I will answer those questions now. I should not pause. I should just keep talking straight through and not look as though I am going to stop.
There are two questions to answer in particular, the first one about lowering it to three. I am not aware of any court decisions that would bind us about the definitions of groups, organizations or associations. As I said earlier, we are happy to consider lowering it to three. Even as we speak there are people out there watching this and people in the justice department who are intensively examining the proposals that are being made to see if there are any other things we should say so we can add to this discussion. Before this process is over we will have a position for you on your suggestion that we lower it to three.
In your second question you asked us about the impact on law-abiding groups. I say that if there is a group out there that has as one of its primary activities the commission of indictable offences for which imprisonment of five years or more is provided in the code and which has as members people who have engaged over the last five years in the commission of a series of such offences, then they are not law-abiding groups and, by definition, law-abiding groups are excluded from the application of that section.
My friend also asks if we will prejudge certain organizations or gangs, the so-called clubs. No, we will not. The very thing that the attorney general of Quebec asked me for I simply could not give, which is to say that membership alone in a certain group called X is an offence and that there be a schedule to the act with the names of the groups on it which indicate that those people are all criminals and, therefore, they lose certain rights and we can do certain things. We said that we will not do that. We cannot do that.
Instead, we said that we would talk concepts instead of people. We will talk about teams and ideas instead of the names of groups. We will give a description in the criminal law. If there is a group which has as one of its primary purposes the commission of serious crimes and if that group has a membership which has engaged in the last five years in a series of serious crimes, that is a criminal organization. That does not create an offence, it just describes what a criminal organization is.
We then went on to say that if a person commits a crime to benefit a criminal organization, that is more serious than it would otherwise be because this is a particular mischief we are trying to root out of our society.
That is not to say that particular groups are automatically deemed to be criminal when we pass this bill. The reality is that the crown attorney will have to tender evidence in each case: that this person is doing this for the benefit of a criminal organization, that gang X is a criminal organization because it is borne out in the facts. The court will have to be persuaded that they fall within the definition.
The last question my friend asked was why is it that the 800-odd sections in the very thick and complete Criminal Code have not succeeded to date in achieving all of this?
Organized crime, as I have learned from the police, presents a unique challenge in investigation. The police techniques typically are that an informer is sent inside, an officer is sent in under cover or they try to persuade someone in the organization to turn and become their informer. Also they solicit bits of information from people who are prepared to talk. In organized crime, particularly some of the groups which are active in Canada today, the police cannot infiltrate because the groups require that in order to become a member or be admitted to the inner circle that person has to commit a serious crime to qualify. It is an initiation. Police cannot do that.
Second, those who are inside, who police sometimes try to turn to become informers, realize they will face the death penalty if they are caught. That is a serious disincentive to providing information to the police. Similarly, there is an element of intimidation of those who might otherwise give information.
The fact is that the police find it exceedingly difficult to investigate these groups based on the powers in the code. That is why the police have been asking for the kind of tools that are contained in this bill, which we believe will make a difference in these exceptional cases.
I hope that responds to the questions which my friend asked.