands that he must amend clause 1. The real title is “An Act to amend the Criminal Code and to make consequential amendments to the National Defence Act”. It is perfect; I have no problem with it.

However, the “Protecting Canadians by Ending Sentence Discounts for Multiple Murders Act” is inaccurate. I would like the government side to stop spreading these falsehoods. All the numbers we have show that no one has ever received a sentence discount for multiple murders. Yes, there is a mistake. Yes, under section 745, a person receives one 25-year sentence, but that is how the Criminal Code was drafted. That section still exists.

Neither the judge nor anyone can do anything about it. When the death sentence was abolished, no one noticed that this section allowed a murderer convicted of multiple murders to receive the equivalent of a 25-year sentence to serve. However, I can say that the National Parole Board has been monitoring this very closely and will continue to do so to ensure that murderers guilty of multiple murders, psychopaths like Colonel Williams and serial killers like Olson and Pickton will never be released, even if this bill is not passed quickly. I cannot even imagine that.

Obviously, if Bill C-48 is not passed during this session, it will come back in the next sessions and be passed before these people can be released. They will serve 25 years. I do not think that any parole board can release any of the three individuals I just mentioned before the allotted time, which is 25 years because a life sentence is a minimum of 25 years.

Regardless of what my Conservative colleagues, including the parliamentary secretary, might think, the average life sentence served in Canada is 28 years and 7 months, not 25 years. Criminals, especially murderers, stay in prison.

In closing, I would say that this bill fills a major gap in the Criminal Code, a gap that I think deserves our attention, especially in the case of multiple murderers—psychopaths and criminals who have committed more than one murder. Obviously, they might deserve additional sentences. The Bloc will vote in favour of this bill. It will be studied in committee, and quickly we hope.

[André Bellavance, Bloc, Richmond—Arthabaska, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the NDP member for his question. He was here a little while ago when we were debating Bill C-22, and the opposition criticized the short title chosen for the bill. In reality, the subject matter did not reflect the title chosen by the government, simply because it offered more than people want.

When they do this they mislead the public because the title suggests that the government is introducing a bill about a particular thing that it is going to do and stand up for, but upon reading the title of the bill, no need to read the details, clearly that is not at all the subject matter it deals with.

To answer the member, as I said just now in my speech, the sentence discounts the Minister referred to have nothing to do with the purpose of this bill. In fact, the bill is going to give judges an additional tool to ensure that people do not get parole as quickly as they might want. There will be changes in that regard. What the minister is saying is that, currently, judges in Canada always give sentence discounts. Victims’ families are going to look at this and believe that there will be harsher sentences. But that is not what the bill does. The public must not be misled.

[André Bellavance, Bloc, Richmond—Arthabaska, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I too am pleased to take part in the debate on Bill C-48, which concerns the possibility of imposing consecutive parole ineligibility periods in multiple murder cases. My colleague from Abitibi—Témiscamingue was supposed to be speaking, but he has gone back to committee and will return a little later, so we will not miss any of his eloquent words.

When Bill C-22 was introduced, I may have inadvertently misled the House. That is not a serious offence and I will not have to apologize to the entire House. I said that my colleague from Abitibi—Témiscamingue was the Bloc justice critic. He sits on the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, but he is not the justice critic. My colleague from Marc-Aurèle-Fortin is the justice critic. I just wanted to clarify what I said.

Motion in amendment

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I am happy to stand on behalf of the New Democratic Party and speak to this motion.

The matter under debate in the House concerns a recommendation from the committee to return to the House Bill C-22 with the recommendation that we remove or alter from it the proposed short title as proposed by the government.

The title of C-22 is “An Act respecting the mandatory reporting of Internet child pornography by persons who provide an Internet service”. Before I go any further, I commend the government on bringing in the bill, which I think we all support. I know the members of the New Democratic Party do.

The bill deals with the issue of imposing a mandatory responsibility on the part of Internet service providers and other companies that provided services to the Internet that in effect make the Internet function. The bill specifically requires both individuals and corporations, and it will be almost all corporations I think, to report incidents of child pornography on the programs and hardware equipment that they identify. That is a laudable goal and it is something we all support.

I pause and say that it is equally important to protect children from poverty, from homelessness, from having substandard housing and from having increasing lack of access to education of all kinds in our country. I urge the government to spend as much time and effort on those issues as well as on protecting them from child pornography.

The matter under debate concerns the short title. The short title of the bill included in the act says that the bill may be cited as “Protecting Children from Online Exploitation Act”.

There are really two issues raised by the matter under debate. First, it has to do with the politicization of our legislation by the government. Second, there is a fair question to be asked about the accuracy and honesty of the particular title chosen.

I will deal first with the first aspect, and that is the increasing politicization that is creeping into our legislation by the government. I have said that we are in Canada's democratic federal chamber and Lord knows we have an abundance of politics in the chamber as we properly should. This is Canada's premier place of debate on the federal scene and that is as it should be.

However, there is a place for partisanship and a place where partisanship should end. When we draft legislation, the laws of Canada that we publish for all Canadians, that will be interpreted and used by lawyers, our courts and that our citizens are expected to know and conform with, we have an obligation to draft that legislation in a responsible manner. It is not a place for cheap politics. It is not a place for hyper-partisanship.

Using the short titles to inject partisan political messages has been a hallmark of the government. It is done to score political points.

I have done some research, and I will give some examples for Canadians to hear the kinds of short titles that the government has put into bills in the past two years. It has put in the title “Sébastien's Law (Protecting the Public from Violent Young Offenders)”, which is injecting the actual name of a person into an actual piece of legislation; “Standing Up for Victims of White Collar Crime Act”; “Cracking Down on Crooked Consultants Act”; “Keeping Canadians Safe (International Transfer of Offenders) Act”; “Preventing Human Smugglers from Abusing Canada's Immigration System Act”; “Serious Time for the Most Serious Crime Act”; and “Fair and Efficient Criminal Trials Act”.

What all of these short titles have in common is that they are unprecedented in Canadian history in terms of injecting subjective and qualitative commentary into a piece of legislation itself. Traditionally the title of a bill should objectively describe what the bill does. It should not attempt to persuade the reader of a certain partisan leaning or a certain way of looking at the legislation. It should fairly and objectively describe what the bill does.

The government has gone so far as to actually put in parenthesis what the bill does. So obvious is its hyper-partisanship. It has a bill called “Keeping Canadians Safe, (International Transfer of Offenders) Act”. So partisan is the government to title a bill “Keeping Canadians Safe”, which describes nothing about a bill other than a conclusion that it may want the reader to draw about the bill, that it actually has to put what the bill does in parenthesis, (International Transfer of Offenders), and it has done that twice.

Another bill is “Keeping Canadians Safe (Protecting Borders) Act”. The government tends to be fond of the expression “keeping Canadians safe”. The bill actually puts Canadian police personnel onto boats with American personnel patrolling shared waters like the Great Lakes. Who would ever get that from the title of the bill? This is consistent with what Canadians have come to expect from the government in terms of its hyper-partisanship.

The government has fired civil servants who have done nothing more but to offer their opinions not to the government's liking. It has stacked the Senate with failed Conservative candidates and subservient lackeys of all types. It was caught issuing government cheques with the Conservative logo on them for stimulus at a time when Canadians and communities were suffering. So tenuous is the government's connection with ethics, so hyper-partisan is it, that it does not actually know intuitively that there is something wrong with putting a political party logo on a Government of Canada cheque that comes from all Canadian taxpayers. That is the kind of hyper-partisanship that the government has displayed.

However, I am so proud of the committee, and I hope I can be proud of this chamber, when we say enough is enough and stop the government from taking its hyper-partisanship to permeate and infect something as serious and important as the laws of our country. Surely all parliamentarians can agree that we can stop our political partisanship when it comes to the actual drafting of our laws. Laws should be made in this chamber that are sound, that are responsible, that are needed.

We all have different ideas on what laws should be drafted and that is why we have these debates in this chamber. That is why we hopefully listen to each other so we can maybe influence and form better legislation. When it comes to the actual drafting of the bill itself, it should reflect an objective, lawful and responsible drafting of that law. It is no place for cheap politicking. This is the message that I think the committee has sent back to this chamber. It is saying “enough is enough”. It will no longer tolerate this silly, puerile and infantile attempt to infect our legislation with Conservative jingoism.

“Cracking down on crooked consultants” is an actual phrase in a piece of Canadian legislation that we expect lawyers and judges in the courts of this land to express. With the greatest of respect to every member of this chamber, I beseech all of us to stop this.

One day the government, hopefully soon, will be on this side of the House. I wonder how it will react if the government on that side of the House takes the kind of partisan approach to drafting legislation that it is trying to impose on all of us today. I seriously doubt the Conservatives would like it.

I want to talk briefly about the accuracy of the bill. Again, it has been pointed out by many of my colleagues that it is actually a dishonest title for the bill. The bill is one aspect of cracking down on child exploitation and being subjected to pornography from the Internet. It does not have the magic bullet answer.

I want to end with the phrase, “for every problem there is an answer that is simple, easy, cheap and wrong”. That epitomizes the government's approach to crime. It thinks that every issue of crime can be fixed with some simple jingoistic answer, some easy phrase. That is not the case, and Canadians know it.

Canadians want parliamentarians to act responsibly and maturely in this chamber. That is why I hope we can all support the committee and reject this short title that is so irresponsible and so inaccurate.

[Paul Szabo, Liberal, Mississauga South, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I respect the member's opinion. I have been here for 17 years and I do know good legislation when I see it.

We have to look at the evidence. We are talking about a bill to deal with the sexual exploitation of children. The member wanted to talk about something else.

In 2005, the justice committee looked at this issue. If we look at the committee transcript, we will see that some Internet service providers actually refused to provide information when they were asked. The prosecutor said they refused to provide information.

That was an identification in 2005 that there was a problem to be dealt with. The Conservatives took over in January 2006, very shortly thereafter, and here we are today still without having passed this piece of legislation that would require Internet service providers to provide information.

If the member believes the government is doing the right thing and is serious about criminal activity, this bill should have been passed a long time ago. The government gets an “F” with regard to Bill C-22.

[Paul Szabo, Liberal, Mississauga South, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak on the report stage motion of the bill. The subject matter of Bill C-22 was before Parliament shortly before the 2006 election when the current government took over.

