Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise in support of this bill. I too would like to talk about some of the issues mentioned by the member who just finished speaking.
I find it interesting how much time we spend in this place debating justice issues and crime issues. It is particularly true since the emergence of the Reform Party and its attempts to overdramatize and frankly to frighten the Canadian public and people visiting this country, when Canada is by and large a safe place to live, a safe place to work and raise a family and a safe place to visit.
I would like to reassure people that our justice system, with some of its faults, is a fine system. It does provide proper justice to criminals. It does provide safety and security for families. When there are tragedies and victims are involved, there is a mechanism in place that will respond to those tragedies.
I also say to visitors, to people like Stafford and Lesley Woods who just arrived today from Europe that their stay in Canada, even though it will be with me, will be reasonably safe. They need not worry that they have landed in a country that the Reform Party would have them think is fraught with criminals, with organized crime, with gangs running around, with rape and pillaging taking place. That is simply not the reality experienced in this country.
I was also particularly interested in the comments by the member from the Reform Party who said that we should somehow take the politics out of these debates, to paraphrase those remarks. Yet in the year and a bit I have been in this place I have seen no one here who plays politics more with justice issues, more with crime and more in a tragic sense with victims of crime than members of the Reform Party.
It is interesting to hear them say how they would support some form of safe gun legislation or gun registry, yet they have been opposed to what some 80% of Canadians have supported, which is a gun control law that does make our streets safer.
Last week or the week before we dealt with the DNA bill which will provide a system of enhanced enforcement and control for police right across the country. It is a bill that police chiefs and police associations have supported in large number. The police believe and know—and my colleague from Waterloo who I believe served on the police commission would tell us—that a system of registering DNA in a proper data bank will assist them in doing their job. Yet that was opposed and members of the Reform Party played politics on that legislation.
Members stand up and say that we should not be on a witch hunt, yet I see nothing but witch hunts in this place. It has got to the point that you have to check underneath the cubicle door in the washroom to make sure no one is sitting there with his feet up and a notepad trying to catch something someone might say that could be raised as a point of privilege in an attempt to embarrass someone who might have been having a private conversation. It appears there is no safe place where we do not find members of the opposition lurking about attempting to catch and trick members of the government, to fabricate and come forward with a horrendous scandal.
It is scandal envy. Members opposite see what President Clinton is going through. They see the feeding frenzy of the media in the United States and the games played by members of the Republican Party in coming forward in the impeachment process. They ask “Why can we not have that much fun? Why not make up a scandal and get somebody? We can write down some notes, put a glass up to the office wall to see what we might hear. Imagine the fun we could have”.
All this is done instead of getting on with the business of running the country. This is done instead of dealing with issues of serious economic impact, such as the Asian crisis and the problems our finance minister was dealing with in Washington. We do not have questions about those issues. There has not been one question from the opposition dealing with the seriousness of the IMF situation, the stock markets around the world, and the Japan crisis. What do we have? Members say that we should not be playing politics.
It is more than just a joke, it is quite sad. Because in essence when we get a bill like this bill, which I agree is an omnibus bill that requires looking at a number of different amendments to legislation, members opposite want to play politics instead of dealing with the substantive issues.
I want to talk about the gambling issue. The member from the New Democratic Party had the unmitigated gall to cast aspersions around the country when the slippery slope of casino gambling was started by Premier Bob Rae in the province of Ontario and was exacerbated by this New Democratic Party premier. He put the entire economic future of the province of Ontario into the hands of gambling.
The casino in Windsor generates hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue. Casino Rama is doing the same thing. There is also the casino of casinos in Niagara Falls. Can we close them? Can we say to those communities “Sorry ladies and gentlemen, we have to take all the jobs away”. The slippery slope was started by the New Democrats and they should at least have the courage and the moral fortitude to admit it.
People in Windsor look across the Detroit River and see a city of several million people about to embark on the construction and opening of three, count them, three mega casino projects. What will those casinos do to the casino in Windsor? It has a serious problem in competing with them.
The rolling of the dice referred to in the bill that often colloquially is called craps is not allowed in our country currently. This bill will at least give Casino Windsor and the one in Niagara which are across the border from major U.S. metropolises that will be in the casino business, the opportunity to survive.
What is our option? It is tragic, because what has really happened here is that provincial governments, and Ontario being the mother of all provincial governments in size and in economic impact in this country, now rely on the revenues from gambling. In fact, with the cutbacks and the changes, Mike Harris has now closed all the charity casinos in the province of Ontario.
Imagine that. The little charity casinos. Hockey organizations, scouting movements, volunteer groups from all across the country and certainly in my community in Mississauga relied on those charity casinos. What damage were they doing? The provincial government came along and said “They are unregulated. They are out of control. The charities are not making enough money so we are going to embark on a process to build 44 new casinos in the province of Ontario”.
