Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise today to speak to Bill C-40. It is noble to modernize the Extradition Act and in fact is long overdue.
Canada's current policies are outdated, slow and complex. As a consequence we have members of genocidal regimes, killers and illegals by the thousands in Canada living off Canadian society. We do not know how many or where they are. Maybe Bill C-40 will not be of much use until we devise a more efficient screening and monitoring system for illegal refugees in Canada.
Reform supports extraditing these individuals to face international criminal courts like Rwanda and Yugoslavia war crimes tribunals. We believe in justice. These tribunals and the concept of an international court with independent powers to prosecute war criminals is a 50 year dream and is laudable. The process to establish such a court has been a very difficult road. Canada can take some solace in knowing that it has played such a pivotal role in getting members to the table in the last minute negotiations and in the hesitancy of some.
The new international criminal court will have power to investigate, prosecute, indict and try persons for the most serious crimes of international concern, including genocide, crimes against humanity and crimes of aggression.
Canada is one of the 119 signatories to this historic event. By the Canadian government's own admission Canada has been a refuge for war criminals and former members of genocidal regimes. Due to our ineffectual immigration screening, removal and enforcement system the problem is out of hand. Now at least if we can find these illegals we have somewhere to send them.
The solicitor general keeps promising a crackdown on Canadian organizations that are fronts for foreign terrorists. He says that this is a serious problem. The auditor general agrees and says that Canada has been negligent in dealing with it. We all respect what the auditor general says because it is his group that is independent and tells us what is going on in the government of the day, no matter who it is.
It is not comforting to hear the solicitor general say that Canada had become a haven for every known terrorist group in the world. It is a sobering thought and it is about time we did something about it. I repeat that because it is not too often the solicitor general of any government would say that. He said that Canada had become a haven for every known terrorist group in the world. The bill is a small part of solving some of that problem.
We not only have terrorists groups in Canada. We have some 324 modern day war criminals and another 62 suspected war criminals in Canada. Those are the ones we know about. We have among us death squad members, torturers, individuals accused of genocide and officials from corrupt regimes in Somalia, Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Haiti, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Rwanda and El Salvador, a virtual cornucopia of the world's worst.
That is a pathetic statement about the pathetic immigration system in Canada. We would not be here today debating Bill C-40 if we had an immigration system that really worked. Our immigration system has played the refugee game with these individuals for too long. War criminals are not refugees just because they arrive at the border and say that they are refugees. They are war criminals and we have to take a very tough stand on that issue.
Bill C-40 changes a 120 year old law. There are not too many members who will ever get to debate a bill that old in the House. The present statute allows Canada to extradite criminal suspects to other countries but not to the tribunal set up by the United Nations to prosecute war criminals from the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.
Bill C-40 will now allow Canada to send suspects to a permanent international court. For years Canada pressed for such courts but ironically our law would not allow us to extradite the suspects.
Bill C-40 will modernize extradition proceedings by allowing extradition to face international criminal court like Rwanda and Yugoslavia war crimes tribunals, by broadening the grounds for extradition but removing the list of indictable offences and replacing it with the requirements that the conduct be an offence in both countries, and by permitting the temporary surrender of a convict who is serving time in Canada to another state to face trial there. Is it not interesting that they use the phrase “the temporary surrender of a convict who is serving time” to somewhere else to face a trial there? I will discuss that later.
Bill C-40 will modernize extradition proceedings by permitting the use of video and audio technology to conduct hearings. It is nice to know we are getting into the modern age. It will link the extradition and refugee appeals process where a person has sought to avoid extradition by claiming to be a refugee. The law had to be changed to save Canada from the embarrassment it is facing on this issue.
The Reform Party is not without its reservations regarding some elements of Bill C-40 despite what it purports to do. Bill C-40 is meant to streamline the extradition process by rolling two existing bills, the Fugitive Offenders Act of 1882 and the Extradition Act of 1877, into one bill.
Will the system be less complex? We do not know that. These two old bills have not worked and now we have one new bill. Will it be less complex? Will it allow Canadians to know that the people arrested for these offences can be extradited, tried somewhere else and removed from Canada in a very expeditious manner?
The clause in Bill C-40 which would effectively broaden the grounds for extradition by abandoning what is known as the list approach to offences is a welcome change. The current system, which only allows for extradition of the criminal when the act is part of an official list, is outdated and cumbersome. The list of offences varies from country to country.