It is important to note that since January 2006 when the Conservative government took over, the subject matter of the bill and the importance of a bill dealing with the sexual exploitation of children has been before Parliament, and four years later we still have not passed a bill that could have dealt with this very linear approach to a very serious problem but important enough that all the parties are supporting the substance of the bill. It speaks volumes about the commitment of the government to be honest with Canadians about what its priorities are.

I wish the media would do an analysis and look at how the various justice bills have come forward and have died due to prorogation or due to the 2008 election and what happened to them when they came back. We note first that the government has one member speak on a bill and then nobody else speaks on the government side. Government members are muzzled, handcuffed, and have no authorization to even speak in Parliament about legislation that the government has brought forward unless it is approved by the Prime Minister's office or by the Privy Council office. That is the level of participation in legislative debate that we can expect from government members. They cannot speak. They will not speak. They do not ask questions. They do not care to get involved because they cannot. They have been told not to.

We should look at the facts. For a number of bills, the Conservatives have had an election platform of getting tough on crime and they continue to repeat the theme that they are tough on crime. Then they have all these bills, instead of saying there are a number of areas they would like to deal with in terms of the Criminal Code and then put them together in an omnibus bill, which is normally the case, the four, five or six different areas in which they want to toughen up sentencing, identify new offences, or whatever. The Conservatives put them out there, they table them, but we never hear about them again. They just languish there, and then we go along on other business. What happens? As soon as there is a crisis on some other business, the Conservatives come back with crime awareness week. They get their bills back out there to see if they can distract Canadians from the problem they have somewhere else in legislation so that Canadians will say, “Yes, the government is tough on crime; we like that”. However, it never finishes.

When we had the last election and the prorogation, the options of the government were to be able to bring back a bill that would be repositioned at the stage it was left at when prorogation occurred. Did the government do that? No. As a matter of fact, the Conservatives decided the bills would all start again, or they took two or three of them and put them in one bill. That changed the mechanism with which they were working and they had to start at the beginning. Therefore, all the debate, all the work that was done, all the prep work, all the printing, and all the consultations with all the stakeholder groups was basically set aside and we started again.

Here we are, four years later. What was Bill C-58 last time is now Bill C-22, and what is hanging the bill up is the government.

I would like to read into the record what Bill C-22 would do. Every bill, on the inside cover, states in very distinct terms the purpose of the bill.

It says:

This enactment imposes reporting duties on persons who provide an Internet service to the public if they are advised of an Internet address where child pornography may be available to the public or if they have reasonable grounds to believe that their Internet service is being or has been used to commit a child pornography offence. This enactment makes it an offence to fail to comply with the reporting duties.

It is pretty straightforward. Internet service providers, whether they be individuals or businesses, must report if they become aware, and there are some penalties. For individuals, it could be up to $10,000 in penalties. For corporations, it could be $100,000.

It is not a big deal, but why we are here today and what we are debating is a report stage motion to reinstate clause 1. Clause 1 is a short title. If the media were watching, they would say, and a lot of the members have mentioned, that the short title would be used; the courts would often refer to the short title rather than the long title.

The short title that the government put in Bill C-22 is the Protecting Children from Online Sexual Exploitation Act, compared to Bill C-58, the last iteration of this bill, which stated in clause 1:

This Act may be cited as the Child Protection Act (Online Sexual Exploitation).

As a number of hon. members have said already, this bill does not do that, in terms of being the piece of legislation that is going to deal with sexual exploitation online. It is one aspect, one small aspect of activity that one would expect in a comprehensive, serious strategy to address exploitation of children.

Why would the government do that? It goes back to probably the reason underlying virtually everything the government does. It has not been governing since 2006, it has been campaigning. To the government, everything in this place is slogans: “We are getting tough on crime”; “We are going to deal with protecting children from online sexual exploitation”. But the bill does not do it, because there are other jurisdictions. If the Conservatives were serious about it, they would not trivialize it like this. They would not make us go through another debate on this bill about a clause that supports that the bill would do something that in fact it does not.

How is it that the Minister of Justice gave the opinion to cabinet that the bill is in good form? It is not. It is misleading. It is false. It is deliberately misleading. The government has deliberately misled the House, deliberately misled Canadians. The government seems to lie so naturally. It really does. It looks so very natural. It does not even flinch anymore. It is too comfortable, because it knows it can get away with it. It is time to call the government on misleading Canadians and misleading Parliament, and to take legislation seriously.

The member for Windsor—Tecumseh has given some very eloquent speeches over the years about the need to do a comprehensive review and amendment of the Criminal Code. We did not need 10 bills to adjust the sentencing provisions related to 10 different offences. We could have had one bill dealing with everything the government wanted to do on sentencing, on house arrest, on parole, on the faint hope clause, everything. If we wanted to deal with it, it could have been in one bill.

It is going to be the same committee, and in fact, by and large, the same witnesses who would come for that omnibus bill as it would be for each and every one of those individual bills. But it does not serve the political, partisan reasons that the government is here today. It is not governing, it is campaigning, and we have to call a spade a shovel. The government is campaigning. It is sloganeering. It thinks people are stupid. It thinks Canadians are stupid. Well, Canadians are not stupid. They deserve respect and we should deal with legislation in a responsible fashion.

Maybe the hon. members would like to participate in the debate and defend the change to something that is so misleading. The government members had better start doing their job, or maybe it is time to look for another job.

[André Bellavance, Bloc, Richmond—Arthabaska, QC]

Mr. Speaker, today I will speak to Bill C-22. Most of my opposition colleagues have made very interesting remarks about the government's desire to restore the short title. If I may, I would say that this is pure propaganda to make people think that the government is especially concerned about victims. I am not saying that the bill is bad, far from it. Earlier, my colleague from Abitibi—Témiscamingue, the Bloc Québécois justice critic, presented the position of the Bloc Québécois, which is in favour of this bill. The real title, An Act respecting the mandatory reporting of Internet child pornography by persons who provide an Internet service, describes what is found in the bill. The government added a short title for publicity purposes, which is totally inappropriate in this case.

The purpose of Bill C-22 is to require Internet service providers to report child pornography activities they are aware of, which makes perfect sense. It is amazing to us that it takes a bill to require Internet service providers to do that. It seems to me that, based on the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, any good citizen has to help out anyone in danger. That could also apply here. Statistics show that Internet service providers are already doing this type of reporting when they discover they are hosting child pornography sites.

Bill C-22, An Act respecting the mandatory reporting of Internet child pornography by persons who provide an Internet service, is the successor to Bill C-58, which was introduced in November 2009 and died on the order paper. Today, I will have the opportunity to speak about another justice bill. A staggering number of justice bills died on the order paper, and now the government is in a hurry to bring them all back. Yet it is the government's fault because it prorogued Parliament and called elections. It cannot blame the opposition for that. These bills did not move forward because the government scuttled the work of parliamentarians.

Bill C-22 would require persons providing Internet services to the public to report if they are advised of an Internet address where child pornography may be available to the public or if they have reasonable grounds to believe that their Internet services are being used to commit a crime related to child pornography. Failing to comply with these requirements constitutes an offence.

This bill is aimed not just at Internet service providers, but also at well-known social media, such as Facebook. These media have also become tools for sexual predators who prey on children and those who wish to disseminate horrible images of sexually abused children. The bill must cover all aspects because the Internet is unfortunately one of the tools used by ill-intentioned people and low-life criminals.

The Bloc Québécois is surprised that a law is required to make Internet service providers do the obvious, that is, report people who decide to use their services and their links to disseminate that kind of filth, if I may call it that.

Some provinces have laws, and some service providers are already doing this. Did the government introduce this type of bill just to score political points? I do not know.

In any event, it is better to be safe than sorry. Even though Internet service providers are already doing what they ought to, with this bill we are assured that they will report what is happening right under their noses. They will have no choice because the bill includes fines. Increasing the likelihood of getting caught is much more of a deterrent than increasing punishments, which are often immaterial to this type of criminal.

Given the importance of improving law enforcement's ability to deal with one of the most despicable forms of organized crime, the Bloc Québécois fully supports the principle of the bill. In committee we will look at all the ins and outs of the bill and we would like to pass it as quickly as possible. We are against the amendment to change the title. Whether one title is used instead of another is not the most important point of discussion on this bill.

We urgently need to do as much as possible to protect the child victims of these acts. This bill will not protect children directly, but it will have a deterrent effect if those who host such awful images are forced to report the criminals. This will go a long way toward helping the police and will contribute to fighting perverse crimes perpetrated by bad people who use children for sexual purposes.

The current child pornography provisions in the Criminal Code prohibit all forms of making, distributing, making available and possessing child pornography, including through the use of the Internet. The Code even prohibits looking at child pornography.

In September 2008, the federal, provincial and territorial ministers responsible for justice met and agreed that Canada's response to child pornography would be enhanced by federal legislation requiring any agency whose services could be used to facilitate the commission of online pornography offences to report suspected material.

Children are currently protected from sexual exploitation through provincial and territorial child welfare legislation. In Manitoba, Ontario and Nova Scotia, all citizens are required to report all forms of child pornography. The new federal bill provides for a uniform mandatory reporting regime across Canada, which will complement provincial and territorial child welfare legislation. This bill is an add-on to the legislation that already exists in certain provinces.

Bill C-22 is simple enough and has only 14 clauses. Under the bill, providers of Internet services—Internet access, email, hosting and social networking sites—will now be required to report to a designated organization, to be determined at a later date by regulation, any information they receive about websites that make child pornography be available to the public. They will also be required to notify the police and preserve the evidence if they believe that their Internet service has been used to commit a child pornography offence.

That change is the whole point of this bill. Companies can no longer bury their heads in the sand and say that they did not know that one of their sites was being used. As soon as they have reasonable grounds to think that their services have been used by this type of sexual predator, they need to report it or they will be fined. I believe all members of the House agree that Bill C-22 needs to be passed as quickly as possible.

[Marlene Jennings, Liberal, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to participate in the debate on Bill C-22 at report stage and third reading.

I have been listening to my colleagues on both sides of the House with regard to Bill C-22 and the considerable comments that have been made about the government's attempt at third reading to bring back its original short title.

I want to discuss very briefly what the bill does because the Liberals support the bill. We think it is a positive step in the right direction. It would make reporting Internet child pornography mandatory for Internet service providers and other persons providing Internet services.

