Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise to join with my colleague, the hon. member for Winnipeg—Transcona, to explain why it is we believe that this is one of the most important motions to come before the House and why we chose to allot a full day of debate on this fundamental issue.
This is about whether or not we as Canadians and we as elected members of the House are seriously prepared to say that indeed we do want to get at the truth to the extent possible within the framework of the public complaints commission. We want to get at that truth and we want to ensure that the students who are the complainants before that commission have equitable and fair representation.
I had the opportunity to attend some of the commission hearings. There is at the present time a profound imbalance. On the one hand there is a battery of lawyers representing the RCMP and the federal government; in fact just last week they hired three more lawyers. On the other hand there is a group of students, complainants in what is clearly an adversarial process, who have no legal representation funded whatsoever. That is profoundly unjust.
It is not just New Democrats who are making that argument. The public complaints commission itself on two separate occasions has appealed to the government, to the solicitor general, to do the right thing, to recognize that fairness demands legal representation for these students.
Madam Justice Barbara Reed of the Federal Court of Canada has made the same appeal. She could not have been clearer when she said in July “Without state funded legal representation, the complainants will be at a great disadvantage. There will not be a level playing field”.
The allegations and the issues we are dealing with are profoundly serious. The allegations are that during the time leading up to the APEC summit and indeed at the summit itself, far from looking solely at security concerns, the Prime Minister, his senior officials and other ministers were more concerned about the comfort of foreign dictators like Suharto. They were concerned about avoiding embarrassment to those dictators.
Therein lies the line between a democracy and a police state. I say that very seriously because in a police state there is political direction of the law enforcement apparatus of the state. That is what we saw during the APEC summit.
We saw students peacefully and non-violently protesting, being arrested and being forced to sign conditions of release, which were illegal, that they would not demonstrate against APEC or any country in APEC. We saw banners torn down. We saw the Tibetan flag at the graduate students centre taken down. We saw women, students strip searched. We saw Indonesian bodyguards, thugs with guns being allowed into Canada and the Indonesian ambassador asking what happens if they shoot somebody. We saw most ominously in many respects a young man named Jaggi Singh, one of the organizers of the APEC alert being arrested, wrestled to the ground on the UBC campus by three plainclothes police officers, handcuffed, thrown in the back of an unmarked car with tinted glass, driven off and locked up during the APEC summit.
Those are police state tactics. Those are the kind of tactics we have seen too often in countries like Indonesia, Malaysia and China, as my colleague from Winnipeg—Transcona has said. It was not long ago that we saw those tactics in Chile. As a New Democrat I join with my colleagues in saying that we celebrate the fact that the United Kingdom and Spain have said that Augusto Pinochet is going to be locked up and I hope tried for crimes against humanity that he committed against the people of Chile during those dark years. We welcome that.
Today is the moment of truth for Liberal MPs. There is no doubt that every member on this side of the House is going to support fairness, justice and equity for those students. I am making a direct appeal today to those Liberal members of parliament, an appeal in particular to the member of parliament for Vancouver Quadra who represents the UBC area. He has said “Yes, I believe students should have funding”. He has his chance today. He has the opportunity today to show us whether he is serious about that or whether he will be whipped into line to say no like one of a bunch of trained seals.
That member has suggested, as some other Liberal members have suggested, that it is okay because the commission has the power to use the $650,000 allocated in supplementary funds for legal fees for the students. That is absolutely false. The commission has said that it does not have that power.
More important, it is not just a legal opinion. Madam Justice Barbara Reed of the Federal Court of Canada said “It seems reasonably clear that the commission does not have the authority to issue an order to provide funding for the legal representation of students”. It could not be any clearer than that. If Liberal MPs say that the commission has the power to allocate those funds, I say to them that they are misleading Canadians. The federal court itself has said that it does not have any such power.
Yesterday the Canadian Federation of Students, the National Action Committee on the Status of Women, the Canadian Labour Congress and many others joined in appealing to this government to do the right thing, to recognize that there must be a sense of fairness to this process, that in the absence of that, the complaints commission is a travesty of justice. It is a one sided farce.
This government keeps saying let the commission do its work. The commission cannot do its work unless the complainants who appear before the commission are properly funded.
To Liberal MPs, this is their chance to stand up for fairness for those student complainants. We should listen. The members on the government side of the House should listen to the Law Society of British Columbia which wrote to the solicitor general and said an essential principle of a democratic government is that all people are equal before the law and are equally entitled to fairness and due process.
The inquiry is an adversarial process and the complainants appearing before the commission are acting as representatives of the public interest.
The students at UBC were demonstrating not just for themselves but for all of us as Canadians with some pretty important, fundamental values. They deserve to have fair and equitable representation.
I again appeal to members on the government side of the House and to all members to do the right thing, to provide that funding and to make sure we get at the truth, so that this is not just a cover for some pretty appalling police state tactics that took place.
I move:
That the motion be amended by adding after the word “House” the following: “strongly”