Madam Speaker, it is a privilege for me to enter the debate on this Bloc motion to delete from the proposed bill clause 5. I will be supporting this motion.
I want to address a couple of the points made by one of my Liberal colleagues opposite. She made the point that we want judicial independence so that it stands clear and will interpret and apply the law in the way that the legislators of this country both federal and provincial intended it to be enforced.
I could not agree more. I think we all agree on the independence of the judiciary. I think we want to commend those people. I think we want to recognize them for what they are. In order for them to do that and to have the kind of respect we want them to enjoy, they must be competent and able and must demonstrate solid judgment.
A lot of judges fit into that category. Not all of them do. But the important thing to recognize is that we want competence. We want to trust our judges. We want to depend on them. We want them to interpret the law as it ought to be interpreted. Where we have difficulty is when judges decide that what they think about the law is more important than what the House thinks the law is to be. We have difficulty when judges think they can write the law for Canadians, when they can reinterpret what the House of Commons said and when they can tell the House of Commons this is what we should be doing.
That is when the judges have stepped outside their independence. They have now taken over a position they had no business taking over. Let us never forget that a judge is a servant of the people to preserve the justice of the nation, to ensure the laws are applied fairly and with the intention and the spirit within which legislation was passed. Judges should not tamper with the sacred right of the people and the responsibility the people have given to them to represent their interests, to make sure the safety and the justice of the people are preserved. That is a point we must underline.
This raises the point of how a judge is appointed. The process of appointing a judge in Canada today leaves a lot to be desired. We want to appoint people who have demonstrated that they can be wise in their judgement, who have the courage to take on very difficult situations and ensure the principles of justice, fairness and righteousness apply in the administration of that justice. To do that means we have to step completely outside of patronage appointments. We must have a process that guarantees that. Unfortunately the process we have today does not guarantee this kind of independence. How can we expect to have an independent judiciary if the process itself is not one that guarantees or at least has the potential of bringing forward those people who are competent and who have demonstrated they can be trusted?
That bring us into the actual provision of this motion, the elimination of clause 5, which means to give to the judges a retroactive pay raise of 4.1% and another in the year following of 4.1%, a total of about 8.3% from the salary base from which they have come today.
My concern is not that judges are going to get a raise. They deserve to be adequately compensated. But it has to take place in the context of what else is happening in our society.
I draw attention to the context within which this proposal is being brought forward. My hon. colleague has just talked about the RCMP having received a pittance. Perhaps it is a pittance but it is what it is. Let me refresh our memories as to what it is. On March 27, 1998 RCMP officers secured a pay raise of 2% retroactive to January 1998. They received a second increment on April 1 of another 1% and an additional .75% in October 1998. That is not exactly a pittance but it does not even come close to what is being proposed for the judges.
Let us look at what the officers do for us. They are the ones who are at the front line, who are there to detect the criminal and try to find out who committed the crime and to do what is necessary to bring that criminal to justice. Those officers did not get the kind of raise they deserve. If they did, the judges should receive something similar.
More important is a totally different issue. The government has decided in Bill C-3 to deny the police officers who are to enforce the law one of the basic fundamental tools in order to detect who actually committed the crime, to make sure the identification is accurate. We are talking about DNA samples. They ought to be given that kind of authority, the tool that allows them to unequivocally determine who was at the scene of the crime. That is one area of the context, but there is another one.
Recently the Minister of Justice provided a fund of $32 million for crime prevention. It is a wonderful, noble idea to prevent crime. It is excellent. But what happened? Did any municipality, any province receive any additional fund so that it could apply and get the people out there to enforce the law? No. Should we prevent crime as much as possible? Yes we should, but we are not enforcing the law as well as we could and the police are not able to do their job simply because in many instances there are not enough of them.
Let me tell the House why there are not enough of them. Even if we could use all the RCMP officers for crime detection, that would be one thing, but the government in its wisdom passed Bill C-68 which establishes a firearm registration. Who has to administer the registration of all these firearms? The police.
Is that their primary function? Will that help them detect crime? Will that help them to make our society safer? Will that help them to bring to justice the people who have killed others, who have committed violent crimes?
It is not a small amount of money, $133.7 million per year estimated by the director of the new firearms registration unit. Where is the logic in all this? That is our context.
We can go one step further. We can go to the Young Offenders Act. We have been told for almost two years now there will be new legislation. What did we get? A proposal. Put that in context. It begins to look a little strange.
We have the RCMP officers getting a raise. We have civil servants getting a raise. We have other people in our private sector getting a raise. None of them are getting a raise anywhere close to what is being proposed for the judges.
These are the people we want to administer the law, to enforce the law, to pass judgment on criminals that is fair, just and righteous. Then we turn around and say they are in a special class and deserve more money than anyone else. If we really want to listen to the people, we should be doing things that are fair and equitable.
We have created a special class of people who deserve a raise over and above what anyone else is getting. I want to raise a point that has to do with the definition of spouse.
It is very interesting that this legislation says a surviving spouse in relation to a judge includes a person of the opposite sex who has co-habited with a judge in a conjugal relationship for at least one year immediately before the judge's death.
It is very interesting that this definition is different from the one that recently came out of the appeals court defining spouse. For judges a spouse is a partner of the opposite sex. It is interesting that we have that kind of definition here and we have another definition for the rest of Canadians.
What will happen now? Is an appeals court going to say this act is ultra vires or are we going to change the other legislation? It is fascinating that we have these kinds of things in legislation.
I propose to the government that it take this bill back, rethink the whole thing and figure out something that makes sense to Canadians.