Under Bill C-40 an extraditable offence will be a crime in both countries. This will not just happen. I sense a lot of co-ordination will have to take place to get the system working properly.
Bill C-40 will ease the rules that dictate the sort of evidence that must be presented by a nation seeking the extradition of an alleged offender. Canada has been criticized in the past for its narrow approach to what can be used as evidence. This is new territory. In fact it is a quantum change. I suspect much preparatory work will have to be done.
Bill C-40 will allow the flexibility to deal on a case by case basis with extradition requests where no treaty is in place.
Getting back to the two war crimes tribunals established in The Hague and in Tanzania, this is the first time in 50 years since Nuremberg that the world community has acted to create an international jurisdiction to hold individuals responsible for international crimes.
In the Rwanda situation alone 32 people indicted by the tribunal are facing charges for the slaughter of an estimated 800,000 people during a three month rampage in 1994.
As I said before, there are some concerns with the bill. Bill C-40, despite removing many layers of appeals in the extradition process, involved courts to minister, to refugee board, back to minister and then back to court. It would be naive to believe that Bill C-40 makes extradition immediate.
Delays have always favoured the accused because witnesses die. The supreme court in the Askov case asked that trials be held within a six month period to ensure that justice be done. That does not happen very often. Six months is a very short period of time for most of these cases. As Justice Gibson of the federal court ruled, Canada cannot deport people without a fair and just assessment of whether they would face the risk of torture if returned.
What this means to me is court challenges and charter defences right up to the supreme court. Bill C-40 will be tested. Is it watertight? We have to produce bills in the House that can meet the test of the supreme court. We cannot be using the supreme court as a judge of what the people who were elected to govern Canada should be doing. I am afraid the bill does not meet that test. The supreme court may have asked for hearings within a six month period, but as we all know extradition routinely takes many years.
Let me talk about charter appeals and provide four examples of delay and why I am fearful Bill C-40 will not conclude this charter madness. Charter appeals on the grounds of cruel and unusual punishment allow multiple appeals as highlighted by the following: Rafay and Burns. Murder was committed in 1994 by this pair. The case will be heard in the supreme court in November. The B.C. Court of Appeal found that the minister had to refuse extradition because they faced execution for bludgeoning Rafay's parents to death.
Pierino and Miachael Divito are Mafia figures wanted in the U.S. for conspiracy to import 300 kilos of cocaine. It goes to court because of a much harsher drug sentence handed out in the U.S. Their lawyers vow that they will go all the way to the supreme court. Why are they going to the Supreme Court? They do not want to be tried in the United States because they will go to jail for a long time. They want to stay in Canada. Does this law solve that problem? I do not think it does.
Salavatore Cazzetta, leader of the Rock Machine biker gang, wanted in the U.S. for drug trafficking charges, was delayed extradition for four years with arguments taken all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada.
Michael Gwynne, a fugitive serving a 120 year sentence, was apprehended in 1993. He has argued his case for five years all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada. In short, Bill C-40 does nothing to preclude these types of appeals.
I would like to read from a July 29, 1997 article by Jeffrey Simpson in the Globe and Mail . It has to do with the Rafay case and what he calls charter madness. I believe this article represents what an overwhelming majority of Canadians think. He wrote:
On July 12, 1994, the parents of Atif Rafay were bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat at their home in Bellevue, Wash. Local police suspected the murderers were Atif Rafay and a friend, Glen Burns. Lacking enough evidence, however, the police asked for and received undercover co-operation from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, since the two suspects lived in Canada and were Canadian citizens.
Courtesy of the undercover operation, Atif and Glen admitted they had killed Mr. Rafay's parents for life insurance and the value of the parents' home. These admissions were voluntary.
Case closed. But hold on. We live in the Age of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which gives the ruling of judges greater impact on criminal law than anything done by a mere minister of justice or group of parliamentarians.
Now, in the Rafay-Burns case, the B.C. Court of Appeal relied on the Charter to block the extradition of the two men wanted for murder in the United States.
Why? It was because Canada had abolished the death penalty. He continued:
Were the two men found guilty in Washington and put to death, as that state's laws allow, then their charter rights would be violated, including the one that any Canadian citizen is allowed to return home.
