Mr. Speaker, what is the purpose of Bill C-30? It is a very simple bill consisting of 94 pages in length. The bill would establish a body that provides administrative services to the Federal Court of Appeal, the Federal Court, the Court Martial Appeal Court and the Tax Court of Canada.
What is the benefit of Bill C-30? The auditor general said one benefit might be some cost savings if the bill were passed. The member referred to the independence of the administrative side of the court system as one rationale for this. I am not sure what that has to do with the independence of the judiciary.
A third benefit we should look at is a greater efficiency of the court system, although the other side of it has a cost factor attached to it. Presumably there will be cost savings by bringing this administrative regime into being. However will people be laid off now that we are consolidating all the courts into one administrative system? If one administration system is to be instituted, will there be some labour savings from it?
Will there be empty government spaces as a result of the consolidation? Will paperwork be reduced? Who will manage this change and who will measure whether we get the results the government says we will get out of it? I do not know how clerks and other people who work in the court system have anything to do with the question of greater independence of the judiciary. Who will measure it to see whether it is worth all the time and trouble to do it?
In the name of saving some dollars and bringing greater efficiencies, there are 54 pieces of legislation affected by this one little change. How much time did lawyers in the justice department spend to find out which 54 pieces of legislation will be affected by this one minor change? How many hours did they work on it? How many hours will it take to fully implement the legislation?
If there were 1,000 copies of a piece of legislation that the government needs to carry out its duties affecting 54 pieces of legislation in both official languages plus the regulations that go with it, it could work out to something like two million pieces of paper. Yet the government says that it is for the environment and that it will not waste resources and so on.
Who will check the quality of this administrative system? We went through all the trouble of tinkering with the bill. Is there anyone in charge to see whether we will get any quality improvements from our judicial system?
There are many people outside the judicial system who have tons of complaints about the system and the lack of response to their needs when they required justice. Is there anything in the bill that measures quality improvements in the delivery of our judicial services?
Liberals believe that if there is a problem out there all they have to do is have the justice department manufacture another law and order a result. I am sure in the government's mind it could get cats to bark if it got the justice department to work on it. All the cats in Canada would be barking the minute the government passed it through the House, got it through the Senate and made it law.
This is the problem I have with the bill. It is a knee-jerk reaction to consolidate administrative services under one roof, with the assumption that all these pluses will come out of it. I am very skeptical that any real results will come out of it.
The government has a tendency to believe that if things can be centralized and consolidated they will get better. For 125 years it has managed native and aboriginal services in the country from coast to coast out of one centralized department in Ottawa. Do we have anything positive to show for that? We have welfare dependency, poverty, and a lot of problems that we do not like. That is the government's way of dealing with it.
The government said it would be a good thing if it ran our pension system to guarantee pension benefits for Canadians. What do we find after 30 years of it operating our pension system? We have a very dismal type of benefit package in relation to what people have contributed to it. We have a huge contingent liability. We are imposing huge surcharges and extra charges on other people to deliver those things.
I like the fisheries department. The government has been running the fisheries department for a long time. If I look at the fisheries correctly, the Atlantic Canada fisheries are almost dead. The B.C. fisheries are close to that. There are probably more people working in the fisheries department than there are fishermen in the country.
The Liberals have a lot of belief in that sort of thing: if they could build a few more stories on top of the justice department and pass a few more pieces of legislation then everything would look up.
With all the changes to 54 pieces of legislation how much time will it take the government to retrain all its administrative people so they can learn all the new changes that will take place? Will it be holding a whole series of meetings over the next six months to retrain people on the great changes it has introduced under Bill C-30?
That brings me to the area of whether we will get any real benefits from consolidation. At one time there was a supreme court trial division, provincial courts of appeal and the Supreme Court of Canada. We did not have the Federal Court of Canada. For over 100 years the country got along without the federal court system.
The Liberals thought they needed another court system, a federal trial division and a federal appeal level, even though we already had those in existence in the provinces with our provincial courts of appeal and trial divisions of the superior courts. The Liberals appointed those judges and set their salaries, but we had to have another layer of judges.
It is very confusing in a jurisdictional sense. It is very complex and difficult to decide where an action or proceeding should take place, whether it should go through the provincial or federal court system. However when it gets to the Supreme Court of Canada it all ends up in the same place.
If the government really wanted to consolidate things and bring some real clarity, accountability and savings in terms of tax dollars, it would consolidate the federal system with the provincial court system.
It would eliminate 200 judges and save $4 million a year at the bare minimum without even getting into all the clerical help and everything else. That is an area in which we could benefit from some consolidation, but the Liberal government does not do things that way. It does not want to downsize the empire it helped to build. A lot of its pals in the legal community would lose potential esteem by being appointed to one of these courts.
There were some comments made by a colleague about the independence of the judiciary. I have a lot of problems with that argument.
Our system is based on the British system we have inherited and refined. In the final analysis the 301 people who came to the House of Commons, providing that public sentiment is with us, should have the final say on the laws of Canada.
It is not the courts. They are not elected and not directly accountable to anybody. They are there for life or until they retire. They do not have to face the media or parliamentarians. If we say something that is not quite right for some of them, we can be held in contempt of court by them. They have a lot of power. I am disturbed at how much power we have transferred to the courts.
If we look at the Ressam case that we dealt with in the House, one of the problems with Ressam and our immigration refugee system was the courts. They decided that we did not make the rules in the House, that they did, and that if they did not like someone being sent back to some country like Algeria they would not send him back.
I do not agree with transferring power from a democratic institution to an institution that is not democratic, and then transferring more and more power. I do not know how the secretaries, the clerks and the administrative people in the court system have anything to do with judicial independence and the separation of powers of the judiciary in the court system.
It is another tendency where we are transferring fiscal power from the House of Commons, from the finance minister and so on, to the courts. They are making court decisions that are imposing huge financial burdens on Canada and on the taxpayer.
Indirectly they are now getting to a position where they can start deciding who in the public service comes within the ambit of judicial independence. They will have the final say on the benefits package, the salary benefits that are paid out to these employees. I find this disturbing.
I would have thought that based on experience the government would realize the tendency to move in this direction is wrong and that we will have to back off in a lot of areas. The Americans will make us back off in a lot of areas, as will the United Nations with its conventions on deportation of refugees. We will have to back off, get off our high horses and use some common sense.
I am disturbed the government would be giving more power to our court system. The courts have plenty of power and do not need any more than they already have.
We are kind of reluctant supporters of the bill. It is a very timid type of bill. If the government had some courage it would be looking at a serious consolidation of our judicial system and at some of the big time savings we could have on a year by year basis.
I doubt whether the bill will save anything. By the time we are finished implementing it, changing all these laws and retraining everyone, we will be in the hole for a long time. My Liberal friends figure that if they pass a law, bingo, everything will be okay, that tomorrow the law will be in place and everything will fall into place.
It is not the way things are managed in the world. If we want results we manage those results; we do not order them or command them. The government has to learn that. It is very poor at that and it is time it started looking at a whole different way of doing public administration.