Mr. Speaker, I am glad to take part in this debate. I want to start by expressing appreciation to members of the Bloc Quebecois who brought forward this very timely, topical and relevant subject for us to debate today. Special thanks go to the member for Berthier—Montcalm for bringing forward the particular motion.
I come from the riding of Winnipeg Centre, the core area of Winnipeg. In that neighbourhood, I am not proud to say, we are no strangers to the problems of organized crime albeit on a small scale. I am speaking specifically of urban street gangs, often wrongly called aboriginal youth gangs. It is a misnomer to call our problem an aboriginal youth problem. These urban street gangs are run and orchestrated by adults, often using young people or abusing young people, to bring about their own goals. I want to make perfectly clear that when I talk about the gang problem in Winnipeg it is an urban street gang problem and not an aboriginal youth problem.
Much of our problem in the inner city of Winnipeg is a very predictable consequence of a disastrous social policy or the absence of any social policy. This is a predictable consequence that anybody could have told us would be the outcome of years of neglect. Years and years and years of letting the inner city of Winnipeg rot has had a very predictable outcome and consequence in the form of a permanent underclass. Quelle surprise. Starve people for a couple of decades and we will develop an underclass which will become organized. When we shut people out of the mainstream economy where do they go to find a standard of living?
When we talk about organized crime everybody thinks of the Mafia. It is almost a cliché. Where do we think it came from? In the 1900s in New York City people were shut out of the mainstream economy. People would not hire a swarthy Mediterranean type. They were shut out of the economy and they created their own economy. Yes, it was illegal. Given the choice between my children starving and doing something a bit off colour, I have often said it is frankly an easy choice to make. They loved their children too and they were forced into the situation of doing something illegal in order to survive.
That is the situation with the urban street gangs we have in the city of Winnipeg. A whole generation of people were shut out of the mainstream economy and created its own illegal mini economy. Some people think that illegal is just a sick bird because frankly when it is survival or illegal they choose survival.
The whole social problem faced in the core area of the city of Winnipeg recently manifested itself in arson. There is an epidemic of arson. It is like Watts in 1965. It is burn baby burn. People are expressing their frustration by torching the miserable neighbourhood they live in. They are levelling it. They are taking the law into their own hands. They are expressing themselves and their frustration by burning down the neighbourhood they live in, maybe in the hopes that something will rise from the ashes that will be a better world.
It is very predictable. Any student of the human experience could have told us that this would happen. We are playing with fire here and now we are experiencing fire. It boils down to year after year after year of fundamental neglect in the inner city.
Thankfully we have now elected a progressive mayor and a progressive provincial government. Maybe those two could actually work together and start to turn the issue around. Let us call it what it is. Organized crime and street crime are predictable consequences of chronic long term poverty that we should have known about.
My colleague talked about an issue in which I am very interested: human bondage, human slavery, the advent of slavery again.
I see the member from the Tories gets a kick out of that. I agree that human bondage can have many meanings. The particular meaning I am dealing with now is the terrible spectacle of desperate people, looking for a better life, who are washing up on the shores of British Columbia's west coast. They are getting put into a pipeline that is in fact organized crime. The whole network of people who are taking advantage of these desperate individuals is organized crime in its truest sense. They are very well connected. They have a network all over North America that takes these people from the ships and puts them into illegal and abusive situations where they have to pay off the debt they owe for getting themselves smuggled into the country.
More sensitive people are looking at this issue and trying to understand how it comes about. People from the Fujian province in China, desperate enough to leave their situation, are willing to get on some death trap of a boat and owe some criminal $40,000 to come here to build a better life for themselves and their children. Let us try and understand their motivation. What kind of circumstances are they leaving that they would risk life and limb to undertake a journey like that?
In doing a bit of research, I have learned a bit about the Fujian province where these desperate people come from. That is the first place in China where they had these free economic trade zones, that great bastion of capitalism called free economic trade zones. It is a fenced compound where labour legislation does not apply and no laws apply. People work making Barbie dolls, The Gap jeans and Liz Claiborne sweaters. A lot of our western products are developed in these trade zones in the Fujian province of China.
The ILO, the International Labour Organization, did some research. It found that they need to make about 85 cents an hour to make a reasonable standard of living in China. To live like a Chinese peasant, they need to make 85 cents an hour. This is $6 or $7 a day. The wage in these free economic trade zones is 18 cents an hour, one-fifth of what it costs to survive as peasant. The Gap jeans, Liz Claiborne and all these outfits are paying these people 18 cents an hour for making western goods. These people are not stupid. They put two and two together. They know there is another world out there that lives a hell of a lot better than they do. To better themselves and their families, they will do anything to get here and maybe have some hope and optimism that they will enjoy a better standard of living.
I believe we have only seen the tip of iceberg in this situation. I think we will face a day of reckoning. As a western developed nation, we cannot keep those people down forever. They know that we are here enjoying the good life and they are there living a life of misery and desperation. We have this bizarre spectacle of people living in a grass hut with a mud floor watching Mary Tyler Moore reruns on a colour TV and wondering why it is not them and why they cannot have a piece of that good life. So they become desperate.
A lot of less sensitive people or people who have not thought this through are saying “Why should these people be able to jump the queue and wind up on the shores of Canada and become landed immigrants in this country? What about all those good people who are waiting patiently in line?”
Let me tell the House something. There is no way to get here from there. China has 1.2 billion people and we have one Canadian immigration officer in China who is in Beijing, which is a heck of a long way from the Fujian province. How does a person making 18 cents an hour save up enough money to get themselves to Beijing, to then stand in line for months sometimes and literally sleep outside the door of the embassy to get a visa to come to Canada?
I asked the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration why we could not set up a little satellite office. If there is such a great demand from the Fujian province to come to Canada, we could set up a little office in the Fujian province for 18 months. There would be no market for snakeheads. We would pull the rug out from underneath them if we gave people conventional access to this country. Well, the minister said that there was no budget for promoting Canada, et cetera. It is all a budgetary issue. Now we are facing the consequences of these people who are desperate enough to come to our shores and become victims of this terrible criminal pipeline.
The last thing I will say about this is that I am very critical of the way the government is handling the issue. We know some of the problem people in that criminal pipeline. We know some individuals, and I know some by name, in Vancouver, Toronto and New York City. However, for some reason the government is hoping to wait until it can do one big sting, like a TV cop show where in the last five minutes of the show they will round everybody up and bust them so they can look like heroes.
Why are the police not harassing the people that it knows already? By the word harass, I mean within the context of the law. Why are the police not picking these people up and questioning them? Why are they not doing everything they can to stop this and send a message back to the Fujian province that Canada will not tolerate the smuggling of human cargo and human bondage in our community. That is one issue I am very critical of.
The other thing that my colleague from Sydney—Victoria raised is the RCMP's inability to enforce the laws and put an end to some of the terrible organized crime we have in the country.
Our party gets letters from RCMP officers telling us that they are unable to investigate crimes they know are being committed because they do not have the budget or personnel to do it. It is sending a green light to organized crime, especially on complicated issues of white collar crime, et cetera. It is a terrible thing when we do not have the money to bust criminals who we know are operating in our community and exploiting Canadians. It is all budgetary. It is strictly a matter of finance. Balancing the budget seems to have priority over protecting Canadians from organized criminals, and I think that is scandalous.