The government took too long to introduce this bill. We lost precious time when the former version of the bill—Bill C-58—died on the order paper when the Prime Minister decided to prorogue Parliament last year.

If protecting children from exploitation, as the government's original short title proclaimed and which the government is attempting to re-establish in the bill, were really a priority for the government, why did the government not only kill its own bill through prorogation but then take four months after Parliament resumed to reintroduce the bill? When it reintroduced the bill, the only change to its previous version, Bill C-58, was the short title.

The long title of the bill, which is An Act respecting the mandatory reporting of Internet child pornography by persons who provide an Internet service, is exactly what the bill does. It is the formal title and an accurate title.

However, when one looks over the landscape of government legislation, it is becoming increasingly clear that the government is now instituting a new political ploy, which is to change the names of its bills, those long, boring titles, to political sound bite titles in an attempt to oversell what the bill actually does and what the government is doing with regard to criminal justice.

The long title is precise and accurately describes what the bill does, whereas the government's short title that it put in its bill and which it is now attempting to re-establish in this bill, even though opposition members in committee voted it down, is deliberately misleading. It overstates what the bill actually does.

I want to make it perfectly clear that the Liberals believe this is a good bill, which is why we support it. However, we find it objectionable that the Conservative government is attempting to play political football with the lives of our children. This is too serious an issue for the government to politicize the issue by making a short title, which is nothing but a political sound bite and which overstates what the bill does.

The bill is the right step in the right direction in addressing this issue. We are pleased that the Conservative government has finally given this bill and this issue enough priority to no longer kill it through prorogation and no longer delay reintroducing it. When the government finally reintroduced the bill and moved second reading, it had the full co-operation of all three opposition parties to debate it quickly and comprehensively and get it to committee. In committee, we gave it priority and heard witnesses in a rapid fashion. We heard from the minister and proceeded to clause by clause because the opposition parties, particularly the Liberals, saw the importance of giving priority to this bill, something we did not originally see from the Conservative government.

The bill will not completely solve the problem, which is why the government's proposed short title is not accurate. As my colleague, the NDP justice critic, mentioned, the Liberals attempted in committee to change the short title so that it would accurately represent what the bill would do, which is child pornography reporting.

My colleague, the member for Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, proposed an amendment to the bill to change the short title of the bill to the child pornography reporting act. Unfortunately, the chair ruled the amendment out of order because we had not amended the content of the bill due to the fact that we were 100% in agreement with the content of the bill. Under the rules, in order to change a short title, even if the original short title does not accurately describe and represent the content of the bill, the chair has no choice but to rule a change to a short title out of order. Therefore, the chair did as he had to do, which was to rule the Liberal amendment out of order.

At that point, as my colleague, the NDP justice critic, mentioned, if the government had been serious about the content of the bill and the objective and aim of the bill and not interested in giving a higher priority to politicizing and attempting to use the issue for political gain on its part, it would have immediately said, “Look. You have a problem with the short tile. Let us work with it. Let us find a short title that we all agree with and we will put it through”.

The government did not do that. It did not approach me, and I am the Liberal critical for justice. I know for a fact that it did not approach my two colleagues who also sit on the committee. We just heard from the NDP justice critic that he was not approached by the government to try to come to some agreement as to the issue of the short title. Therefore, we decided to remove the short title completely.

We are content with the long title because, as I said, it actually states and describes accurately what the bill would actually do.

This is not the first time that the government has added a short title. We need only look at Bill C-21, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (sentencing for fraud), to which the government gave the so-called short title of Standing up for Victims of White Collar Crime Act. The Conservative government's short title is actually longer than the real title. That is ridiculous.

If the government truly wanted to defend victims of white collar crime, why did the government and the Minister of Justice wait 215 days after prorogation in December 2009 before starting debate at second reading of Bill C-21?

This government claims to be the government of law and order.

It says that it is the party of law and order and yet, if we look at virtually every criminal justice bill, the government has played political football. It has either delayed tabling legislation or, if it tables it, it lets it sit on the order paper without moving second reading debate. It has prorogued the House knowing that its bill will be killed and then, when the House and Parliament comes back, rather than immediately re-tabling the bill, the government lets it sit before it actually tables it. The government is not actually interested in defending Canadians and ensuring they are safe. It is more interested in trying to gain political capital with playing with the lives and the safety of Canadians. That is a shame and it is despicable.

We do not like cheap political points that the government attempts to make with victims. We call on the government to stop doing that and it will get the co-operation of the official opposition.

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I rise to speak to the proposed amendment by the government, which is a pretty straightforward one. All it does is put back the short title to Bill C-22.

In committee, the opposition parties, after analyzing the bill, unanimously came to the conclusion that the short title was just a piece of propaganda on the part of the government with really very little, if anything, to do with the content of the bill. For that reason, the committee voted to delete the short title. From a procedural standpoint, quite frankly, it does not make any difference in terms of the bill going through.

All opposition parties, as well as the government, are supportive of the bill. It is one that should have gone through the House years ago, but with the calling of prorogation and other stalling that the government did on its crime bills, it sat for years, and I mean that literally, before it came forth.

It is not a significant amendment in deleting the short title in terms of the content of the bill and the bill going forward. What it does is ask the government to get serious and stop playing partisan politics, especially with issues of online child pornography, with this. It asks the government to stop its propagandizing, to be honest in terms of its legislation and to stop using these silly titles.

This is not the first and probably not the last time that I will take some offence to this as a lawyer who practised in the courts. In court, as a practising lawyer, as an advocate for our clients, we obviously refer to legislation that is before the court on whatever issue we are dealing with. Historically in the courts we have used the short titles rather than the long titles to refer to the law. Just imagining myself in the court room using some of the short titles that the government has used, both in this bill and in other bills, I would be embarrassed as a practising lawyer.

I do not see myself as a practising lawyer doing anything other than protecting my client's interest when I am in the court room. I am not there, nor are the prosecutors and defence counsels in the country, to push the propaganda role that the partisan Conservative government wants to push when it comes to these short titles. We are not there for that purpose. That is demeaning, quite frankly, to our role as advocates.

We are there to deal with serious issues that are before the court, especially when we are dealing with an issue like online child pornography. We do not see ourselves as agents for the Conservative Party of Canada and its propaganda machine. For that reason alone, I have taken some offence to a number of the bills that have come forward with these short titles that are often misleading, and this is another example of it.

The short title the government is proposing to put back in, that we voted out at committee, talks about protecting children from online sexual exploitation. However, the long title, and the more accurate one by far, is Bill C-22, An Act respecting the mandatory reporting of Internet child pornography by persons who provide an Internet service. The bill, in its entirety, is all about forcing, cajoling and encouraging Internet service providers to report if they identify it. Then, if on request or under warrant, that they provide additional information so it can be tracked. It is a tool that our police and prosecutors have needed for some time.

As I said earlier, for years we have been hearing from them. I know the justice minister regularly has heard from the other provincial justice ministers and attorneys general for this need for quite some time at their annual meetings or semi-annual meetings.

The bill has been before the House in the past. It has been sitting here waiting to be dealt with. Then we had either an election called or, on two occasions, prorogation and the bill just sat.

It is quite clear this is a valuable tool. It is why all the opposition parties are in favour of it. However, to trivialize it by throwing these silly titles in, which are either irrelevant or misleading, is something that we should not as legislators countenance. The government should be ashamed of itself for bringing this back. Had it brought a more meaningful short title back, it probably would have had support from this side of the House. All it did was bring back exactly the same wording, which as I said earlier is grossly misleading as to what the bill would do.

It is really a technical bill. It is one that is absolutely needed. To suggest that somehow this is the be all and end all of sexual exploitation over the Internet of our children is grossly misleading and not one that we should countenance as opposition parties or as the legislature as a whole.

Therefore, we will be voting against the amendment of the government. It does not advance the cause of fighting the issue of child pornography at all.

It was interesting when the parliamentary secretary asked a question earlier of one of my colleagues. In the course of the question there was at least an implication, if not an outright statement, that somehow we would be able to protect children from being abused in Canada. What came out in the hearing, when we dealt with the issue of online child pornography, was there were very few exceptions, and I think we have had three to five cases in Canada, where the child who was abused in the online material was in Canada.

That is why this title is so misleading. The reality is this abuse of the children is not occurring in Canada to any significant degree. Almost all of this material is coming in from international sources. The abuse is occurring in Asia, Africa, Europe and some places in the United States. In those countries when we identify the source, and we will be able to do that much better if we finally get the bill passed, through the Senate and get royal proclamation, it will allow us to help jurisdictions where the abuse has actually occurred.

The point I want to make, and this is why I am taking issue with the parliamentary secretary, is we know that in a number of the jurisdictions, and in fact a vast majority of the jurisdictions where this material is being produced, even if we do share the knowledge that we will obtain as to the source, the police forces, the prosecutors, the justice system will either be unwilling to respond or will not have the capacity to respond.

I think Canadians need to be aware of that. We fight it as much as we can in Canada, but this is an international problem and it is one that we cannot deal with entirely by ourselves. We need that co-operation at the other end and it is not always there. In fact, in a lot of cases it is not there at all.

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

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his very interesting question and I would respond with a quote. Maybe they should call it the “protecting children from the Bloc, the Liberals and the NDP” act.

I am searching for the right words in order to respect the Speaker's decision, but that is exactly what he said. They want to appeal to the people by saying that they are fighting crime and doing everything they can. That is not true. The Bloc Québécois supported Bill C-22, formerly Bill C-58, from the very beginning. Four years ago we were saying that the police have to be given the tools to deal with 21st century crime.

The short title of the bill is “Protecting Children from Online Sexual Exploitation Act”. It does not do that, and I especially do not want our Conservative friends to use this misleading title to spread unwelcome propaganda.

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

Mr. Speaker, I do not know. I think that he may have just got carried away. Sometimes the member for Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles does not behave like a parliamentary secretary, as was the case during the interview that aired on GO Radio X FM in Abitibi-Témiscamingue.

I can tell him that this interview has made the rounds. If he wanted to take the populist approach and tell us that we are worthless because we are not taking care of our country's children, he dropped the ball. And I hope that he heard how I picked it up during the three subsequent interviews I gave to all the media in the region.

I find that the parliamentary secretary sometimes goes too far. This is one of those times. In my opinion, he should choose his words more carefully in the future and, more specifically, verify the accuracy of what he is saying, which he clearly did not do.

