Mr. Speaker, it is unfortunate and I regret that the leader of the Bloc Quebecois has made fun of my kind words concerning Mr. René Lévesque who was a journalist and a Premier of Quebec.
How arrogant of me, an anglophone, to dare say something positive about a famous Quebecer. I truly admired Mr. Lévesque as a journalist. Mr. Lévesque understood human rights and liberties.
Mr. Lévesque must be turning in his grave at this proposal of the Bloc Quebecois to limit freedom of association. This is the very freedom Mr. Lévesque defended as a journalist and as a premier of Quebec.
How ironical. The members of the Bloc, the sovereignists want to reduce the scope of this legislation. That is impossible, for if we reduced basic rights, criminal groups would win.
I have something to say in this debate and I have waited a long time. I am one of the few people in this Chamber who is a former journalist. I can assure you, Mr. Speaker, that in my view, René Levesque, as one of Canada's most celebrated journalists, would indeed be turning in his grave at the very thought that his colleagues in Quebec would be proposing to lessen the rights of Quebecers, lessen the rights of Canadians as an instrument to get at criminal organizations.
I must tell a story, Mr. Speaker. In my early young days as a reporter I myself had my own encounters with organized crime. I have great sympathy for the Quebec journalist who found himself wounded severely in the recent incident that has led to this debate. When I started out at the Hamilton Spectator many years ago as a police reporter, the city editor at the time really admired the way I seemed to be able to get information out of anyone. At that time I was only a reporter for two years.
Hamilton has had a Mafia problem for some time and I imagine it still has a Mafia problem now. It certainly did then. There was a particularly notorious Mafioso by the name of Johnny Papalia who lived in town. A couple of years ago he was gunned down in a contract killing. Even for 20 years he has obviously had quite a reputation in his own organization and it cost him in the end. He was notorious and he used to operate from a little company called Monarch Vending which is on Railway Street, a little blind street in Hamilton.
What was happening was the Globe and Mail was running a series of exposés on the Mafia and the city editor in Hamilton wanted to match the exposé. The exposés were about a different Mafia leader altogether, but he suggested I go down and get Johnny Papalia's reaction. No one had ever interviewed Johnny Papalia. He was notorious. He was a tough guy.
Anyway, I dutifully decided to take a taxi rather than my own car because of course even journalists do worry about these things and I did not want Johnny Papalia's friends to get my licence number. I took a cab down to 10 Railway Street. The cabbie said to me “You are going to see Johnny Pops”. I said, “Well, yes”. The cab dropped me off. He was kind of interested. He drove down to the end of the street and backed up into a driveway. He wanted to see whether I would come out.
I went into Monarch Vending and there was this great big guy. There were lots of thugs around in those days and they looked like thugs. I said I wanted to see Johnny Papalia and they were so amazed. This Mafioso guy came out. He was a tough looking hombre and he said “I will tell you once, take off. How dare you come here”. I said, “Look, Mr. Papalia, I just came here to get your side of this article in the Globe and Mail ”. He raged at me and I backed up and out of the door and down the driveway and past his Cadillac. He had a Cadillac in the driveway. I got a little mad myself and I said “All right, if you do not want the damned story” and I took the newspaper article and spiked it on the radio aerial of his Cadillac. I have to tell you, Mr. Speaker, for some time afterwards I did look under my car in case there was a bomb or any other thing but there was not.
In those days, I think generally speaking, there was an unwritten rule. That unwritten rule was that one did not intimidate, harass or threaten the life of journalists.
Why we are having this debate tonight and why it is so very important is that organized crime has broken that code. They have attacked a journalist in the course of his duty. I have great admiration for the Quebec reporter. I am glad he survived but we should all be desperately concerned when an event like this occurs.
I think it is absolutely right for this parliament to go on the attack against this kind of threat but I caution everyone that there is no journalist in this country, I am sure, who would really want to sacrifice our fundamental liberties just because one or two of us get killed because that is what does happen. I lament the Bloc Quebecois. They do not realize it is the same tradition of journalism in Quebec as it is in the rest of Canada. Nothing is different.
Quebec journalists follow the same tradition of defending basic rights.
You do not sacrifice a fundamental right like freedom of association because a journalist has been attacked, but what parliament must do is it must make these organizations pay. The only way you can make organizations like this pay when they attack journalists, when they attack politicians, or when they attack justice officials, is to take business away from them.
I proposed earlier, Mr. Speaker, that I really do think that the government has been going at this problem in bits and pieces. In fact over the last five or six years the government has failed to comprehensively address the ways in which organized crime is making money.
