Thank you, Chair.
I appreciate the words of Mr. Cotler, the former Attorney General of Canada. He was a law professor for over 30 years and is someone who takes his responsibilities seriously, and he understands the constitutional and parliamentary system under which we operate. He gave what I think is a very erudite critique of what's happening here today.
We have serious responsibilities as members of Parliament to deal with these nine pieces of legislation. Mr. Cotler used the word “transformative”, in the sense that they bring about substantial changes in the nature of the criminal justice system and in the nature of remedies for terrorism, for example. It's not enough to say that this was talked about for some time, for some years. We now have legislation that's here for the first time.
For the first time, victims of terrorism will have a remedy in civil law, and it's important to get it right. We spent Tuesday doing that. Anyone who took the time to watch—and people are watching this now—our hearing on Tuesday can have nothing but understanding for what the parliamentary process is about when you're at clause-by-clause consideration of legislation.
We talked about each law. We had proposed amendments. There was discussion about it, and eventually it came to a vote. We got just about through that piece of legislation. I thought it was a very respectful process on all sides to have representations made, to hear the arguments, and to listen to thoughtful expressions of opinion on one side or the other. At the end of the day, with a few more votes—I think there are one or two proposed amendments—we will have passed the Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act in this hearing.
What comes next is the child sexual offences part. I made it clear last Tuesday that this is something we proposed in the House—to actually separate it out of this bill, have it dealt with separately, and passed immediately. We believe it shouldn't have to wait for the responsible process of clause-by-clause consideration, which is perhaps going to take a longer time, maybe three or four meetings, and that it could move more quickly. It could get to the committee, be dealt with separately, and be sent off to the Senate. We believe other aspects of this legislation may take time in the Senate. We have no control over what's going to happen there. But I think we have a responsibility in this committee to give it due consideration.
Mr. Jean says if you believe we should get at it, well, let's get at it; turn on your watch, roll up your sleeves, and we're here until midnight.
Well, that's not the way the process works. We have a schedule of meetings for this committee. We meet on Tuesday and Thursday; we meet for two hours at a time. There are gaps in between for consideration of matters, for consultation with people, like the Government of Quebec, which has proposed amendments and made suggestions, and others who have an interest in amendments to this legislation. That's part of the process, too.
Other people have other obligations. People are on other committees that start at 11 o'clock this morning. People are in question period. People have other obligations. We can't just shut down the life of everybody in Parliament and say, “Well, we have between now and midnight”, and all of a sudden, with no notice whatsoever, we're expected to deal with nine pieces of legislation in a responsible manner. That's just not realistic. It's not realistic.
That's why when someone says this is a hijacking of democracy, it literally is, because democracy is a process. It's not just perfunctory. It's not just, “You propose a motion and we vote it down, you propose a motion and we vote it down, you propose an amendment and we vote it down because we have the numbers.” There has to be an opportunity for reasoned discussion.
I don't expect every amendment being proposed to receive due consideration. But we have people here, on both sides of this committee, who have a tremendous amount of experience. We have three or four lawyers on each side. We have people engaged in this process who are familiar with the nature of criminal law and have something to say. They have the ability to listen to reason and to respond to suggestions that make sense. Canadians, frankly, expect us to do this in a reasonable manner, not just to say that we're going to have a marathon session now because people decided they didn't want to have debate carry on.
Mr. Cotler said this, and it sounded reasonable at the time. In the House of Commons, the minister or the government House leader gets up and says he wants to limit debate, that there is no need to have this debate in the House of Commons because they are just talking about the principle of the bill and aren't getting anywhere. They want it to go to committee, where the reasoned discussion can take place, where the opportunity to study the bill clause by clause can happen.