The provincial government called for proposals. Proponents submitted proposals and spent millions of dollars. Then without any thought to the impact of having closed all the charity casinos, it said to the volunteers and the charities “You can no longer earn money from this endeavour”. The United Way, all kinds of groups who rely on them are now before municipal councils saying “What do we do now? Give us a bingo licence. Give us some lifeblood. Give us some opportunity to survive”.
Mike Harris and the Conservative government following in the footsteps of the creators of the great casino migration in the province of Ontario, the New Democrats, have banned the charity casinos and cancelled the RFP for the 44 casinos that were going to open. The charities would have been able at least to apply to the Trillium Foundation for some of their revenue but the province told those charities to find some other way to survive. What are their options? Quite clearly they have to look inward. They have to look to their membership. Only so many bake sales and garage sales can be held in an attempt to raise that lost revenue.
There is enough shame to go around at least in the province of Ontario on the issue of casinos. But we now have no choice. Whether a member is in opposition, whether it was that member's party that brought this in or whether it was the government, we have to ensure that these establishments survive. They have become huge generators of economic wealth on which the provinces now rely for health care, for social care and even for education because of the amount of money that is going into them. Therefore, welcome to crap city. That is what we are dealing with in this country because the casino phenomenon will indeed expand.
Another part of the bill which I think the opposition has failed to recognize as being critical is what it will do in the area of domestic violence. One of the changes in this omnibus bill deals with something we identified through working with the province which is that those who are arrested as a result of domestic violence often try to contact the victims. We all know this.
Having been in politics for almost 20 years, I and I know many other people in this place deal with battered women, with families who have suffered through domestic violence and know from experience that the perpetrators, the people who have been charged, try to contact the victims in domestic violence cases. Why do they do that? It is because they want to change the victim's mind. Or maybe they get their lawyer to offer some kind of deal or do some kind of plea so that the woman will back off. Most of the time it is the woman who is suffering from this violence.
This bill says that cannot be done any more. This bill says that they cannot contact the individual they are charged with battering. A lawyer cannot be sent as some kind of missionary to convince the battered or abused individual, often a wife, a girlfriend or a common law wife. They can no longer interfere.
Why is that important? I spent nine and a half years as a member of regional council and city council in the region of Peel and Mississauga. We administered social services during that time and still do. My wife is currently a member of that council. We dealt at the ground level with the results. We saw the women, in most cases women, with black eyes and broken bones as a result of domestic violence.
In addition to the tragedy of domestic violence all too often we see that women will back off, either through coercion, fear for their children or their own personal safety. They refuse to proceed. It is a scourge on society that we should not tolerate as parliamentarians, as city, local and regional councillors, as MPPs or MLAs. We must attack domestic violence and eliminate it from society as much as we possibly can.
If Bill C-51 is worth supporting for one reason and for one reason only, it is this aspect of the bill. To vote against the bill will mean this change will not occur.
I ask members opposite to stop playing the games I hear going on in this place and to look at the benefits of the bill and how it will assist the broad base of society. It will improve the justice system in relationship to domestic violence. It will say to the perpetrators, as I said before, that they cannot contact the victims or through some surreptitious manner have their lawyers do it.
Hopefully this will help social workers and people who deal with the victims of domestic violence to shore them up and give them the courage they need to go forward so that a conviction can take place and we do something about ending domestic violence.
That is not the only reason to support the bill. I suggest there are many others. There is the issue surrounding child prostitution. As well, the bill will benefit police enforcement. Why? Because it will permit police to use electronic surveillance to determine if a person has sought some kind of sexual favour from a minor. They can use that evidence to obtain a conviction. It is critically important and does not exist now. The bill will allow that to take place.
Members opposite might ask for a clause that toughens the punishment. The government has done that in other areas. This bill like all bills cannot be a panacea for all concerns in the justice system. We should not expect Bill C-51 to solve every problem.
No one in the House on either side, in any party, condones any kind of sexual offence against children. To suggest otherwise is playing politics. That brings me back to a private member's bill that we dealt with in this place earlier in the week, Bill C-284. There was an attempt to play politics with the issues surrounding amendments to the Criminal Records Act, the CRA, that deal with publishing the records of those who have been convicted of some form of sexual offence against a minor and are pardoned.
The solicitor general already has the discretion to disclose pardon records to bona fide organizations. Who are those organizations?
There are numerous examples of convicted people who have been paroled, finished their sentence or pardoned. I do not know of any who have been pardoned after being convicted of sexually abusing a minor, but certainly they complete their sentences and wind up at some point back in the community.
There are numerous examples of names being published, of photographs being published and of the communities in which they are to live being warned that these individuals are back. However it has been done appropriately. It has been done through the police force to ensure there is no abuse of anyone's rights.
That is one of the greatest things about this safe country of Canada, the country I welcomed Stafford and Lesley Woods to, the country I welcomed people from all over the world to. We are a safe country. We have a parliamentary democracy that allows us to put in place laws that will protect women and children, in fact our entire society.
The bill should be supported unanimously for many reasons, a couple of which I have outlined today.