I remember speaking to this chamber about Bill C-22 for 20 minutes and being questioned by him during the 10-minute question period following my speech, so something is amiss.

Not only is the Bloc Québécois in favour of Bill C-22, but it also insisted, through its revered House leader, that this bill be brought back quickly so that it could be implemented quickly.

Perhaps the member for Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles and parliamentary secretary should choose his words more carefully and verify his sources in the future.

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

Mr. Speaker, I hope that my colleague from Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles is listening to what I am saying to him. I would like to tell him that the comments he—the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice—made about the Bloc Québécois were unspeakable. He made these comments during an interview with GoFM RadioX in Abitibi—Témiscamingue on November 10, I believe.

The member for Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles made statements completely unworthy of his role. He is supposed to be the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice. He should have been more respectful of us but he dared to say that the Bloc Québécois does not support Bill C-22 and that the Bloc members—especially the members for Abitibi—Témiscamingue and Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik—Eeyou— need a swift kick in the you-know-what because they do not stand up for children.

I believe that the parliamentary secretary should be immediately relieved of his duties. And I hope this message goes all the way to the Prime Minister's Office.

I invite the public to read Vincent Marissal's blog from November 10, 2010. He writes for La Presse and he is not a federalist and definitely not a sovereignist. He said that the parliamentary secretary, the member for Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, is nothing but an overblown orator and that the follies on the Internet need to stop. On his blog, he repeated the disrespectful comments—which is the only way I can think to describe them—made about the member for Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik—Eeyou and me, the member for Abitibi—Témiscamingue.

I want to tell the member, the parliamentary secretary, the real story. He should listen and be more attentive at the meetings of the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, of which he is supposedly a member. He is there regularly; I see him. Maybe he is sleeping or recuperating from an illness, but we are working. And the Bloc Québécois is in favour of Bill C-22. Not only does the Bloc support Bill C-22, but it has already told the government, through its revered House leader, that this bill needs to be brought back quickly and passed because the police have been asking for this for a long time.

I have here Bill C-58, which is exactly the same as Bill C-22. Bill C-58 was introduced a year ago, in November 2009. If Parliament had not been prorogued, which is what the Conservatives do when things do not go their way, the former governor general would have long since given royal assent to Bill C-22. It is not the opposition members' fault; quite the contrary. I hope the parliamentary secretary will correct his remarks and at least apologize to the Bloc Québécois members, who are very concerned about child protection. When we look at Bill C-22, we see that the amendments do not reflect the will of the committee. That is why we will vote against this amendment, which would restore the short title. We will do so quickly.

The title of the bill is “An Act respecting the mandatory reporting of Internet child pornography by persons who provide an Internet service.” That and only that is the objective of Bill C-22. But with all due respect, Mr. Speaker, because this does not apply to you, the Conservatives do not understand anything. Unfortunately, some of your colleagues do not understand anything.

They do not understand that that is not what the short title says. The short title is the “Protecting Children from Online Sexual Exploitation Act”. But this is not the purpose of the bill. I will explain for the benefit of the parliamentary secretary, who does not understand anything either. The bill would force Internet service providers to report people who may be using the Internet to distribute all sorts of pornography, not just child pornography. That is what the bill says, and that is what our Conservative colleagues do not understand. I am sure you understand, Mr. Speaker, but they do not.

At the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, we tried to explain this to them, but they did not get it. So we will be voting against the amendment, and the short title will disappear. That is clear. We want the public to understand that the idea is to force Internet service providers to make a report if their Internet service is used to distribute any pornography, not just child pornography. Unfortunately, all the people who appeared before the committee told us that in fact there was more child pornography on these sites. So obviously there is a need for tools.

Now I would like to talk about real things. I challenge the parliamentary secretary and the member for Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, and even the anglophone parliamentary secretary, whom I cannot name, who spoke earlier. I challenge them to tell us how much money they are prepared to invest, for that will be the main issue. We asked them if they were prepared to implement this extremely important bill that police forces have been calling for for some time.

Special squads to track down these sexual predators will have to be created. This includes the Ontario Provincial Police, the Sûreté du Québec, the RCMP, the Montreal police and so on. Squads will have to be created within all police forces. People who appeared before the committee told us that is what it would take. Accordingly, the government needs to provide the necessary funding immediately. There is no doubt that the House will pass Bill C-22 very quickly and very soon, probably either today or tomorrow. It is very important.

This bill is being called for not only by police forces, but also by Internet service providers, who have indicated that they are currently under no obligation. Often when they discover something, it is too late. Indeed, we know how it works and it is extremely complicated. Some people explained that now is the time to fight this.

I am nearly out of time, for 10 minutes go by very quickly. I would simply like to tell those watching us that we will do everything we can to ensure this bill passes quickly, because we need to give police forces the means to fight the crimes that are unfortunately committed in cyberspace using 21st century tools. For that reason, and that reason alone, I urge all members here to vote in favour of this bill, so it can come into force immediately.

[Yasmin Ratansi, Liberal, Don Valley East, ON]

Mr. Speaker, what I did mention is that the long title of the bill, which is An Act respecting the mandatory reporting of Internet child pornography by persons who provide an Internet service, is exactly what the bill does. The short title the Conservatives are proposing is “protecting children from online sexual exploitation act”, but that is not what it is doing.

The long title is exactly what the bill says. While we are debating titles, the long title should have stayed. If the government were really keen on protecting children, it should have stuck with the long title and moved forward because this bill is due and it is important that we get on with the work.

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

Mr. Speaker, I have a question for my colleague.

The title of Bill C-22, which is the former Bill C-58—I will get back to this later and I hope that the member for Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles will stay where he is, because we have some business to attend to—is “An Act respecting the mandatory reporting of Internet child pornography by persons who provide an Internet service.” This title seems perfect to us. But the government wants to call it by the short title, the “Protecting Children from Online Sexual Exploitation Act”. In committee, we felt that this short title did not properly describe the objective of the bill. The Liberal Party agreed, and I believe that is also the case with my colleague. I hope that is what she understood.

I would like to know if that is why the Liberal Party and the other opposition parties will vote against the proposed amendment.

[Yasmin Ratansi, Liberal, Don Valley East, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to rise today to speak on Bill C-22.

In terms of background, the bill would make reporting Internet child pornography mandatory for Internet service providers and other persons providing Internet services. This is a very important concept whose time is long overdue.

The government has taken a very long time to reintroduce the bill. It has lost time in presenting the bill, due to prorogation. The bill's first iteration was Bill C-58. We all understand the issue of child pornography and we all know that children have to be protected. Children are an important asset. They need to be protected. They are vulnerable and they are easily misled.

My question to the government is, if protecting children from exploitation, as the short title says, is really a priority of the government, why then, after prorogation, did it take it four months to reintroduce this bill?

In fact, there was no change to the bill. The only thing that changed was the short title. Why? Regarding sexual exploitation, if protecting children is really a priority of the current government, then let us stick to the business of protecting children. Let us stick to the right law. The long title of the bill is, “An Act respecting the mandatory reporting of Internet child pornography by persons who provide an Internet service”. This is exactly what the bill would do. This is the formal title. It is an accurate title. The aim of legislation is to protect children from pornography and for the people who provide Internet services to report it.

So why is the government playing games?

The government has repeatedly changed the names of bills, without making any real changes to the bill itself. It has either changed titles or prorogued Parliament and reintroduced the same bills over and over again. Changing titles to political sound bites is not really protecting the kids.

The long title is precise. It describes exactly what Bill C-22 is supposed to do.

The short title is misleading. It overstates what the bill would do.

I would like to make it clear that the bill is a good bill. What we are debating here is why the government is wasting time to change the title of the bill.

The Liberals support the bill. We do not support the title. It is a step in the right direction to address the issue of child pornography and the issue of Internet predators and to make it the responsibility of the providers of Internet services to give us the information.

However, the bill would not completely solve any problems. That is why the short title really is not accurate. It does not reflect accuracy.

The Liberals attempted, at committee, to change the short title to represent what the bill would actually do. The Liberals proposed the “child pornography reporting act”, because that is exactly what this bill attempts to do. The amendment was rejected, so the Liberals decided to remove the short title completely.

Other opposition parties agreed at committee with the content of the long title, because as I said previously, it is what the bill would actually do.

This is not the first time that governments have tried changing or modifying titles. They have done it in Bill C-21, the bill to modify the Criminal Code in regard to sentencing for fraud. It was then replaced by a short title, saying it is the law to defend the victims of white-collar crime. The short title is really longer than the long title, which is the correct title.

If the government is serious about defending victims of white-collar crime, why did it take it 215 days after prorogation to commence the debate for the second time on this bill?

There was another bill, Bill C-16. It went through the same process.

It is obvious that the government is not really serious. The Conservatives claim to be the government with the law and order agenda, but we see the repeated bills, over and over again. If nothing gets passed through Parliament, the Conservatives prorogue Parliament and bring bills back to the House under different names. My question is then, why does the government not get serious about dealing with this issue? It should stop trying to score cheap political points.

In the stakeholders' view of the bill itself, the commissioner of police and the provincial police support this bill. The director of Cybertip.ca states that the bill is a step in the right direction. It is the good first step. The Canadian Centre for Child Protection states that this is a good, right step. Companies such as Bell, Rogers and Telus all agree that this is important.

Statistics Canada indicates that the illegal action of the people who rely on child pornography has increased from 55% in 1998 to 1,408% in 2008.

These images of pornography that are being accessed are horrifying. We all can probably give examples of children and young people who have been enticed on the Internet to do things that they would normally not do. Children are vulnerable. Children seek affection. Children think the person is telling the truth. When children are getting enticed by the Internet, it is important that this bill be put in place immediately.

Cybertip.ca made a presentation at committee and provided the committee with some very interesting information. What it said was very disconcerting. It said: 36% of the images analyzed by the centre depicted sexual assaults on children, and 64% depicted children in a deliberate sexual manner; 76% of web pages analyzed had at least one child abuse image where the child was less than eight years of age; and of the children abused through extreme sexual acts, including bestiality, bondage or torture and degrading acts such as defecation, 69% occurred against children under eight years of age.

What are we doing to protect our children? These are horrifying statistics.

Cybertip.ca also said 83% of the images were of female children.

Liberal members support this bill, but we do not want games being played on the backs of children. We want the law to be passed. We want the law to be effective. We want the law to be there so that, with the technologies that develop, the Internet users, the criminals who use these measures, are put to the test. We need to get them behind bars. We need to protect our children.