We only started this on Tuesday. We've only given two hours of consideration to this hundred-page piece of legislation that deals with nine separate bills, nine separate pieces of federal legislation. It deals with corrections. It deals with terrorism and setting up for the first time legislation on civil remedies. It deals with child sexual offences that are of great concern to a lot of people in this country. We want to see some changes made, and we support those changes. There are changes to the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act that are very controversial in this country because of what their effect might be. We've heard representations in general on what the consequences of those changes would be. But we haven't looked at each clause one at a time, which is our obligation.
I don't know if anybody had any real estimate of how much time this was going to take, but we do know that we're here, as of Monday, for a five-week session, between now and the middle of December. I don't think we need to take up all of that time to deal with this clause-by-clause legislation, not at all. I think we'll probably be through it in three or four meetings, depending on how the time goes and how cooperative people might be or how much debate there might be on particular issues. I think once some of the issues are settled, we'll see where it's going. But there has to be an opportunity for that to take place over a reasonable period of time.
To try to jam it all into one day is, frankly, a method of stifling proper discussion about important matters of state that affect people's livelihoods, that affect people's freedom, that affect how long they're going to be incarcerated, that affect the enormous costs being projected for what might be imposed on the provinces.
When this was debated in the House, we had responses from the government such as, “We give the provinces transfers, and it's up to them to decide what their priorities are.” Well, what does that mean? That means that if this law goes through and there are consequences for a province that mean it's going to cost them an extra $100 million to incarcerate people, that $100 million will come from something else. It will come from education. It will come from health care. It will come from preventative programs that make streets safer, because provinces have obligations and programs and jurisdiction to engage in preventative programs as well.
All of these consequences are serious consequences of this legislation that have to have an opportunity to be discussed in the context of the particular pieces of legislation themselves. That's not something you jam into a day, saying, “Let's see how tired we can make people. Let's see how frustrated we can get members of this committee. Let's see how we can make them sweat and how we wear them down to show how tough we are. We're going to sit here all day and all night. If you really want to work, roll up your sleeves and work.” Well, that's nonsense.
We were elected for a four-year term--all of us for a four-year term. It's all very well to say you have priorities. We understand that. That's why we're here.
We're here talking about this bill today because it's the priority of government, and we recognize that the government has the right to determine the order in which legislation comes forward and the emphasis they want to place on it. They have the right to do that, and we fully accept that. What they don't have the right to do, in our constitutional and parliamentary democracy, is to ignore the process, a reasonable process that allows proper time for consideration of all these matters.
You're asking for cooperation. We're asking for cooperation as well. The kind of cooperation that's required here is the cooperation that says we're going to give due consideration to this. We're going to do it in accordance with the process that's set out, in accordance with the schedule of the committee. There's no urgency here. There's no national crisis that has to be resolved between now and midnight tonight. This is just one stage of legislation, but a very important one, and perhaps the most important one. Perhaps it's even the most important one that we, as individual legislators, have a right and an obligation and a duty to participate in.
We have debates on principle in the House whereby you set forth your overall approach, your challenges to hold the government to account on issues that come up. But when you're into the nitty-gritty...and, yes, we have expert witnesses from the Department of Justice who have studied this and put forth amendments, and they're here to help us through this process now, but that's their role. Their role is to do that on the instructions, by the way, of the Minister of Justice. So we're getting here what the Minister of Justice has instructed be put before the committee, and we have an opportunity to discuss it, to potentially amend it, and to approve it.
As Mr. Cotler said earlier, and he's been around legislatures a long time--I spent 16 years in another legislature, three or four in this one, and I've never seen a piece of legislation yet that couldn't benefit from some improvement or some change. We regularly used to have a bill in the other legislature I was in to fix errors and corrections in legislation, and it went on and on. The reason it was there was that the legislation hadn't been given proper consideration in the first place. I think they called it An Act to Remove Anomalies and Errors in the Statute Law, and that's because the legislation didn't get proper study the first time around.
