Mr. Speaker, I believe this bill deserves the support of parliament in large measure. It is an omnibus bill and, by definition, an omnibus bill is a housekeeping bill and can in fact be quite tedious.
A particular provision that caught my eye with respect to this bill was the homicide and criminal negligence provision, the year and a day provision, which permits prosecution even though the victim may have survived beyond a year and a day by virtue of the advances of medical science. That makes perfect common sense. It makes all kinds of sense, given our present state.
However, may I suggest with respect to an omnibus bill that the devil is in the details. I would like to, if I may, draw the attention of the House to one of those details, namely, gaming. The apparent effect of the amendment would be to amend the criminal code with respect to international cruise ships that are exempted under certain provisions of the Criminal Code.
In addition, provincial governments under certain limited circumstances would be able to conduct and manage dice games without the heavy hand of the Criminal Code upon them. Apparently this has been a request put forward by both Ontario and Quebec.
I would like to address this addiction by all levels of governments to the business of gambling. The province where I come from, Ontario, raises something in excess of $2.4 billion of its revenues from this addiction. This translates into approximately 5% of all of the revenues of the government.
I could stand to be corrected on my numbers but that is my recollection from newspaper articles.
The governments of Canada and the Government of Ontario in particular are heavily addicted to revenue generated by way of gambling. It is certainly within my memory that this was not always a source of revenue for any government. Governments have now become dependent on their gambling fix in order to meet the ever growing demands on their treasuries.
This bill facilitates that addiction and, I would argue, is not necessarily a public policy we should encourage.
Gambling by definition is largely a recreational pursuit enjoyed by a great number of people and abused by a relatively small number of people.
There is, however, a parallel to the government addiction to revenue generated from alcohol. Alcohol is clearly enjoyed by a large number of people and abused by a small number of people. However, in the decriminalization of that activity, we have diffused the criminality associated with the consumption of alcohol from the streets of Chicago in the prohibition days to the streets of all our communities.
I dare say that if any member asked a police officer what is the greatest contributor to crime in our society, that police officer might well answer the criminality associated with the consumption of alcohol.
The effect that we intend, mainly the reduction in criminality with respect to the illegal disruption of alcohol, has been replaced with criminality of other forms, mainly drunk driving, spousal assault, et cetera.
In the decriminalization of any activities, society in general and governments in particular frequently do not calculate the bottom line, cost to the populace, while they merrily rake in the revenue from the activity. This is most readily observable in the revenues generated from alcohol and probably less observable in the revenues generated from cigarettes.
However, I would submit that the revenues that are generated from both those activities do not go back into serving the populace that has the addiction by virtue of the ready availability of those products. In other words, revenues raised in alcohol and cigarettes far exceed government expenditures for those members in society who become addicted to those products.
In a perverse way, governments become the handmaidens in the addictions of their citizens.
It is my view that governments should not be participating in creating addictions among their citizens. I would argue that there is a parallel being developed here. As governments decriminalize certain activities they create a dependency in a certain portion of the populace and that dependency is not compensated by making those revenues generated by the decriminalization available to those who are addicted.
Therefore governments in general and particularly the Government of Ontario become handmaidens in the addiction while not giving any hand with respect to the help for the addiction. This is in my view a rank form of hypocrisy and bad public policy.
Time does not permit me to give example after example of individuals and families ruined by their addictions to these social pastimes. I would further argue that the hypocrisy of government cuts out its high moral ground of leadership and in fact erodes its ability to lead the populace in directions for society which are good directions.
If I may be permitted a small illustration, prior to becoming a member of parliament I was on the board of an organization called Christian Indigenous Development Overseas. The concept was relatively simple. We lent money to micro enterprises in third worlds. We lent money to people who had no security. We lent money to the people who were the poorest of the poor. We had projects in the Philippines, in Columbia and in Jamaica, and no sensible banker would ever lend money to these folks.
Our message, however, was quite simple. If you work hard, if you are an honest person, you will succeed. When we started this project we were assisted by CIDA and by the Wild Rose Foundation of Alberta. For every dollar we raised our funds were matched somewhere in the order of three to four dollars. It was a very successful formula and widely acknowledged as a good use of resources.
However, the Wild Rose Foundation decided to generate its revenues in part from gambling activities. As a funding organization we questioned whether we could receive funding generated from gambling activities. It seemed to us that we were being hypocritical. How could we use the funds that were generated in a somewhat less than honest way from something other than hard work and then give the funds to people who were desperately in need and to whom we were giving the message work hard, be honest and you will succeed? We felt we were being hypocrites.
When the Wild Rose Foundations declined to withdraw from gambling activities we felt we had no alternative but to withdraw our request for funding.
Just as we felt we were being hypocrites, this bill puts an additional layer of hypocrisy on all governments. There has been virtually no debate with respect to the larger social policy issue. While I support the bill and will in the end vote for the bill, it is my view that the social policy issue needs to be addressed.
The addictions of governments to revenues generated from these kinds of sources versus the benefits to society affected by the decriminalization of these kinds of activities is a broad social debate and one that is ongoing.
However, I suggest that an analogous ground might well be to how corporations prepare the balance sheets. Frequently the picture of a business generally on a balance sheet is quite limited. One has assets, one has liabilities, one has income and one has expenses. What the environmental movement is teaching us is that there is more to the bottom line than what appears on a balance sheet.
I suggest that the analogy is appropriate here. There is more to the bottom line than what appears on the balance sheet. We do not know what social damage is caused by our governments' addition to these kinds of revenues.
I would argue that in gambling we do not put on to the bottom line the actual cost. We do not know what the impact of gambling is on the populace at large and the cost it has to society.
To carry the analogy further, government similarly has a balance. It has revenues and expenses. I will not get into assets and liabilities because there the analogy really breaks down because of the way governments count assets and recognize liabilities. However, we do not really know what the social costs or the welfare costs or the addiction costs are to society. It certainly only minimally impacts the bottom line of governments but it does impact us all in society. It hits society's bottom line but it does not hit governments' bottom line.
As I said, I will support this bill because there is a lot of good work in it and it tightens up areas that need to be tightened, but the whole area of gaming needs to be addressed by parliament.