It was the former Liberal government in 2002 that made it illegal to deliberately access a website containing child pornography, rather than just having possession of such materials. It is important that we do it.

It was also the former Liberal government that put in place the law allowing a judge to order a service provider to supply the information to authorities when there are reasonable grounds to believe that child pornography is accessible through an Internet service provider.

It was the Liberals who put Cybertip.ca in place, an online reporting tool for child pornography.

The United States and Australia passed similar legislation in 2002 and 2005.

I urge the government to stop dragging its feet, stop playing games with short titles, and let us go forward with the bill.

[Bob Dechert, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice]

moved:

Motion No. 1

That Bill C-22 be amended by restoring Clause 1 as follows:

“1. This Act may be cited as the Protecting Children from Online Sexual Exploitation Act.”

Mr. Speaker, I would like to restore the short title of the bill to its original form: the Protecting Children from Online Sexual Exploitation Act.

At committee it was ruled by the chair that a motion to amend clause 1 was out of order and therefore the motion was not debated. This, I believe, resulted in the rejection of this clause. If there had been the opportunity to debate the importance of the short title, the following could have been noted:

Bill C-22 requires the mandatory reporting of child pornography by providers of Internet services. This will enhance Canada's capacity to better protect children from online sexual exploitation, period. I emphasize this is not to limit the bill's scope, but to underline the importance of the bill and its breadth.

The committee heard from the Minister of Justice and Ms. Lianna McDonald, the executive director of the Canadian Centre for Child Protection. Both emphasized the potential effects of this legislation and how it will protect children from online sexual exploitation.

It will do so in a number of ways. First, it will strengthen our ability to detect potential child pornography material. Second, reports generated under the bill will help block child pornography sites through Project Cleanfeed Canada. Third, the bill will facilitate the identification, apprehension, and prosecution of child pornography offenders. Fourth, and most important, the bill could help to identify the victims so that they may be rescued from sexual predators.

That is why the government had proposed the Protecting Children from Online Sexual Exploitation Act as a short title for Bill C-22. This is clearly the ultimate objective of the bill, and the short title should be restored.

I am pleased to note that this important bill received all-party support and was improved with only two minor amendments for clarification.

Before I get to the specific amendments, I would like to say a few words generally about this piece of legislation and its purpose. I think everyone in the House would agree that there is no greater duty for us as elected officials than to ensure the protection of children, the most precious and vulnerable members of our society.

The creation of the Internet and the World Wide Web have provided new means for offenders to distribute and consume child pornography, resulting in a significant increase in the availability and volume of child pornography.

While Canada has one of the world's most comprehensive criminal law frameworks with which to combat child pornography, we can and must do better in protecting children from sexual exploitation.

The bill is a simple and straightforward approach to help achieve that goal in that it proposes to compel providers of Internet services to become active participants in the fight against child pornography and child sexual exploitation.

Bill C-22 will strengthen Canada's ability to detect potential child pornography offences; help reduce the availability of online child pornography; facilitate the identification, apprehension, and prosecution of offenders; and, most important, help identify the victims so they may be rescued from sexual predators.

It is my hope that reducing the amount of this vile material on the Internet will prevent other children from being abused, both in Canada and around the world.

I will now turn back to the committee proceedings and the amendments that were passed. Both amendments were for clarification and do not change the substance of the bill. The first change relates to the definitions and the definition of “Internet service” in particular. There was some concern that the enumeration of the services covered under the bill could be interpreted in a manner that would put the average citizen under a duty to report. However remote this interpretation may have been, the committee agreed that it should seize the opportunity to make the definition of “Internet service” crystal clear and consistent with the French definition.

The second amendment relates to the provision concerning laws of provincial or foreign jurisdictions. In essence, Bill C-22 imposes two duties on those who provide an Internet service to the public.

First, providers are required to report to a designated agency Internet tips that they might receive regarding websites where child pornography may be available to the public.

Second, if a provider has reason to believe that a child pornography offence has been committed using its Internet service, the provider is required to notify police and to preserve that evidence for 21 days.

The purpose of Bill C-22 is to ensure that service providers report child pornography that comes to their attention. Therefore, if the service provider has reported the child pornography incident under a similar duty, under either a provincial law or a law in a foreign jurisdiction, it has complied with the objective of the legislation, and, through this provision, with the legislation itself.

The intention of Bill C-22, however, was not to duplicate reporting to a designated agency where a service provider has already reported the same incident in accordance with the laws of a province or a foreign jurisdiction. In other words, the provision relieves a service provider of its duty to report under the proposed legislation if it has already reported the same incident under the legislation of another jurisdiction.

However, the committee was concerned that the provision related to more than just the reporting duty and could be interpreted as relating to the duty to notify. The duty to notify police arises when a service provider has a reasonable belief that a child pornography offence may have been committed on its system. Accompanying this duty to notify police is the duty to safeguard computer data that may result in evidence of the offence. This jurisdiction provision was never intended to relieve service providers of their duty to notify or preserve evidence. Therefore, the committee took the opportunity to clarify the issue and make specific reference to the section number relating to the duty to report.

Those were the two amendments made in committee, but I would like to touch on some important testimony that was given during the committee study of Bill C-22. The committee heard from representatives from the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, which operates cybertip.ca, Canada's national 24/7 tip line for reporting the sexual exploitation of children on the Internet.

At present, most reporting of child pornography across Canada is done through cybertip.ca or, in French, cyberaide.ca. Within 48 hours, cybertip.ca reviews, prioritizes, and analyzes every report it receives. Cybertip.ca verifies the report by collecting supporting information using various Internet tools and techniques. It also identifies the location of the material in order to determine the appropriate jurisdiction. If the material is assessed to be potentially illegal, a report is referred to the appropriate law enforcement agency for follow-up and investigation.

Each month cybertip.ca receives an average of over 800,000 hits and triages over 700 reports. Approximately 45% of reports are forwarded to law enforcement. As of June 2009, cybertip.ca had triaged over 33,000 reports since becoming Canada's national tip line in 2002. Over this period, more than 90% of the reports received by cybertip.ca were related to child pornography. At least 30 arrests have resulted from these reports, approximately 3,000 websites have been shut down, and, most important, children have been removed from abusive environments.

Finally, I would like to note that Bill C-22 was crafted with the following overarching principle in mind: that the legislation should not contribute to the consumption or further dissemination of child pornography. I submit that it has adhered to this principle. It is a simple bill that can do much good without unduly affecting the business practices of those who are compelled to comply. It strikes the necessary balance between public safety and the privacy rights. It is also another example of how this government has made the safety and security of Canadian children a top priority.

I urge the House to give its full support to this bill, as amended, so that it can be referred to the Senate and we can adopt this important piece of legislation without delay.

The House proceeded to the consideration of Bill C-22, An Act respecting the mandatory reporting of Internet child pornography by persons who provide an Internet service, as reported (with amendments) from the committee.

Business of the House

[John Baird, Conservative, Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, today we are debating the NDP opposition motion.

Pursuant to any order adopted by the House earlier today, the vote on that opposition motion will take place on Tuesday, November 16 at the end of government orders.

Tomorrow the House will have the occasion to debate at second reading Bill C-32, Copyright Modernization Act, and the backup bill, should debate conclude at second reading, will be Bill S-9, Tackling Auto Theft and Property Crime Act, which I know is a key priority of the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada.

Next week, as the member opposite said, is a constituency week. I encourage all members to remember and recognize the sacrifices made by the men and women of our armed forces, on November 11.

When we return on Monday, November 15, we will call a number of bills, including Bill C-3, Gender Equity in Indian Registration Act, Bill C-31, Eliminating Entitlements for Prisoners Act, Bill C-35, Cracking Down on Crooked Consultants Act, Bill C-20, An Action Plan for the National Capital Commission, Bill C-28, Fighting Internet and Wireless Spam Act, Bill C-22, Protecting Children from Online Sexual Exploitation Act and Bill C-48, Protecting Canadians by Ending Sentence Discounts for Multiple Murders Act. We would also consider calling other bills that may have returned from committee by the time we return.

Thursday, November 18, shall be the next allotted day.

In closing, I wish all members a productive constituency week.

Justice and Human Rights

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I have the honour to present, in both official languages, the fourth report of the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights.

In accordance with the order of reference of Monday, October 4, 2010, the committee has considered Bill C-22, An Act respecting the mandatory reporting of Internet child pornography by persons who provide an Internet service and agreed on Thursday, October 21, to report it with amendment.

Ending Early Release for Criminals and Increasing Offender Accountability Act

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

Madam Speaker, I want to thank my colleague and immediately reassure her. Indeed, police forces have been waiting for Bill C-22 for almost 10 years. I recently went over this bill again because we will be studying it this afternoon when the hon. Minister of Justice appears before the committee. We have asked the minister to hurry up and not waste time.

The problem with Bill C-22, which deals with fighting pornography, is whether the government will grant any funding. I should warn my colleagues across the way that if I get a chance to ask the Minister of Justice a question this afternoon, it will be this: Will the government provide funding? It takes specialized squads to deal with this crime and that is precisely the current problem. We will need to create squads, like the ones for fighting organized crime. We have to do exactly the same thing to deal with pornography, a crime that is much worse and even more insidious. Nevertheless, now we have the services and the systems.

Yesterday, we were looking at what the Royal Canadian Mounted Police is implementing in terms of a system that will allow us to move forward. However, the RCMP needs money. Bill C-22 is indeed a bill that the government claimed it was introducing to protect victims, but the bill has not been implemented yet. Neither has Bill C-30. The Conservatives campaigned in two elections on a promise to implement this bill. The time has come for that party to put its money where its mouth is.

[Maria Mourani, Bloc, Ahuntsic, QC]

Madam Speaker, I would like to begin by congratulating my colleague on his excellent speech. I am sure he would agree that this government's actions in terms of public safety and protecting victims have been nothing more than smoke and mirrors.

I listened carefully to the member's speech. I have not read Bill C-22 that he mentioned, so I wonder if this is the much talked-about bill that police forces have been waiting for for nearly 12 years now, that will give them the tools they need to go after pedophiles and the producers and consumers of child pornography. Furthermore, we know that between 1980 and 1990, there were about a thousand child pornography images and videos on the Internet. Now there are millions of such images and videos on the Internet. This means that thousands of children have been abused in making these photos and videos, and it means that thousands of pedophiles are profiting from these photos and videos.