Our job here is to give this proper study and not to say we're going to have a marathon session now, with no notice to anybody whose schedules have presumably already been made for the day in terms of what they're going to do, where they have to be and appointments they've made, commitments they've made to people and commitments to their duties in the House and in other committees. We're going to say no, we're going to shut all that down now, and either you pass it all between now and 10:45 and we carry on, or we arrange to be available all day until one minute to midnight tonight.
That's what's being suggested here as some sort of practical, realistic, reasonable way of dealing with nine pieces of legislation, each of them significant in themselves, with detailed provisions set forth, which we've given considerable study to. Even this process has been very rapid. We had a constituency week, when all members of the House are expected to return to their constituencies and do the kind of work they do in their constituencies. We had meetings with constituents, planned events that we were to attend in association with Remembrance Day. That was the week in which all the amendments were expected to be put forward. Nobody was here. Everybody had gone to their constituency, but our amendments were wanted. I thought that was pretty unreasonable too.
We managed, over the period of time up to Tuesday, to produce our amendments and consider them, to have them both to legislative drafting and be translated into both official languages, and to do that job. That work was done in a very short period of time. So don't let anyone get the impression that the opposition is not cooperating in moving this legislation forward as quickly as is reasonably possible, consistent with our duties and obligations as members of Parliament and as legislators to give due consideration to legislation.
Again, all I have to do is look back to what happened on Tuesday. Legislation that had never been given clause-by-clause consideration in the House before, had never been the subject of scrutiny, never been a part of Canadian legislation in the past--no such thing existed as a civil tort and a civil remedy for people who are victims of terror.... We heard from witnesses about it, we heard suggestions as to how it could be improved, we were doing our job. The fact that it took a whole meeting on Tuesday is totally appropriate. With a few more moments of discussion, perhaps 10 or 15 minutes, that particular piece of legislation would be finished at second reading.
That's the way this legislation is supposed to be dealt with. If we had started today with further consideration of this legislation, by the end of the meeting this morning we would have made considerable further progress. Instead, we've got the government making a brand-new issue: “No, we're not going to talk about the legislation, we're not going to talk about clause-by-clause today; we're going to talk about process here now. We're going to talk about the fact that we want you to cooperate in refusing to follow through on a committee clause-by-clause study in a reasonable manner. We want to talk about our desire to have this done today--not only our desire, but our willingness to use our majority on this committee to insist that it happen today.”
If that's what you want to talk about, that's what we're talking about. We think your approach is absolutely contrary to the notions of democracy, to why we were elected, what we are here for, how we are supposed to do our job, and what Canadians expect of people they elect to Parliament. The people in this country who have taken such an interest in this legislation are not doing it because they think it's a great idea to write letters to members of Parliament. They're not doing it because they want to spend their time worrying about what's going to happen to our society, what's going to happen to our provincial government responsibilities, and what's going to happen to children who end up being incarcerated to the point that their future is destroyed unnecessarily.
What's going to happen to people who may run afoul of the law as a child or as a young adult of 18, 19, or 20, and there's no opportunity anymore for a pardon--none? We're going to have something called record suspension. Let me tell you, as someone who practised law for 30 years, that if you talk to the ordinary person in the street about what that means and if they know anything about the law, they probably think it means a suspended sentence. They won't recognize it as a process whereby the police, the RCMP, do an investigation on your rehabilitation since you committed this crime, and after you've served your sentence, if you had a custodial sentence, after you've paid your debt for that particular crime, you can actually apply to the parole board and seek a pardon, and the word “pardon” actually means something.
A young man who committed a crime at age 19 can now turn around at 25 and say, “Well, I made a mistake. I did something wrong and I paid the price, but I got a pardon for that. I can hold my head up and say I'm now recognized, because this board, this independent body with the police force, they've looked into my character and my rehabilitation efforts and they've said I should be pardoned for this.” You should not go around for the rest of your life with the burden of a criminal record hanging over your head, interfering with your employment, interfering with your ability to travel, interfering with your ability to get on with your life and to make something of yourself because you did not get a pardon. I think that means something; that means something to Canadians. But for some reason this legislation says no, we're going to change that.