Canada, of course, always waxes indignant when the United States or any other country tries to impose its laws on others. Nothing gets Canadians to sit more upright on their white charger of morality than denouncing the “extraterritorial” application of U.S. laws. But if Canadian laws, as in this charter case, are being applied in an extraterritorial sense, that is, our charter must protect even those accused of first degree murder, then everything is fine because we just have to believe our sense of justice is superior to that of the Americans.
If these had been U.S. citizens, the extraditions would have proceeded.
But because the two are Canadians and therefore entitled, in the opinion of the court, to the full protection of the charter wherever they are, including for acts possibly committed in another country, they cannot be extradited.
This is charter madness, of which plenty is going around. When foreigners travel in this country, they obey Canadian laws and pay the penalty if they break them. They may not like our penalties, they may think their system of justice back home is superior, but that's one of the risks people take when travelling, let alone committing first degree murder.
Similarly, when Canadians are on U.S. soil, U.S. laws apply. If we break those laws and flee back across the border to escape punishment, an extradition treaty properly clicks into place so that Canada is not a “safe haven” for criminals of whatever nationality, Canadian or otherwise. That we might not favour capital punishment (and I don't) doesn't mean we impose our sense of what is right for Canadian citizens accused of first degree murder somewhere where the death penalty applies. But of course, in the age of the charter, this sort of common sense, community protecting sort of reasoning is out the window of judicial policy making.
That story alone should let us know there is a serious problem.
I have heard debates in this House over the last couple of weeks that sometimes members on this side do not listen to what the public wants. There is a quote on the gun control bill, why do you not listen to what the public wants. In this case, 85% of Canadians would vote for capital punishment if there was a referendum.
Yet we have two young people who murdered one of the fellow's parents in a terrible crime and should have to face that penalty. But here they are sitting in a Canadian jail at Canadian expense just because of where they were born.
None of us would respect that. None of us expect that we can run across the border, rob a bank and head back home because perhaps our laws are better. That is what is happening with our laws in this country. That is why we are becoming one of the biggest import-export areas for drugs in the world. Our sentences are too weak and one cannot be extradited if caught.
This bill is not going solve those problems. We are going to have a lot of interesting times in committee asking questions of those who drafted this bill to see if it really gets to where it has to get. The people in the House right here get to make the laws, not those people sitting a couple of blocks away in the supreme court.
I have another objection to Bill C-40. The bill preserves the minister's discretion in cases. This is part of the delay problem. It injects the minister into a judicial process. It is wrong and we will not support that aspect of the bill. This should not be the minister's role. This is a judicial role, an independent role.
We cannot have any tinge of political interference when it comes to extradition for criminal offences. The minister should have no discretion to seek assurances on sentences, period. What it does is it imposes standards which necessarily vary from one minister to the next, or from one country to the next.
The role of the court should be simple in these extradition cases. The conduct complained of is a crime in Canada, a very simple rule. The person sought is in fact the person accused. Again it is very simple. There is a valid extradition treaty. The bottom line is that the severity of the punishment in the other country should be irrelevant.
I have another concern. Extradition is costly. I have some questions about the mechanics and the logistics of Bill C-40. We have called a number of government departments and have read the bill very thoroughly ourselves. These questions are not answered in the bill.
Who pays for the transportation of a criminal to the War Crimes Tribunal or the International Court? Who pays any related costs? Who pays for legal counsel for the accused in charter cases? And we know they are all going to go to the max, to the supreme court. Who pays for the legal defence before the tribunal? It had better not be Canada that is on the hook. Why should we pay to get rid of someone wanted by someone else?
It is not unlike the process right now. When someone comes to this country and says the word refugee at the border, we accept them. We pay their health costs and their legal costs, all the way for every court they go to. We know the majority of these people are just trying to jump the queue which is not acceptable to most Canadians. To an overwhelming majority of Canadians that is just not acceptable.
Bill C-40 may improve some things but it is not perfect. We will be exploring many more details of this bill in the committee and seeking answers to the questions I posed in my opening remarks today.
We look forward to working with members on this side and the other side in the committee to get, after 120 years sitting on the books of Canada, a bill that will work, that will please Canadians and a bill in which the will of Canadians cannot be changed by a small number of people up the street from the House of Commons. We want to make sure this bill is airtight so that it does the job and works for all Canadians.