Mr. Speaker, today I am rising to speak in favour of our party's opposition day motion that the complainants, namely the students appearing before the RCMP Public Complaints Commission, be provided with separately funded legal representation. Before I get into the substance of my remarks, I will be sharing my time with the leader of our party, the member for Halifax.
As has been noted by previous speakers in the debate today, what was done last November was not done for reasons of security but because the Prime Minister wanted to spare President Suharto, a dictator from Indonesia, any embarrassment while he was visiting Vancouver at the APEC summit meeting. As a result dozens of people were arrested, mainly students, and police may have interfered with the human rights of hundreds of those individuals.
Professor Pue, a professor of legal history at UBC, has said that if these principles can be clearly violated then the political use of police forces to harass journalists, political opponents and other inconvenient individuals is no longer unthinkable. A very slippery slope lies between the APEC protesters and the rest of us.
As an aside, I go back to what happened two weeks ago today on the question of privilege concerning the solicitor general to say that in my brief tenure here it was the most shameful moment I have witnessed in the House of Commons. The solicitor general stood in his place to categorically deny and to be personally offended at what I had overheard him saying to the gentleman who turned out to be Mr. Toole from Saint John, New Brunswick.
I can understand why on the day that the questions were raised there might have been some doubt and some uncertainty in the mind of the solicitor general. Upon reflection, upon sleeping on the matter and then getting up to essentially deny, deny, deny is unconscionable, and people over there talk about ethics in this matter.
With respect, what kind of message does that send to our young people? Does it not say they should just keep refuting the story and have all their friends stand up and applaud what they are saying? If they say it long enough and loud enough, the world will move on and talk about other issues. It is a great message for my children's generation or for any generation, for that matter.
Let me read into the record one of the many letters I have received. This one is actually an e-mail from a business person in Toronto who said “In the real world if I talked about a client, their business, my firm's relationship with that client, or if any other aspect of my firm's business and was overheard in public, the following would happen. I would be barely back in my office when I would be summoned to report to the CEO and be promptly fired on the spot. This would occur without opportunity to appeal, rebut or waste my partner's time with an explanation. It is in the voters (shareholders) best interest to have no tolerance policies when it comes to breaches such as the one you uncovered. With all due respect, only in politics or public life do serious indiscretions in conduct and judgment go undisciplined. Unfortunately this reflects poorly on the political process in democracies such as Canada and the United States. Members' credibility as effective and trusted managers of the public purse is once again challenged ultimately to the detriment of the constituencies they represent”.
I would add that the solicitor general's actions or lack thereof not only reflect poorly on him but on all of us. Had he done the right thing and offered his resignation, it could have elevated our collective miserable reputations.
The solicitor general has been saying that he is not prejudging, that he has not prejudged the public complaints commission. Hypothetically let us suppose that we have a real, genuine hearing in Vancouver, that the students are funded legally, and at the end of the day the commission reports that in its opinion four or five RCMP officers acted with excessive force during a five minute period and recommends that Staff Sergeant Hugh Stewart take the fall, be disciplined or be dismissed from the force.
How can the solicitor general stand in his place and say that he has not prejudged the inquiry? That is exactly what he told Mr. Toole on the infamous flight on October 1. I believe I was doing my duty to bring that public discussion and debate forward in the Chamber.
If the solicitor general is careless in what he says in public—not only did he not say it in the House but admonished others not to say it, not to prejudge—I would have been derelict in my duty not to have brought it forward. His utterings were highly irresponsible on that flight but I ask the House not to take my word for it.
Let us listen to Patrick Monahan who teaches law at Osgoode Hall. I am sorry the member for Willowdale is not here. He was a former policy adviser to that member's brother, Ontario Premier David Peterson. Patrick Monahan said “I don't see how the solicitor general can maintain that this was a private conversation. Certainly he seemed to be discussing private matters, but the issue is that it was taking place in a public place. An airline certainly is public in the sense that there are people sitting visibly in the area where you are speaking so your conversation can be overheard”.
He goes on to talk about the member for Palliser not acting in a deceptive way whatsoever. He said “He was simply sitting on the airplane immediately adjacent to where the solicitor general was sitting so he was sitting in full view and listening. He was not using any kind of special hearing device to pick up the conversation. To allege that there is anything improper about taking notes about a conversation, there is no basis to that”.
John Grace, the government's own former privacy commissioner, said that “an airplane is a public place and when a public figure in a public place begins to talk about public issues within earshot of others he or she should expect that others will listen”.
Today's motion simply asks that the government provide separate funded legal representation for the complainants at the APEC inquiry. I think that most Canadians listening to this debate or following this story basically cannot believe that this has not been automatic on the part of the government. It very much appears to any fair-minded observer that the government has deprived these young people of their basic human right to protest peacefully in order to cosy up to the Suhartos of the world. Then it turns around and denies those individuals legal assistance to help them get adequate representation. It is truly a David and Goliath story that we are witnessing.
It is a shameful incident in this country. The Liberal cabinet knows it, the Liberal back bench knows it, the solicitor general knows it perhaps better than most of us, and I think the Canadian public instinctively and intuitively knows it.