As Mr. Cotler said, these are the kinds of transformative matters in this legislation that we're now being told--or asked to support--we should deal with all in one day. All of this in one day. Why? No reason. There's no urgency here to deal with this today. You know, we could have dealt with a good chunk of it today. We could deal with another good chunk of it next Tuesday, and possibly the rest of it next Thursday. What's the hurry? Where are we going? You know we're here.
You know, the people of Canada have elected us to be members of Parliament and to serve every day, to sit in the House every day that the calendar provides for us. We have a pretty long calendar. You know we're here for five weeks. This is the first of five weeks. This is important legislation. When we finish this, what are we going to do? What are we going to do next Tuesday? We could have given further consideration to this legislation, but the government decided they didn't want this to happen. They wanted it all to happen last Thursday. People might have had other things they had scheduled, other things they were scheduled to do, other things that time—their time—was already committed to, without any notice to change the whole way of doing things. What for? The only reason is to stifle debate, discussion, and proper consideration, and I think the people of Canada are being very ill-served—very ill-served—by this approach. I hope that members opposite—we always live in hope in this business—will reconsider their view on this, will reconsider ramming this through, and give this legislation the opportunity to be considered in an orderly fashion, the way it should be. Now that's something that we as parliamentarians are elected to do.
I've touched on the issue of pardon because one of the big debates that this legislation gives rise to is which approach can be more successful, the punitive approach or the approach that promotes prevention and rehabilitation. The pardon is one of them. The ability to obtain a pardon is one of those matters that actually supports rehabilitation. It holds out the prospect of a pardon to someone who has already committed a crime, is being subject to whatever penalties the courts impose, and has to pay the price. But it can also be held out as a carrot for rehabilitation, redemption in the form of a pardon. Well, that's something that is worthy of debate. It's worthy of debate and consideration, not to be rammed into a one-day marathon session.
I'd like to hear those arguments as to why it's better to say we're going to remove the possibility of redemption. I'd like to hear what a pardon, and the notion of a pardon and the word “pardon”, and everything that goes with that, means to an individual who's the subject of criminal proceedings as a young person, or as someone who commits an offence once in their life. Why? Who thought it was better to say we're not going to use that word anymore, because it's better to make criminals less likely to want to rehabilitate themselves, go on the straight and narrow, reform their lives, and change their behaviour? To have a system that recognizes when somebody has taken their life in hand and gone down a better path, and reward them for it and prevent them from having to have a noose, an albatross, around their neck for the rest of their life in the form of a criminal record.... I want to hear the arguments that suggest it's a good idea to remove that. That's something significant and transformative.
This legislation has had such an effect on society. Organizations like the Barreau du Quebec...the Canadian Bar Association came before us with a 90-plus-page brief detailing their concerns about this legislation. The Canadian Bar Association is not made up of defence lawyers; it's made up of all sorts of lawyers. The criminal justice section is made up of defence counsel and crown prosecutors. They work together to examine legislation and comment on it in a very helpful way. Over the years they have made a very positive contribution to the consideration of legislation by parliamentary committees such as this.
I've noticed a very disturbing point of view being expressed in the House, and sometimes here, that somehow a lawyer who defends a person charged with an offence is advocating for criminals. Those of us who have been to law school and practise law know full well that the criminal justice system is designed to ensure that those who have committed crimes are punished in accordance with the law. But the key point here is “in accordance with the law”. How do you have the rule of law operate if you don't have criminal lawyers ensuring that we only punish people in accordance with the rule of law? That's our system. But to hear representatives of government somehow or other attack those who represent people and enforce the rule of law in our society--that's an attack on the rule of law itself, and it's very dangerous.
When people from the Canadian Bar Association come to us representing both sides, they want to make sure the law is effective and achieves the object it's supposed to achieve. If you call a piece of legislation the Safe Streets and Communities Act, I think people are entitled to test those provisions of the law and offer their opinions as to whether or not this provision will lead to safer streets and safer communities.
