Yes, may even more than there are cod. Some people feel we should give the federal government more power because we will somehow get better quality. Well I do not share those comments.
A third area that I am not exactly excited about is the talk about judicial independence. The problem we have with judicial independence is the appointment process we have for judges. There are no committees to review this matter and the public has no say in it. Our friendly dictator picks up his phone, gets someone's agreement to be a judge and bingo, someone is a judge. That is our system and there is a problem in terms of judicial independence.
In my view I can hardly think of a court system that has more power than in this country. Prime Minister Trudeau, back in the early 1980s, created something called the charter of rights which gave our courts so much power that most of those people sitting in the other house have become quite irrelevant in terms of power and in exercising that power. The Supreme Court of Canada has far more power than anybody on that side of the house.
I want to go through a few things that the Supreme Court has decided in its wisdom. It decided that prisoners should have the right to vote in federal elections. It made the decision to give people like Bernardo and Olson the right to vote, a decision on which it overruled the Parliament of Canada. It decided that anybody who lands on Canadian soil shall be entitled to the full rights under the charter in our judicial system. We have made it virtually impossible to extradite some of the most dangerous criminals in the world who land on our soil. Through its wisdom, it created absolute chaos in the lobster fishery and in the relations between native and non-native people. The list goes on and on.
The Supreme Court has a lot of independence and this is a bogus claim. What in the world does the staffing of the court system have to do with judicial independence? It is way beyond my imagination. The judicial independence issue is a creative argument in the labour management area. Judges must get paid, they must have staff and so on, but please bear in mind that they are employees of the government and they are in a bit of a conflict. If we look at it from a labour management standpoint, we are giving up a lot when we tell the courts that they have free run at hiring their administration staff and in determining their own salaries.
I have noticed a disturbing trend at the provincial level where we have actually had labour management disputes between the judges and the government over salary and benefits. Because these disputes cannot be resolved, the judges go off to the courts to have these matters resolved. Guess who the courts side with? Invariably they side with the judges on these disputes on the premise that the government is interfering with judicial independence. What labour union would not mind having that relationship? If there is a dispute, people could just apply to their labour union brothers who sit on some tribunal and they would make the decision.
I really do not understand this argument that we need to have this restructuring because it is in the interest of judicial independence.
I want to emphasize one final point for the government. It has embarked upon a piece of legislation with certain aims. I do not see one single tool or mechanism in place to monitor it to see if any of the aims will be achieved.
The government is very good at passing legislation that has negative and bad results. It is because it does not have a plan in place. It gets some bureaucrat to create the legislation. It brings the legislation to the House, rubber stamps it and then rams it through with the hope that it will work out in the final end.
When legislation is created in the House it is high time we put monitoring mechanisms in place to make sure the legislation does what it was intended to do and, if it does not, we get rid of it.