Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to speak to this bill. We have spent a fair bit of time on it in committee and also had the pleasure of moving a number of amendments. The one my colleague just talked about was moved by the Reform Party to make this a better bill.
Extradition is vital to the justice system. Canadians must not be allowed to escape trial by fleeing to other countries. Canada must not be a haven for persons wanted for criminal action in other countries. The process must be fair and expeditious.
Changes in the legislation that advance these goals are welcome. They include the broadening of grounds for extradition by simply requiring that the conduct be a serious crime in both countries, permitting the use of video and audio technology for hearings, linking the refugee and extradition processes to determine faster whether the refugee claim is legitimate or bogus.
With regard to war crimes, the changes are long overdue. The United Nations established a Rwanda genocide tribunal in 1994 and the Yugoslavia war crimes tribunal in 1993. The international criminal court is the new body to be created with an unclear mandate.
Canada, along with 119 other countries signed a treaty that will bring into force an international criminal court with the power to investigate, prosecute and indict and try persons for the most serious crimes of international concern, including genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and crimes of aggression.
It is clearly an international criminal court or tribunal with a definition of state or entity. Therefore extradition will be allowed. The treaty may be sound, although the United States has refused to sign. It should have been the subject of public hearings and a better debate in this parliament.
Much of the problem with the existing law is the layers of appeals: courts, to minister, to refugee board, back to the minister, and back to the courts. Delay is an advantage to the accused. They know witnesses will die or their memories will become less clear. This bill has done very little to speed up this process of delay by going back and forth.
That is why the supreme court insists under Askov that trials be held expeditiously. It suggested that six months was a reasonable standard, yet extradition proceedings routinely take many years. This bill does nothing to address the two main problems, charter appeals and ministerial discretion.
Charter appeals on the grounds of cruel and unusual punishment allow for multiple appeals. In the second reading debate, I read a number of them. There is a file six inches thick of the appeals that have taken too long. The charter appeals in the supreme court have taken too long. They do not do justice to those of us in Canada and those of us who were seeking to extradite.
There is the Rafay and Burns case in British Columbia. A murder was committed in 1994. The case will be heard by the supreme court in November in Ottawa. The B.C. Court of Appeal found the minister had to refuse extradition because they faced execution for bludgeoning Rafay's parents to death. It should not be a question in this country whether we send them back or not.
Pierino and Michael Divito, Mafia figures, are wanted in the U.S.A. for conspiracy to import 300 kilos of cocaine. It goes to court because of much harsher drug sentences handed out in the U.S. The lawyer vows it will go all the way to the Supreme Court. They do not want to be sentenced in the United States. They want to be sentenced here because for their drug crimes they might get five years in Canada and they would probably get life in the United States because they are organized crime figures. They are part of the Mafia. Here in Canada we will treat them nicely and tell them they can get out after one-sixth of their sentence is served, one-third under a new bill which has passed.
Salvatore Cazzetta, leader of the Rock Machine biker gang is wanted in the U.S. on drug trafficking charges. His extradition has been delayed for four years with arguments taken all the way to the supreme court.
Michael Gwynne, a fugitive serving a 120 year sentence, was apprehended in 1993. He argued his case for five years all the way to the supreme court.
This bill does nothing to stop those kinds of appeals I have just mentioned.
The bill preserves the discretion of the minister which is part of the delay problem and injects the minister into the judicial process. The minister should have no discretion to seek assurances on sentence. She is trying to impose standards which necessarily vary from one minister to the next and in another country. We would not accept such interference in our judicial system. Jeffrey Simpson wrote a very good column in the Globe called “Charter Madness” on this issue.
The role of the court should be simple. Determine whether the conduct complained of is a crime in Canada. Protect us against dictators like Suharto trying to extradite democracy supporters. Determine that the person sought is in fact the person accused. Is he Ivan the Terrible? Make sure there is a valid treaty. The severity of the punishment in another country should be irrelevant to this bill, but the government is not prepared to change that.
We had a rigorous examination of this bill before committee. Witnesses expressed concerns with many sections of the bill. One of the more direct assertions of the concerns with this bill came from the Criminal Trial Lawyers Association. During second reading debate the Reform Party and I pointed out our concern with ministerial involvement in the extradition process.
On the one hand Canada enters into a noble and long overdue process to deal with extraditable individuals, like members of genocidal regimes, and we enter into an agreement with 119 signatories to set up international criminal courts, like those for Rwanda and Yugoslavia, which suggests a judicial process. On the other hand we allow the Minister of Justice to intercede and intervene in the process.
The Reform Party tried by way of amendments in committee to have clauses 3, 12, 15 and 16 changed to ensure an extraditable individual was actually extradited from Canada. We wanted “may be extradited” changed to “shall be extradited” to ensure the minister could not intercede. We were not successful. That remains our major overriding concern. We cannot support a bill that allows the minister discretion.
All the minister should be doing is receiving the extradition order and allowing the process to kick in. The minister should have no discretion. It would have been gratifying to have clause 38 of the bill simply read that the minister was to receive a copy of the order, period.
The Reform Party is not pleased with clauses 40, 41, 42 and 43 of Bill C-40. We would have preferred, as we said in committee and moved amendments in that regard, to have the minister removed from the process.
In principle, the bill remains the same and we cannot support this intent. It insinuates a political nuance on a bill when we should be trying to make a strictly judicial matter. Clauses 44, 45, 46, 47 and 48 are important safeguards in the bill, but they should not be exercised by the minister.
We were unsuccessful in committee in getting the changes we felt were required. However, we inserted some additional wording in clause 44 to ensure all safeguards possible were evident. We moved that the clause be amended to include “nationality, ethnic origin, language, colour, political opinion, sex, sexual orientation, age, mental or physical disability or status”.
We put that amendment to the bill. It affects people's rights under the charter. We were amazed that in drafting the bill the government missed that. We got it with help from our research division and the criminal lawyers who helped us put some amendments to the bill.
Seven Reform amendments were accepted by the committee. It is wonderful we were on guard to do this. If we had not, this bill would probably be challenged in a number of areas in the Supreme Court of Canada, which would cost the Canadian taxpayer a lot of extra money. Most of the amendments we put were to deal with the charter and with where this bill would go. The bill was not drafted properly. By accepting the Reform amendments to this bill, that was admitted by the government people who drafted it.
We cannot support Bill C-40 as long as such clauses as clause 44(2) remain. What the punishment is in another country should be of no concern to us in Canada. It is the right of each country to say whether a crime is punishable by death. We should not be precluding extradition based on that. The Reform Party has grave concerns with clause 46 which has been called the Mandela clause.
We have had a good debate and a good committee on this bill. We won on seven of the amendments. The opposition is doing a good job for the people of Canada.
We will vote against this bill because we did not get all the things we wanted and to show protest in the area of separating the minister from the judicial section. We do not want to unduly delay voting on this bill so we can get a new extradition act in Canada. It is probably one of the longest bills on the record. It is one of two bills that we have been working with with for over 100 years. It is certainly time they were updated. We are very pleased to have made some amendments to this bill that will be good for all Canadians.