Police forces want to have the ability to obtain the IP addresses of these cyber-pedophiles and producers of online child pornography. Will this bill give them that capacity? The former victims ombudsman, Steve Sullivan, said that if he were prime minister, that would be his top priority. I do not believe this bill will do anything in that regard and I wonder what my colleague's thoughts are on this.

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

Madam Speaker, I am pleased to speak to this bill, which comes at a very bad time. We will try to deal with this methodically. I want to respond to my colleague who just spoke. The Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights is currently studying six bills, including Bill C-4 on young offenders. The review of this particular bill is not complete because the government has not yet tabled the necessary documents, as it should have done in June 2010. The bill we are discussing today could also die on the order paper because it may be some time before it is studied in committee.

I do not know whether my colleague, the member for Ahuntsic, is studying as many bills that affect the public in the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security. If she is, then we have a serious problem. This government is playing politics and taking a piecemeal approach to justice issues, doing a little bit here and a little bit there. It has introduced a bill that I would say is extremely worthwhile and has been a long time coming. The Bloc Québécois will vote in favour of this bill, and we would like to send it to committee as soon as possible.

Let us look at the dates of this bill. On June 16, 2009, we were examining Bill C-43. Summer arrived, the House adjourned, and then MPs returned. In October 2009, we were examining Bill C-53. Then, the government—not the opposition parties—decided to prorogue. This bill died on the order paper on December 30, 2009. Now, the government has re-introduced the bill as Bill C-39, which is the same as the previous bills C-43 and C-53. I hope this one will not die on the order paper, because it is very important.

The government is accusing the opposition of not looking out for victims, of not caring about them or being interested in them. According to the government, the only thing that the opposition cares about is criminals, and getting them out of jail as soon as possible. I never hear so many blatant lies from the other side of the House as I do when they talk about victims. We absolutely care about victims. The best example is that the Bloc Québécois has been calling for the abolition of the one-sixth of the sentence rule for two years now.

I will give a little legal lesson, more specifically on criminal law, for my colleagues opposite. It is a problem with criminal law that comes up when an individual is sentenced. The best example is the case of Colonel Williams. We can talk about him now, because he will probably be sentenced to life in prison, with no chance of parole for at least 25 years. We can get back to that, because the government just introduced another bill. Let us take the example of someone sentenced to jail time. Bill C-39 applies only to someone sentenced to more than two years. That is extremely important. We are talking about sentences of more than two years in prison. The problem is that in provincial prisons, in Quebec in particular, this service already exists. However, even if the individuals are sentenced to two years less a day, they are still eligible for release after serving one-sixth of their sentence.

In terms of criminal law, let us look only at sentences of at least two years, for example, someone in Quebec who is sentenced to three years in prison. This person is sent to the regional reception centre in Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines, in the Montreal region. Regardless of where that person is from, that is where they are sent.

It takes between three and four months for the case to be dealt with. If the person was sentenced to 36 months in prison, after six months, or one-sixth of the sentence, that person is already eligible for release, and no one will have dealt with the case.

There is a gap there. We have long been saying that parole must be earned and that release after serving one-sixth of a sentence should not exist. I have 30 years of experience as a criminal lawyer. Some of my clients were released after serving one-sixth of their sentence. After having been sentenced to three years, they were released after six months and no program had been established for them, which made it far more likely that they would reoffend.

My colleague, the member for Ahuntsic, who is a criminologist and has worked with these types of people, probably knows what I am talking about. This is exactly what is happening in prisons. They cannot even begin to work with an individual who has one foot out the door if he was sentenced to two or three years in prison. He has practically left before he has arrived. Why? Take the example of one of my clients. We decided that it was better for him to be sentenced to 24 months in prison instead of two years less a day because it would take longer to serve a sentence of two years less a day in a Quebec prison than a 24-month sentence. One-sixth of 24 months is four months, and so he was released after four months. There was not even enough time before he was released for them to deal with his case and have a meeting to discuss a plan for his return to society.

That is the worst possible mistake. As I have been saying in this House for nearly six years now, the problem with the Conservatives is that they do not understand. So, I will try to explain it again. The Conservatives think that minimum prison sentences will solve everything. Nothing could be further from the truth, so far that even the Americans are beginning to realize it. Canada—and especially the Conservatives—seems to be a few years behind. In two or three years, they are going to realize they are on the wrong track.

The public is not shocked when someone receives a four-year sentence, but rather when that individual gets out after one year. The public is shocked by the fact that people are not serving their sentences. That is precisely what the Bloc Québécois has been criticizing for some time.

Whether my Conservative friends like it or not, minimum prison sentences do not preclude offenders from being eligible for parole. Even with a mandatory minimum of three years, the individual is still eligible for parole. That is what the Conservatives do not understand. Once again, we will try to explain to them that it is the parole system that needs to change. The parole system needs to be changed so that people who are sent to prison are not released unless they have a plan for their reintegration into society. That is the problem. In the example I gave of someone who has been sentenced to three years, if he is eligible for parole after six months, he will sit back and do nothing.

That is why we are calling for the elimination of parole after one-sixth of a sentence is served. That is also why we hope to vote quickly to pass this bill. I know my Conservative Party colleagues always overreact because of the worst criminals. In the case of Colonel Williams, who has committed a rash of unspeakable crimes in the Belleville and Trenton area, if he is sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years, society will take care of him. He will be sent to prison, as he clearly deserves. I will not try to defend him here, since I am not his lawyer.

That is not the problem. The worst criminals deserve the harshest sentences. That has always been true. The problem lies with individuals who are not criminals, but who are going down a path of crime. If we do not stop them, if we do not take measures to stop them, they will become hardened criminals. Generally they are individuals who are serving their first penitentiary sentence. Obviously it depends on the crime, but in most cases, a person's first penitentiary sentence is somewhere between 3 and 10 years. Those are the people this bill absolutely must catch and as soon as possible.

When I say “catch”, I mean we must encourage them to do what it takes to return to society with a plan in order not to reoffend. The problem is that the parole board does not help. It does not have a chance to work with the individuals. If an individual is eligible for parole after one-sixth of his sentence, what will he do? Take, for example, an individual who has a three-year sentence. When he arrives at the regional reception centre—every province has them—it takes three to four months before his case is reviewed. What do you think he does in the meantime? He plays cards, watches television, drinks Pepsi and waits. No one works with him, at least not very much. Someone needs to work with him as soon as he arrives at the penitentiary.

There is something my Conservative friends do not understand. I will explain it to them yet again. An individual who is sentenced will return to society and if he is not properly prepared to return to society, then, unfortunately, he will reoffend. It is a known fact that the risk of recidivism for this type of person—I am talking about those who receive sentences between 3 and 10 years—is quite high. The risk is there. We have to find ways to correct this.

Quite honestly, this is a good bill. This afternoon, the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights is going to study Bill C-22 on Internet child pornography. We all support this bill. It must be passed. Everyone agrees that this legislation needs to be put in place. It must be passed, but the government will have to submit it to us. The same holds true for Bill C-39. We must deal with it as soon as possible because it is a good bill. The parole board needs to be able to implement it. But no work is being done right now because no one knows whether the bill is going to come. The bill might not pass and could die on the order paper because of an election in the spring of 2011, for example, which is not such a far-fetched idea. It could happen. Suppose there is an election in the spring of 2011. If the government has not submitted this bill to us—we have six bills to study—then it is going to have to set priorities for the committee. We have already agreed to study Bill C-22 while we wait for the translation of the report on Bill C-4 on young offenders, as I said earlier. But it is important to pass Bill C-22 on child pornography.

There is the other bill on vehicle theft—I cannot remember the number—that we discussed before the House adjourned a week ago. Everyone supports this bill.

The government should do the sensible thing and say that since the opposition supports a number of bills, they will be sent as soon as possible to be studied, discussed and passed.

Since this bill will likely be studied by the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security, I think things should go quickly. But we have to give the penitentiaries the means to prepare release plans. This is the process where an offender is told that he has five years left to serve, for example, and he has to begin, now, to take part in preparing a release plan or serve his last five years.

At least the individual still has the choice in prison. But it is clear that he may leave—and will leave—after five years. There needs to be some follow-up with this person. During the entire prison sentence, the individual offender's treatment needs to be personalized, just as the courts hand down personalized sentences.

The individual must be made aware that their release from prison is as much their responsibility as the crime they committed. The person was found guilty or pleaded guilty to the offence and was given a sentence. However, after they are sentenced, many individuals tend to sit in prison and just wait for the end of the sentence. This bill should put an end to that. We must change the attitudes of people as they enter the prison by asking them about their plans for release and what they want to do. Do they want to finish school? Do they want addiction treatment? Do they want some sort of training? What do they want? That would set the wheels in motion so that they can leave prison better equipped than when they arrived.

Obviously, that is not what is happening right now. The National Parole Board, the prisons and the Correctional Service of Canada are not able to provide these services. That would require many things. The government supports this bill, but it needs to invest the necessary funds. Why invest? Because criminals will eventually be released. Victims need protection. They are always talking about victims.

There is something that we do not understand about the Conservatives. The National Parole Board takes care of victims, especially in terms of the prison system. This organization's main priority is the rehabilitation of an individual who is rejoining society, but the victims must also be protected and every possible step must be taken to keep that individual from reoffending.

I am being told that I have only two minutes left, but I could go on about this for a long time. I would like the Conservatives to remember this: automatic sentences have never solved anything. A minimum prison sentence has never solved anything, and that will not change today. All the studies presented to the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights show, beyond a reasonable doubt, that minimum prison sentences have never led to a decrease in crime.

We must ensure that these individuals serve their sentences, keeping in mind that they will one day return to society. It is clear that we will probably never see people like Colonel Williams, who will receive a minimum sentence of 25 years for a double murder, outside the prison walls. But we will see people who were sentenced to five to ten years in prison, and some are already close to being released.

Did people like Mr. Jones or Mr. Lacroix, who owned Norbourg, learn their lesson? With all due respect, I think that the only thing they learned was not to get caught.

Unfortunately, with the current system, prisoners learn more about not getting caught than they do about preparing for their release.

Tackling Auto Theft and Property Crime Act

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

Mr. Speaker, I believe that my colleague knows the Bloc Québécois's position on the Senate. The only option is to abolish it. But we are not there yet.

