Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak to Bill C-51, an act to amend the Criminal Code, the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act and the Corrections and Conditional Release Act.
First I would like to draw the attention of the House, but more particularly the listening public, to the fact that what we have before us is an omnibus bill. An omnibus bill is the name given to a bill that contains many unrelated amendments. We usually get omnibus bills in the context of amendments to the Criminal Code, but it is not only in the context of amendments to the Criminal Code and related acts that we get omnibus bills.
I would remind the House that in the past the House has found particular omnibus bills to be quite offensive. That is to say, offensive in terms of parliamentary procedure and offensive in terms of the limited opportunity that it gives to the House to express itself on the various matters that are contained within the omnibus bill.
One of the most paralyzing and significant crises in Canadian parliamentary history happened over an omnibus bill. It was the omnibus bill brought in by a Liberal government in 1982.
In that case it was not an omnibus bill having to do with the Criminal Code, but an omnibus bill having to do with energy policy that prompted the bell ringing crisis in the early months of 1982 when the bells rang for 16 days.
Those members of the House who do not go back that far should know that the bells used to be a lot louder than they are now. They rang and they rang for 16 days, 24 hours a day, until that crisis was finally dealt with. That was over an omnibus bill.
I say to the government that, although there is not that kind of controversy around this omnibus bill, I still find that omnibus bills in and of themselves provide a great deal of difficulty for members of the House of Commons, particularly for the opposition because we are put in the position of having to vote for the whole bill or against the whole bill. As is often the case with omnibus bills, there are aspects of the bill that we support and aspects of the bill that we do not.
With respect to Bill C-51, there are a number of things which we support, such as the provision to widen the scope of the offence for obtaining the services of a prostitute under 18 years old, the provision to repeal the year and a day rule for offences involving homicide and criminal negligence causing death, the provision to modernize the fraud and theft provisions with respect to valuable materials and the provision to modernize the provisions concerning the offence of making likenesses of bank notes.
We support provisions to ensure that only officials with law enforcement duties can execute search warrants, provisions having to do with sentencing measures dealing with the consideration of outstanding charges, the offender's ability to pay a fine and those which address technical matters. We support the provision of rules governing when conditional sentences run following the breach of a condition and bringing deceptive telemarketing offences against the Competition Act under the forfeiture provisions for the proceeds of crime.
A number of these are housekeeping, modernizing, technical amendments, but there are a couple of elements in this bill that we believe are worthy of debate and contention. I refer specifically to the provision that would permit the operation of casinos on international cruise ships that are Canadian or in Canadian waters and the provision to permit dice games conducted and managed by a province.
After having listened to the hon. member from the Bloc Quebecois I think I understand a little bit better where this amendment having to do with the operation of casinos on international cruise ships that are Canadian or in Canadian waters comes from. It may well be, upon reflection, that there is an argument to be made for this amendment that is peculiar to the circumstances that Quebec City finds itself in with regard to international cruise ships and Canadian cruise ships.
I was grateful to the member for explaining the value that the province of Quebec and Quebec City sees in this particular amendment.
Having said that, I will concentrate on the provision that permits dice games conducted and managed by a province. I speak to this because I share the concern of a lot of Canadians and certainly my colleagues in the New Democratic Party, and presumably members in other caucuses as well, that all parties, wherever they have been in government, whether they be federal or provincial, over the last 10 to 15 years have succumbed in one way or another or are in the process of succumbing to the gambling game, to a form of gambling addiction which is not just to be found in those individuals who are addicted to gambling, but is to be found in governments that are addicted to the revenue from gambling.
This is a problem that crosses party lines. I do not rise in my place here to pretend that any one particular political party is somehow exempt from criticism in this regard. It is simply to register my own concern and the concern of my colleagues and, as I said, I would hope colleagues from other parties that as a country we are becoming a nation of casinos.
I have a casino in my own riding called Club Regent. If someone had asked me 10 years ago whether I would have ever thought that driving between my home and my constituency office I would have to pass a casino every day I would have said they were crazy, that it would never happen. Yet today that is the case.
I am sure a lot of my constituents are happy that it is there. It is a good location for them. People enjoy going there and there are people, many of whom I know as they are good friends, who seem to be able to go to the casino, not spend all that much money and just enjoy themselves. They have some kind of internal limit on what they spend and when it is done they are gone. Sometimes they win, sometimes they lose, but it is not destructive.
However, the fact is that for a lot of Canadians it is destructive. It is destructive of their economic and personal lives. I cannot help but think that in the end it is destructive of our collective well-being to have governments dependent in the way they have become on revenue from gambling, dependent so much so that they are always looking for opportunities to expand this revenue base.
Where can they build another casino? Can they add a hotel that would attract more business from outside the city, outside the province or outside the country? What can they do to induce more Canadians and more non-Canadians to come to Canada to gamble?
I do not know about other members, but when I grew up gambling was something that happened in Las Vegas. Gambling was something that happened in back rooms, with guys playing poker. It was frowned upon. It seemed to be something on the seedy side of life.
The provinces have taken this particular phenomena which was regarded in that way in the past and have elevated it to a major component of our fiscal and social life. I think that is a mistake. I think a lot of Canadians think it is a mistake. I think it is a mistake whether it is done by an NDP government, a Liberal government, a Conservative government, a Péquistes government or, God forbid, a Reform government.
I just wanted to put that concern on the record. It is certainly something that comes not just out of my own political tradition. In spite of the actions of particular NDP governments, there was certainly a long tradition of opposition to gambling in the CCF and in the NDP. I think it comes out of the social gospel. It comes out of the Protestant churches. My own church, the United Church of Canada, is still resolutely opposed to any form of gambling.
I think we are at the point where we need to do some rethinking of this collective addiction to gambling, rather than expanding upon it, which is basically what Bill C-51 does. Up until this point we have not allowed people to participate in throwing the dice. We saw a bit of throwing the dice when it came to constitutional matters back in 1992 or whenever it was when the former prime minister said he was throwing the dice, but I digress because I am quite serious about this.
I think to expand the parameters of gambling in Canada at this time is a serious mistake. We know that gambling disproportionately disadvantages the poor. We know that in many ways it is a tax on the poor. I feel that instead of looking to gambling for more revenues, instead of looking to a way of raising money that disproportionately disadvantages low income people, we should be looking to a real reform of our tax system which gives meaningful income tax breaks to Canadians of low income and looking at ways in which we could make those who have, and have much, contribute more to the general well-being.
At the moment we have a tax system which basically subsidizes those who have. If people have enough money to put $10,000 or $15,000 into RRSPs, if they can max out on their RRSP limit, the Government of Canada is subsidizing their pensions at the same time as it is saying to a lot of low income Canadians that they are going to have to get by on less and less. There will be no significant increases in CPP or OAS. But when it comes to subsidizing the retirement incomes of those who are affluent enough to max out on their RRSPs there seems to be no limit. I suppose this is some perverse fulfilment of the biblical saying that for those who have, much more will be added, and to those who have little, they will have even less. I am paraphrasing, but members know the teaching I am talking about.
I do not think we ought to see that fulfilled in the way that we have through the tax system we have now. So I make that point, but fundamentally I wanted to make the point that I think somewhere in the eighties we took a wrong turn. Government by government and province by province we conceded in the eighties, and the nineties, but it started in the eighties. Actually it started before that, in the late seventies with lotteries, but it progressed.
We can argue about when it started, but the fact of the matter is that somewhere along the line I think we made a serious wrong turn. I would hope that some day we might see the wisdom of seeking genuine alternatives to gambling in terms of raising revenue and return to a time when there was either none or a whole lot less government sanctioned gambling going on than there is now.