Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure for me to rise today to address Bill C-37 on behalf of the New Democratic Party. I read this bill with some interest. As I went through it, it could not help but remind me a bit of my own family.
When my grandfather came to this country from Italy he was very proud of a sauce he made. As hard as he tried to pass the recipe on to his children, he would on a regular basis taste their sauce and he would say that they got a little bit of it right and a whole lot of it wrong. As I look at this bill I see that the Minister of Justice got a little bit of it right but forgot a whole lot of ingredients that might have made this bill worth supporting in the House of Commons.
Let me start with the few ingredients she got right. It is important to note there are to be some changes which will allow certain parts of the legislation to be treated as matrimonial assets that could be divisible upon separation or divorce by the judiciary. That needed to be done in the act.
It is also helpful to have a unified family court. In the province I come from many people have been very frustrated at the way the family court process works. They have to appear before provincial family court judges to deal with essentially custody, access, division of property and maintenance provisions. Then they have to appear before federal court judges to deal with the same issues. To repeat them all over again is a duplication.
Those issues, the creation of unified family courts and of justices that can deal with those matters, as well as the division of annuities and so on are some of the positive aspects of the bill.
Unfortunately the minister could have taken the opportunity to truly address the concerns Canadians have about the way judges are appointed in this country. There is some reference in the bill to a commission. I believe the bill makes a recommendation that a commission be set up. The commission would be composed of three individuals. One would be appointed by the Minister of Justice and one would be appointed by the judiciary. Then those two individuals would appoint a third member to review judges' benefits and salaries.
There was an opportunity to go further with this legislation. There was an opportunity to open up the way judges are appointed. A special committee or a subcommittee of the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights could have been set up to review different proposals to see how the judiciary might better be appointed.
Even with this minute change, it does not go far enough. The minister could have added to this commission a representative of the Canadian Bar Association. Nobody knows better the workings of the courts and the workload of judges than many of the lawyers who appear in front of them.
There is a missed opportunity here. It is a golden opportunity for the Minister of Justice to address some fundamental issues.
Some hon. members have commented on the Young Offenders Act and on young people in the courts. Young people appear before judges every day. Families appear before judges every day. Those people have to ask how the people who make such fundamental decisions on guilt or innocence, on custody or access arrived at such an important position of making such decisions on people's lives. It is unfortunate that Canada's history is a legacy of patronage appointments, appointments to the bench of people who may not have the best legal qualifications and the best legal judgment but who support the right party. There is some relief in sight.
In my province of Nova Scotia there are many Liberal lawyers who in the last few days have seen their chances for judicial appointments recede into the mist as Nova Scotians have made fundamental political changes in their province. When the New Democratic Party takes power in that province, I expect there will be a change in the method of appointing judges.
This was an opportunity to address those concerns. It was also an opportunity to look at the crisis in the justice system. If money can be found to increase the salaries of judges, surely that money could be better directed to the very system which is in crisis right now.
In many provinces in Canada crown attorneys do not have sufficient resources to prosecute the crimes that come before them. In many parts of this country legal aid lawyers do not have sufficient resources to ensure proper fundamental freedoms are met and that trials are done in a proper way. That results in injustice for all, for the accused, for the victims and for those involved in the justice system.
Rather than give those who are among the wealthiest in our society an increase of 8% or more, we could look at funnelling that money back into the provinces through the Canada health and social transfer payments. These have been cut so drastically by the government the result of which has been the very crisis in the courts which has caused the judiciary to say it is overworked.
Today we heard the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice talk about the backlog of cases in provinces like Ontario. I know she is talking about civil cases but civil cases include family cases. Many people, in particular women, cannot afford legal representation when their marriages come undone, when there are questions of custody and there are backlogs of cases.
The Nova Scotia legal aid offices have stopped representing people who are seeking divorces because they simply do not have the resources to fulfil that role. They have stopped representing people in civil cases who do not have the funds or the ability to hire private lawyers. The provincial government says it does not have the money. It has cut back on resources.
That is not just happening in Nova Scotia. When I was practising law in that province, I tried to get hold of a legal aid lawyer in Ontario and it was almost impossible to find one. When I tried to get hold of a legal aid lawyer in New Brunswick to represent a woman in a custody fight whose children had been taken, there was one family law lawyer for almost the whole province.
There is a crisis at the grassroots level in Canada's justice system. Instead of addressing that, instead of providing funding which might better address that issue, the Minister of Justice has decided to give the judges a pay increase. That is the third problem with this piece of legislation.
The legislation does not go far enough in terms of addressing the way judges are appointed. It does not address the flaws in the justice system that are creating the overburden in the courts. It does not help the crown attorneys and the defence lawyers who have to operate in the courts.
At the same time we have to look further at the other public servants who are involved in the justice system. There has not been an increase for the average cop on the beat for so long that he or she probably cannot remember. There has not been an increase for those who work in the prison system, for those who work in the probation offices with young offenders, with the people who are coming out of prisons.
There is very little money for alternate forms of punishment and alternate forms of dispute resolution in the family law areas, the civil law areas and the criminal law areas.
All of those people for the last number of years have toiled with an ever increasing workload and fewer resources and without any kind of pay increase whatsoever.
It is simply unfair to provide the judiciary with an increase of 8% when they already make well over $120,000 or $130,000. It is unfair to provide them with an increase when those who hold the system together and who do much work in the system are suffering because they have had such an increased workload and have had no increase in resources.
That is another thing which is lacking from this piece of legislation. It is another area the Minister of Justice might very well have addressed.
That is not to say that judges are not important. In fact, this government has increased the workload on many of the provincial court judges by downloading on the system, by changes to the Criminal Code, by proposed changes involving things like preliminary inquiries. The government has downloaded on to the provincial judiciary taking work away from the federally appointed judges. It has created more backlog in the provincial courts.
This is not the appropriate way to address the system. The minister had a golden opportunity. Everyone in this House who has spoken on this piece of legislation, my colleagues in every party, have called for a review of the method of the appointment of judges. That is what we are hearing from our constituents. That is what the Minister of Justice is not hearing. However, its time will come and it may come when we have another party governing on that side of the House.
With respect to a crisis in the justice system, if people do not believe that judges truly represent impartiality, then they are not going to have respect for the justice system. That leads to cynicism. It leads to a lack of faith. The minister may well say that she has no choice, that she is bound in trying to keep the independence of the judiciary, that she is bound by the Scott recommendations.
Those recommendations provided the minister with a way to not necessarily implement the recommendations. As long as she could explain that to the public, as long as there was a reason given not to implement those recommendations which was justifiable, then they did not have to be implemented. The reasons we have indicated would provide the minister with some substantial grounds and certainly with public approval had she chosen not to implement the recommendation of the increase in salary but had offered instead to overhaul the entire Judges Act, to open it up to the standing committee on justice for a proper review and to make fundamental recommendations and fundamental changes.
For those reasons we will not be supporting the legislation. It is too bad the opportunity has been squandered but we look forward to better days ahead.