If the government thought that it would be quicker to go through the Senate, it was wrong. It is trying to do the same thing with Bill S-4 on aboriginal matrimonial rights. The Conservatives may be able to get any bill they like passed in the Senate, where they have the majority, but there are still 12 members of this House on the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, which meets twice a week. They cannot make anything up. They are trying to hurry us, but they will have to wait a bit.

I personally thought this bill would be introduced right away. It is the type of bill we all agree on. The same goes for Bill C-22 on child pornography. Everyone agreed on Bill S-9. I do not understand why it is being introduced through the Senate. I agree with my colleague, and as we like to say, enough is enough. Let us just leave it at that.

I find the government is trying to push things through the Senate where it thinks things will move more quickly because it has a majority and the Senate sits in June and July. When a bill arrives in the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights or in the House, it does not move any more quickly. We have been waiting for this bill since April 2008, two years and six months ago. It is time to act. We could have come to an agreement with the House leaders. These are bills we all agree on. Let us proceed more quickly than planned.

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

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak to this bill, but we have a problem at the outset. I am going to say something important, and the members opposite should listen, because if they do not, they are going to make the same mistake again.

Currently, in committee in the room next door, we are trying to finish studying Bill C-4. Some members will say that that has nothing to do with Bill S-9. I am coming to that. Because of the government, we are still waiting for a report on Bill C-4 that should have been tabled on June 16. We have been waiting for three and a half months for this report so that we can finish studying this young offenders bill. The government says that we are dragging our feet. I have good news and bad news for the government. The good news is that we are not the ones dragging our feet. The bad news is that they are the ones dragging their feet. The same is true of Bill S-9. The first iteration of this bill was introduced on April 14, 2008—not last week, not in April 2010 or April 2009, but on April 14, 2008. All the parties said they were prepared to study this bill quickly in committee, as I am saying today.

The problem is that they are introducing so many silly justice bills, so many populist bills as they see it, that we can no longer work. As we speak, the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights has already received four bills to study, and the session only resumed on September 20. Does the government think we are going to have the time to consider Bill S-9? Still, the government should not take us for idiots. That is the problem with the Conservative Party, the problem with this government. It thinks it can ram bills through. It is wrong.

Getting back to this bill, I have some trouble calling it S-9 because they tried to pass it through the Senate before bringing it here. It is not moving any more quickly because the problem is that part of the work had already been done on Bill C-26. The committee had already heard from representatives of the Insurance Bureau of Canada and Statistics Canada. It is the party in power, not us, that is delaying the work. I hope that the public will remember this because auto theft is an important issue. Everyone in Quebec and across Canada is asking us to do something. We certainly have no objection. It is an interesting bill. It is a bill that should have been introduced well before Bill C-4, and well before a number of other bills, given that we were probably going to move more quickly on it.

We do not have recent statistics, but just in terms of auto theft—addressed by Bill S-9 before us today—there was a small drop in 2007. However, auto theft remains one of the most common offences in Canada and is committed in particular by youth between the ages of 15 and 18. In 2007, they were responsible for three solved auto thefts in ten. That same year, 146,000 vehicle thefts were reported to police, an average of 400 thefts per day. I imagine that I will be asked about the statistics for 2008, 2009 and 2010. We do not have them. I believe we should have them soon. It is possible that we may not get all the information because the census will not be taken. However, with the Insurance Bureau of Canada, as well as Statistics Canada and the police stations, we should have a good idea and we believe the numbers will be similar. Unfortunately, there will be around 140,000 vehicles stolen per year.

That is a huge number and it is far too high. We need to eliminate this scourge.

We in the Bloc Québécois think that Bill S-9 is not a bad bill. We agree that it should be studied quickly in committee, as was the case with Bill C-22. Perhaps we will set some other bills aside in order to pass Bill C-22 on child pornography. Perhaps the same thing could happen with Bill S-9, but for that to happen, it has to come to us in committee. It seems as though the Conservatives have other bills like this. In fact, we have been told that we will spend the whole week discussing justice bills. We have to be able to work at some point.

I have been looking at what is being done with the bill. I am sorry to say it this bluntly, but there are three types of motor vehicle theft. Three out of ten vehicles are stolen by youth. We call it theft, but the young people take what are known as joy rides. In French we call them des promenades de joie. I know that it is likely not the best term, but no better terms come to mind. They take a vehicle from somewhere and drive around town. They take a vehicle that was “forgotten” at the corner store, with the keys in the ignition, lights on, motor running. They take it for a ride and leave it somewhere else. This type of crime happens a lot with youth.

Where it becomes a bit more dangerous—and this is happening in Manitoba—is when someone takes off with a vehicle and kills someone. Unfortunately, this type of offence happened recently in Abitibi-Témiscamingue when a young man took a motor vehicle from Rouyn-Noranda to Val-d'Or. He stole the vehicle in Rouyn-Noranda and caused an accident that seriously injured two people. This is extremely dangerous and something must be done.

I am not saying that the motor vehicle thefts I just mentioned are not serious. They certainly should be punished, but there are worse kinds. There are several different types of motor vehicle thefts, and there are essentially two main methods. One of them involves stripping the vehicle for parts.

I will read a list. I do not know if my Conservative colleagues have these models, but if they do, they should be careful, because they are the most likely to be stolen: 1999 Honda Civic—this one is a bit old, but it gets stripped for parts; 2000 Honda Civic; Subaru Impreza; Acura Integra; Dodge Grand Caravan or Plymouth Voyager; 1994 Dodge Grand Caravan or Plymouth Voyager with all-wheel-drive; 1998 Acura Integra; Audi TT Quattro and Dodge Shadow or Plymouth Sundance. These vehicles were among the 10 most commonly stolen vehicles in 2006, and I do not think much has changed since then.

We need to take action quickly. These vehicles are generally stripped for parts, and are rarely exported. They are exported, but not much. This is where organized crime comes in. These individuals place orders for certain types of motor vehicles, which are then stripped for parts. The thief is one thing. Yes, he is a criminal, but the ones who place the orders are the worst ones. These types of orders are generally made through organized crime groups. So we must find a way to punish them.

Bill S-9 does contain some interesting elements. We believe we can improve it through further study in committee. It seems to me that we all agree that we need to improve this bill and that we need to find ways to prevent criminals from taking vehicles apart. We need to reduce the incidence of auto theft. We need to create an offence for tampering with an identification number. When certain vehicles are taken apart, some very important parts disappear, such as the engine, the body and the doors, if they do not have a VIN. As we heard in committee, if the thief is really organized, a vehicle like a 1999 Honda Civic, for example, can be taken apart in half an hour. Now that is organized crime. We must absolutely find a way to make it impossible to take vehicles apart.

We also heard in committee that there are small electronic chips placed in secret locations in certain vehicles, and when those vehicles are stolen or taken illegally, they can be found with a certain kind of GPS. We did not take our study any further, which is why we want the bill to be examined in committee. Perhaps we could find a way to encourage manufacturers to install this kind of electronic chip in several specific locations in vehicles without necessarily forcing them to do so. This would allow authorities to find these vehicles or parts quickly, as soon as the theft is reported. We began receiving this information when we started studying the bill.

Today we must absolutely find ways to prevent this crime. To do so, we have to work with Industry Canada. The Criminal Code is not enough. It is used to punish individuals who steal and dismantle automobiles. We will probably invite the departments involved to work on prevention, which is the best way to avoid this type of theft. If someone knows there is an alarm system set up, they might be less likely to commit a break-and-enter. We want to look at the bill from that angle in committee. Even though we are on the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, it is nonetheless important to find ways to prevent crime.

There are some major offences. However, at least there are no minimum prison sentences. That is a step in the right direction. If the bill passes, then we will amend the Criminal Code to ensure that there are maximum prison sentences for trafficking in property obtained by crime. This did not exist before. The bill will create the offence of trafficking in property obtained by crime, specifically parts from stolen vehicles. The offence of possession of stolen goods exists in the Criminal Code, but when a vehicle is dismantled into parts and there is nothing left but the car door, generally speaking, if there is no identification number or electronic chip linked to a GPS, the door cannot be linked to the vehicle stolen a few weeks or months before. The offence that will be created will concern trafficking in property obtained by crime. That is how the parts will be linked to the vehicle. Circumstantial evidence will show that the vehicle was dismantled into separate parts and that some parts were sold to this or that individual.

To traffic will mean 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.

This bill will help border services officers conduct searches. It will tighten the noose around criminals who tend to steal vehicles to resell them quickly or, more importantly, to alter them. We think this is a worthwhile bill, and we will have to come up with ways to put an end to this scourge.

Criminals tend to take the easy route. Why do young people steal cars? Generally, car thefts take place outside a corner store, when the car owner leaves the key in the ignition and steps inside for some milk. How many tens of thousands of thefts sadly result in penalties that may seem light to a young person, but that can have an impact if the offender commits other crimes later?

We support this bill, which we have to say is worthwhile, even though it should have been introduced much sooner. I do not understand the government. We have been waiting for this bill since April 2008, but it seems to have been forgotten when Parliament was prorogued.

Vehicle theft is an easy crime that is often committed by young people. We must find ways to prevent people from falsifying the vehicle identification number or VIN.

The question was put to Criminal Intelligence Service Canada, and this was its reply:

The Insurance Crime Prevention Bureau has identified an increase in four main fraud techniques that are used by organized crime to steal vehicles. These include: the illegal transfer of Vehicle Identification Numbers (VINs) from wrecked vehicles to similar ones that have been stolen; a legitimate VIN is used to change the legal identity of a stolen vehicle of the same make, model, and colour, a process called “twinning”.

Let us consider the example just given. The VIN from a wrecked Honda Civic 1998 can be used for a stolen Honda Civic 1999. This is where we are being asked to take action.

In closing, we want to study this bill quickly. We can work on it in the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, but on the whole, it is a worthwhile bill that the insurance companies and police forces have been calling for. I do not believe that any member of this House will be against having this bill studied quickly in committee.

Business of the House

[John Baird, Conservative, Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, I want to tell you that when the leader of the Liberal Party named the member for Ottawa South as the House leader of the Liberal Party I was asked many times, “How do you feel about this? Are you looking forward to working with him?” I said to each and every one of them that I was every bit as looking forward to working with the member for Ottawa South as I am sure he was looking forward to working with me.