There is a very considerable body of opinion and reasoned response, by those who know and have seen what's happened in other countries and have analyzed and studied these matters, to suggest that many provisions of this bill--not all, obviously, because we are looking at it piece by piece--could well lead to more crime, more victims, less safe communities, and less safe streets. We are entitled, required, and have a duty to examine these one by one; to consider these clause by clause in a manner that's in keeping with the way Parliament is set out, with committees that meet twice a week for two hours at a time over a period of time.
If there were a crisis.... We meet on weekends sometimes. The House met on the weekend back in June to deal with a matter that was considered of urgent public importance. We kept going. We sat at night. We sat around the clock one particular night. We don't mind doing that. That's not a problem. We'll do that if urgency requires it, but we don't have an urgent situation here. We have a piece of legislation that's up for consideration and that has to go through this process. When it's through this process, it goes back to report stage in the House of Commons, and then it goes to the Senate for consideration. It's a process over which we have no control. We have no control in this House.
But we must do our own duty and give this proper consideration here in the House of Commons, here in this committee, not in a marathon session that's going to start now, end at midnight, and, I don't know, maybe break for question period. Maybe they won't. Maybe the committee members will say, “No, no, we're going to keep going. If you leave, we'll just run through the rest of it while you're gone to question period.” Is that what's going to happen here today? Is that what we're asked to cooperate with? Is that what we're asked to collaborate with--a process that is so undemocratic as to be insulting?
We come here at 8:45 and the first thing we get is a motion saying we're going to deal with this and it's all going to be dealt with by 11:59 tonight, and that's all. That's what we're debating.
So what are we going to do? Are we going to sit here now until 11:30, take off our jackets, bring in food, and nobody will move, because if we go out the door you'll ram the rest of it through...? We have question period scheduled. People have those other committees that are meeting at 11 o'clock, probably in this room. I don't know. Maybe we're in this room because it was already planned that nobody else was going to be here at 11 o'clock. I don't know.
But it seems to me that the government is choosing to ignore the desire of the people of Canada to have a full debate on this. We've had people calling us and wanting to know when this particular clause would be coming up, when this would be happening, when the amendments to the Youth Criminal Justice Act, which is the last part of the bill, would be happening. Oh, I don't know, maybe next week, we were saying, on Tuesday or Thursday. Oh no, no, all of a sudden, without any notice, they're going to be dealt with sometime between now and midnight...I don't know when.
The people of Quebec have heard that their government wants to see amendments brought forward. This is going to happen some time today, not when we get to that which we would have expected to get to maybe on Tuesday. This is going to be dealt with sometime between now and midnight.
That's unreasonable, Mr. Chairman. It's unreasonable for this committee to be expected to deal with this in a short period of time. This is not a 10-clause piece of legislation, aimed at one particular thing, that someone is trying to delay; there is no one trying to delay this. That's not the purpose of this consideration. The purpose of this consideration is to study it. We saw on Monday the fact that it took one meeting, and I heard people say at the end that we'd only dealt with seven clauses. Well, we dealt with seven clauses of a piece of legislation that has never before been considered by the House of Commons or by a committee. It's a piece of legislation that is a brand-new entry into a field of international civil claims that we've not had before. We had representations from groups concerned about the rights and the opportunity for victims of terrorism to participate in a challenge to those who committed terrorist acts, organizations that have sponsored them, and countries that have sponsored them. It's a very new field.
We had significant, serious amendments being proposed, which we dealt with in the course of the meeting. We don't measure progress by the number of clauses. We should be measuring progress by whether or not we gave due consideration to a piece of legislation that has been brought forward for the first time in Canadian history--and we gave it two hours of consideration. That's a measure of progress. That's something I think Canadians would not begrudge members of Parliament--spending two hours talking in a detailed clause-by-clause manner about something that has to do with what will be the law of the land, something that will give rights to people, something that the courts will be expected to interpret and implement and follow, and something because of which, if we don't have it right, somebody could spend enormous amounts of money to go through a court process only to find that the legislation is inadequate to meet what it is they're trying to do. Is that what we want?