I have followed this debate this entire evening and a lot of the debate has focused on increasing policing. There were some very good comments about taking the ports police away. I do believe that our open ports and the ability to export any kind of contraband out of Canada is one of the major things that is fueling profits for organized crime. That has been a very good suggestion.
But just adding police is not the answer. As I alluded to earlier, we have to stop the ability of organized crime to make money in Canada and to launder money in Canada, and to engage in easy cross-border transportation, both in money, and information is another thing, and contraband. We have not done very well there.
We have had an opportunity in the past and we have not exploited it. We need to go after, as I mentioned, non-profit organizations and charities. I know this sounds preposterous that I should be bringing charities into a debate about organized crime, but I can assure the members opposite that this is very, very serious. The charity industry is over $100 billion.
I was going through my pile of correspondence as I was listening to the debate. I had a number of annual reports from major charities. I will not name them because it is a little hard on them in the context of this particular debate, but some of these charities were very prominent charities. They sent their annual reports out and there is no financial detail. There is no audited financial statement.
Major charities are operating with no transparency and it is an absolute invitation to organized crime. One can set up a charity anywhere in this country and there is no requirement for them to report. So the charities have become famous, I think worldwide, Mr. Speaker, for the ability for organized crime or ethnic organizations to finance terrorism abroad, you name it. They are able to finance everything through the various charitable non-profit organizations in this country.
I have complained about this issue many times. I regret that the government has been slow to respond, but I regret also that I have had very little support from the opposition benches. The opposition benches are constantly looking for opportunities to embarrass the government, and when a backbench MP comes along with something that really is central to solving the organized crime problem—or not solving, nothing solves it—but making it costly for organized crime to operate, I just have not had the support. I regret that because I really think that many of the members on the opposite side are very sincere in what they try to do. I think that by and large this debate, except where it entered into the delicate ground of interfering with our fundamental liberties, has been well aimed.
I have to be a little careful because I do not want to cast aspersions on the justice minister and the solicitor general who very patiently took part in this entire debate and I hope receive some very good suggestions, but the responses from the justice minister and the solicitor general are still partial. No one seems to recognize or appreciate that the Internet and electronic communications and the global marketplace are a boon to organized crime, an absolute boon to organized crime. What we really have to do is have an open debate.
It was quite a revelation to me to know that the subcommittee on organized crime was having in camera discussions. That is pretty useless, I want you to know, Mr. Speaker, because I am a person who did not happen to be on that committee. I can tell you that I would have had some input in that committee. I can tell you that it was one of the places where I would have liked to have had some input.
I learned tonight the subcommittee received a submission to which the justice minister alluded. It was a consultation paper on the intimidation of key players in the criminal justice system. This consultation paper arose from a survey that was done in 1998 following a court case involving the Hell's Angels in which Quebecers were asked whether or not they feared reprisals if they did jury duty on a case involving organized crime like the Hell's Angels.
I think 81% of them said they feared intimidation, so the justice department issued a consultation paper which the subcommittee on organized crime is supposedly considering. It seeks laws, regulations or penalties specifically aimed at intimidation of people in the criminal justice system like judges, juries, policemen and prison guards, but they left out politicians and journalists.
This whole way in which we try to control the bad side of society, the way that we try to get control over the negative, shadowy forces that would steal, that would kill, is through our politicians and journalists as well as through our criminal justice system. I would submit that it is more so with our politicians and journalists. The journalists are the ones who write the stories and put their lives in danger, and the politicians are the ones who act upon those stories and pass legislation.
There is ample opportunity for organized crime to get at politicians. There is the instrument of blackmail. I believe that there have even been instances where politicians in this parliament have been physically threatened. That is possible. One can have one's family physically threatened. I am not talking about the Quebecois member. I think the problem is a bit more general than that.
We cannot allow that to happen. If there is to be a consultation paper that seeks to put in place new penalties or new laws preventing the intimidation of people in the criminal justice system, then those penalties, those new innovations, those initiatives, should apply also to journalists and politicians because there is no doubt about the seriousness of what has occurred.
I welcome this debate. I am just a little saddened that members of the Bloc Quebecois do not appreciate that they allow the criminals to stampede the politicians into passing laws. That is what they are proposing, the notwithstanding clause to circumvent the constitution so that in one particular instance somebody can be arrested because they are wearing a Hell's Angels jacket. That is unacceptable, because if we had a law like that it could be used by another government against a separatist party or against any other kind of organization, the flavour of the time shall we say, decided was a threat to peace, order and good government.
We must never allow that to happen. The final analysis is that when we allow criminals to diminish our fundamental rights and freedoms then crime wins.