In all seriousness I can report that the Liberal House leader and I are working well together. I am even working well with the Bloc House leader and with the House leader of the New Democratic Party.

We are all working hard to make Parliament work.

Today I can tell the House that we will be continuing debate on Bill C-46, the Canada-Panama free trade agreement, another key economic initiative as part of Canada's economic action plan, a plan to create jobs, build growth and opportunity for all Canadians across the country.

It is, though, with deep regret that yesterday I learned the NDP moved a six-month hoist motion on the Canada-Panama free trade agreement. As the House knows, the only purpose of moving such an amendment is to obstruct and delay the progress of important legislation.

On Friday, my good friends in the NDP moved a concurrence motion obstructing and delaying the passage of Bill C-22, protecting children from online sexual exploitation, another key part of our government's tough on crime agenda.

I say to my NDP friends, let us work together and make Parliament work. I hope we will not see any more of this.

Tomorrow, as the member opposite has said, we will be having question period and leaving early for the installation of the new Governor General in the Senate chamber.

On Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of next week, the government will call the following bills for debate: Bill C-22, protecting children from online sexual exploitation; Bill C-21, standing up for victims of white-collar crime; Bill C-30, the response to the Supreme Court of Canada decision in R. v. Shoker; Bill C-39, ending early release for criminals and increasing offender accountability; Bill S-6, serious time for the most serious crime; and Bill S-9, tackling auto theft and property crime.

On Thursday, it is the government's intention to begin debate on the second budget bill, sustaining Canada's economic recovery act, just one more key economic action plan legislative initiative.

Canadians have told us they want us to focus on creating jobs, building growth and opportunity. They have told us that they want their government to have a robust legislative agenda, to get tough on crime, and that is exactly what we are delivering.

Motion to concur in seventh report of industry, science and technology committee

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

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order to bring to your attention the motion on the order paper to concur in the seventh report of the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology, which is essentially the same as the supply motion that was adopted yesterday.

On page 560 of O'Brien and Bosc, it refers to the rule of anticipation. It states:

The rule is dependent on the principle which forbids the same question from being decided twice within the same session.

On that same page it states:

The rule of anticipation becomes operative only when one of two similar motions on the order paper is actually proceeded with.

That is what happened yesterday with the Liberal supply motion.

I would add that the concurrence motion was moved last Friday by the NDP with the full knowledge that the subject matter of the concurrence motion was the same as that of the Liberal supply day motion which was scheduled for debate the following Tuesday.

Surely the NDP was aware that the continuation of the debate on the concurrence motion at the later date and the subsequent vote would be redundant. More important and unfortunate is that the debate on the concurrence motion interrupted the debate on Bill C-22, the protecting children from online sexual exploitation bill, which was scheduled to conclude on Friday. As a result of the concurrence motion, Bill C-22 was not sent to committee.

Mr. Speaker, as you know, there is one hour and 36 minutes remaining in the debate on the concurrence motion, and the government is bound by the rules to schedule a continuation of this debate within 10 sitting days, which will conclude in a division on the same question twice.

Mr. Speaker, in order to prevent this unnecessary debate and vote from taking place, I would ask that you strike the motion to concur in the seventh report of the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology from the order paper.

Business of the House

[John Baird, Conservative, Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to take this opportunity to officially congratulate the House leader of the official opposition on his first Thursday question and of course on his appointment as House leader. As I have already said, we want to make this Parliament work for Canadians and co-operate with all the opposition parties.

Let me also tell him, and particularly his leader, how very disappointed I am that I will not have the chance to work shoulder to shoulder with the great, wise helmsman from Wascana.

Let me take this opportunity to once again, in English, officially congratulate the House leader of the official opposition on his first Thursday question. As I have said in the past, we all want to work hard, we all want to work collaboratively to make this House work, and not just with him.

We also want to do so with our friends in the Bloc Québécois and the New Democratic Party.

As government House leader, one of my very first acts on the day of the cabinet shuffle was to reach out to my opposition counterparts. Since then, I have had the opportunity to sit down with each of them and to hear their views about making Parliament work. I look forward to working with them over the coming days, weeks, months and years to do just that.

As for the House schedule, we will continue debate today on Bill C-5 (International Transfer of Offenders), followed by Bill C-31, Eliminating Entitlements for Prisoners, and Bill C-22, Protecting Children from Online Sexual Exploitation.

On Monday, we will call Bill C-8, Canada-Jordan Free Trade Act, and Bill C-28, Fighting Spam, an important piece of legislation presented by the Minister of Industry.

Tuesday, September 28, will be an allotted day, and on Wednesday and Thursday, the order of business will be Bill C-8, if not already disposed of on Monday, Bill C-46, Canada-Panama Free Trade Act, and Bill C-28, Fighting Spam.

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

Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague, the deputy House leader for the Official Opposition, for her questions.

When I get into addressing the issue of the upcoming government legislation that I intend to call, I will make reference to Bill C-34, which was her first additional question. The other question dealt with private member's Bill C-391 and the report that came back from the committee about that legislation. I am sure the member is well aware of the process of private members' business. It has nothing to do with the government business and therefore those negotiations and consultations will take place between yourself, Mr. Speaker, and the sponsor of that legislation.

We will continue today with the opposition motion. Tomorrow we will call Bill C-2, the Canada-Colombia free trade agreement, which is at third reading.

I would also like to designate pursuant to Standing Order 66(2) tomorrow as the day to complete the debate on the motion to concur in the third report of the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration.

Next week we will hopefully complete all stages of Bill C-34, Creating Canada's New National Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 Act. I would like to thank the opposition parties for their support of that legislation and for allowing it to pass expeditiously when we do call it.

There may also be some interest to do something similar for Bill C-24, First Nations Certainty of Land Title Act; Bill S-5, ensuring safe vehicles; and Bill S-9, tracking auto theft and property crime act.

I would also like to complete the remaining stages of Bill C-11, Balanced Refugee Reform Act.

In addition to those bills, I would call Bill C-23, Eliminating Pardons for Serious Crimes Act; Bill S-2, Protecting Victims From Sex Offenders Act; and Bill C-22, Protecting Children from Online Sexual Exploitation Act.

I would also like to announce that on Monday we will be having a take note debate on the subject of the measures being taken to address the treatment of multiple sclerosis. I will be moving the appropriate motion at the end of my statement.

Pursuant to Standing Order 66(2) I would like to designate Tuesday, June 15, as the day to conclude debate on the motion to concur in the first report of the Standing Committee on International Trade.

Finally, I would like to designate Thursday, June 17, as the last allotted day.

At this time I will be making a number of motions and asking for the unanimous consent of the House for them, starting with the take note debate motion.

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

Mr. Speaker, that is quite a number of questions and I hope I have them all. My hon. colleague, the opposition House leader, says they are good questions. Indeed, they are very good questions and I appreciate him posing those questions today. I will go first to the business before the House and then I will get to his other questions.

We will continue today debating the report stage of Bill C-9, the jobs and economic growth act. As I said on Tuesday, Canadians are expecting this bill to pass before we rise for the summer.

I pointed out some of the consequences of not adopting Bill C-9 by the summer. Payments would not be authorized for over $500 million in transfer protection to our provinces. Bill C-9 also authorizes appropriation of $75 million for Genome Canada, $20 million for Pathways to Education Canada to provide support for disadvantaged youth, $10 million for the Canadian Youth Business Foundation, and $13.5 million for the Rick Hansen Foundation. These payments and many others cannot be made until Bill C-9 receives royal assent.

This process, I would remind the House, began on March 3, some three months ago, when the Minister of Finance delivered his budget. We debated the budget on March 5, 8, 9 and 10. On March 24, we adopted the ways and means motion required to introduce the jobs and economic growth act.

The bill was introduced on March 29. It was debated for five days at second reading and finally referred to the Standing Committee on Finance on April 19. The committee reported it back on May 14 without amendment. The opposition had almost a month to offer up amendments but reported the bill back without amendments.

This is the fourth sitting day that we have been debating report stage. The opposition and particularly, I would contend, the NDP have had the opportunity to raise their concerns. However, I want to point out a Speaker's ruling from April 14, 1987 in which he addressed this issue. He stated:

It is essential to our democratic system that controversial issues should be debated at reasonable length so that every reasonable opportunity shall be available to hear the arguments pro and con and that reasonable delaying tactics should be permissible to enable opponents of a measure to enlist public support for their point of view. Sooner or later every issue must be decided and the decision will be taken

I would also like to quote House of Commons Procedure and Practice, at page 210, which states:

it remains true that parliamentary procedure is intended to ensure that there is a balance between the government's need to get its business through the House, and the opposition's responsibility to debate that business without completely immobilizing the proceedings of the House.

Following Bill C-9 today, we will call Bill C-10, Senate term limits, and Bill S-2, the sex offender registry legislation.

Beginning tomorrow, if necessary, we will continue with Bill C-9, followed by Bill C-2, the Canada-Colombia free trade agreement.

Next week we will continue with the business from this week, with priority given to Bill C-9 and Bill C-2. In addition to the bills just mentioned, the government will call for debate on Bill C-22, protecting children from online sexual exploitation, Bill C-23, eliminating pardons for serious crime, and Bill C-24, first nations certainty of title. As usual, the government will give priority consideration to any bills reported back from committee or received from the Senate.

Thursday, June 10, shall be an allotted day. That was an additional question that my hon. colleague, the official opposition House leader, asked during his customary Thursday question.

The other thing he noted was a date for an important take note debate dealing with multiple sclerosis. That date has not been set yet, but there have been consultations between myself and my counterparts, the House leaders from all three opposition parties, and I am sure that we can arrive at a suitable date in the very near future.

On the issue of committee witnesses and that we are blocking other people, I would be interested to know who those other people are that we are blocking. I am not aware of any. I have said repeatedly in the House of Commons over the last week or so that we intend to uphold the principle of fundamental value of Parliament, which is ministerial accountability.

Our ministers have been appearing and will continue to appear at the standing committees. It is my contention and I would ask any Canadian who is interested in viewing, and in some cases where there is no video record, reading the Hansard of standing committees to see the types of questions and antics that the combined opposition coalition is resorting to.

In most cases, we had our very junior people. These are young people. They are people who are probably about the same age or perhaps even younger than my children. These young people are dragged before the standing committees. The opposition subjects them to abuse and intimidation tactics.