I'm not suggesting that the people who drafted this legislation on behalf of the government don't know what they're doing. Clearly, they're hired to do their work because they have expertise. But they don't have all the expertise, and having it is not their job. Their job is to put forth draft legislation for consideration by this committee. If this committee wants to make changes to it and to follow a different path.... It's the job and the right and the duty of members of this committee to put whatever amendments it wishes to an amended piece of legislation that goes back to Parliament. That's the legislative process.
To have the expertise of a person such as Mr. Cotler, who is a world-renowned expert on issues of human rights and who has spent 30-plus years as a law professor, and to put forth amendments for consideration, I think are blessings, if I may use that word, for our committee. We have Mr. Rathgeber over there, another professional lawyer who has experience and who is a thoughtful individual and who can consider these pieces of legislation. And there are others who are here to try to do a job.
We may disagree, but we have the benefit of the knowledge, experience, and wisdom of the members of this committee who bring forth these amendments, and they deserve due consideration. I'm not suggesting they didn't get that on Tuesday, by the way. I didn't think the process on Tuesday was disrespectful of Mr. Cotler. Don't get me wrong. But I think the process was something that we as committee members have an obligation to bring to this table and to bring forth for due consideration, and we have to make those arguments. If they didn't succeed in the end, then they didn't succeed for reasons of policy, or because the government members did not accept them, or they had their minds already made up as to what approach they were going to take.
Perhaps they've made some decision that they are not going to accept any amendments because they are very happy with the bill the way it is. That's their right at the end of the day, because there's a majority here. It's also our duty to put forth amendments that we think make the bill better, make it more in conformity with what the public would want, make it conform more to what our notions of justice are, make it more in conformity with making it better, or make it something that is more acceptable to the House. That's the theory of moving amendments. I move an amendment to legislation in the hope that it will be more acceptable to the House, or perhaps acceptable to more members of the House so we have a greater degree of consensus. That's often the purpose of amendments.
We don't want necessarily a polarized House of Commons where one side is all this way and the other side is all that way. We came here to make Parliament work.
I think that's a phrase you may have heard over the last year from our former leader and from our party: we want Parliament to work.
Well, one of the ways that Parliament works is by people working together on a committee in a collegial and professional manner to consider legislation that's before us. That's what we did on Tuesday. But now, right off the mark on Thursday, after two hours of consideration of a complex piece of legislation, we have legislation and they say, “No, we don't want to make Parliament work; we don't want to be collegial and professional about this.” They say, “Okay, we've had enough of this. What we want is this legislation passed today in this committee.” That's what they said: “We'll stay here all day. If you want to stay here all day, that's fine, stay here all day, but we want this bill today. And if you don't cooperate with us, at 11:59 tonight it's going to be considered passed. That's what we're saying. We'll basically shut down this process, based on some whim or other that determines that you're not prepared to get involved in debate.”
Maybe you don't want the prolonged discussion about this because what we have to say will get greater coverage. Maybe you don't want Canadians to actually know that there are reasonable people who, when they look at the detail of this legislation, have very sensible arguments. And people are going to say, “Well, that makes a lot of sense, but I've been listening to the government and they say this is all about safer streets. But what's being said here is that this is not going to lead to that. What Mr. Harris is saying or what Mr. Cotler is saying or Mr. Jacob is saying makes a lot of sense”—based on the experience of this particular jurisdiction, or based on the opinion of this expert who spent decades studying this matter, that this is the wrong direction to be going in.
Is it that you don't want people to hear that? Are you afraid people might hear that? Your opinions, your point of view, can't stand the light of day. Is that the problem?