Madam Speaker, I have a few preliminary comments about the firearms registry.
I wish the government would recognize that the firearms registry a totally failed experiment. It was ill-conceived. Let us be honest, it was more about politics than good legislation at the time. It is going nowhere and is costing the country a huge amount of money. It has created another unnecessary bureaucracy in this town and there are enough of those already without more of them.
I would like to relate my experience as a practising lawyer. One of the most troubling problems I encountered was the inadequate protection for people, and women generally, who were stalked or harassed by really dangerous people and quite often because of a marital breakdown. The resources were not in place.
I recall a number of years ago when a new mayor was elected in New York City, one of the most crime infested places in the world. The mayor was elected on a law and order platform. He was going to reduce crime and improve public safety in that city. What did he do? He hired more police officers. What did he do with those police officers? He put them on the streets where the crimes were happening.
Lo and behold, guess what eventually happened? The crime rate in New York City dramatically decreased. He was not filling up prisons with prisoners. He was deterring crime in the first place. Today, if I am correct in my figures, New York City has a lower violent crime rate than any city in Great Britain with 500,000 people or more. That is public safety and is an effective use of public resources.
Why is the government not looking at cancelling a useless program that is costing us a lot of money and instead putting money into useful programs that actually do increase public safety and provide protection to our citizens?
The problem for a lot of our law-abiding citizens is that the government does not protect them. The resources are not in place. It does politically correct things like passing more laws. I think the government believes that if it wanted to make cats bark all it would have to do is pass a law. I am convinced of that. Some of those people over there are unreal.
I practised law for 25 years. I wish I had the time to go through all the useless legislation that has been passed that interferes with our ability to make common sense decisions in our day to day lives.
I want to address the rest of my comments to the cruelty to animals amendments in the legislation. I want to make it perfectly clear that the amendments in the bill are all about harassment and mischief. Who will be the object of the legislation? Who are the criminals we are targeting under this one? Under the firearms legislation it was duck hunters, but who will be the object of this legislation? Will it be the livestock producers, the hog producers, the poultry producers, the turkey producers and anyone else who is involved in the caring for animal? Will it be the fishermen, the sports fishermen, the medical researchers, the agricultural researchers, the furriers, the trappers and many others? Most of these folks are just trying to make a living, support their families, get their kids through school, support their communities, pay their banks to get by and also support us by paying our salaries in Ottawa.
The legislation before us is about harassment and targeting those individuals. This is not a time for any of them to be targeted by more government interference.
In the U.S. one of the national parties has compromised itself by getting into bed with an organization called the American trial lawyers association.
We have seen the absurdity in the United States of those sort of policies. People with cancer sue tobacco companies because they did not understand that tobacco was not good for their health. Individuals sue a franchise coffee maker because they did not understand that coffee was hot. A person tried to commit suicide by jumping in front of a subway train and lost his legs because he jumped too far and successfully sued the New York transit authority on the basis that it should have anticipated someone would try to commit suicide and should have put up guards.
Most of this sort of stuff is pure absolute nonsense. We do not need that in this country. Anyone in the United States who has any common sense would agree that sort of intrusion by the litigative nature of the American society causes people a lot of additional costs and impairs the economy.
We heard from the friends of the government in committee, the animal rights groups. They came in droves. I recall a number of those spokespeople identifying lawyers who were supportive of the legislation. Quite honestly I would identify the lawyers that were mentioned as being akin to the American trial lawyers group. They were enthusiastic supporters of the bill. I am sure many of them are even members of the American trial lawyers association.
I am disturbed because the Liberals are bringing American style litigation into Canada. This is something we do not need. Much anti-Americanism sentiment comes from members of the government from time to time. However in this area they seem to be enthusiastic endorsers of something that is unnecessary and negative.
When we stand back and look at it the Liberals generally would like to see a society dominated by courts, judges and lawyers. Why do they want to do that? It is good for the lawyers and it seems to be good for the Liberal Party. However I am not exactly sure it is good for the Canadian public.
With a certain provision in the bill the Liberals have done something that even the Americans have not done. They have introduced the concept of tort and negligence right into the criminal code. I had never heard of that concept ever existing in any other common law or democratic society that I know of where we start introducing concepts of tort and negligence and litigation directly into the criminal code.
Let me draw the House's attention to the actual section. The section has absolutely nothing to do with tinkering with existing legislation. This is an entirely new addition to the act. Subsection 182.3(1) states:
Every one commits an offence who
(a) negligently causes unnecessary pain, suffering or injury to an animal;
Let us use an actual example. I am a sport fisherman and I do catch fish. When I catch a fish I have to do something with it. I could put it in a tank and when I get back to shore I could kill it. I could put it on a rope and hang it beside the boat in the water and when I get back to shore I could kill it. I could have a club in the boat and hit it over the head until I kill it. Or I could throw it in the boat and let it jump around until it dies itself. Another possibility is a method I use, I learned it from an aboriginal person. I take the fish by the head hold it firmly and break its neck. In my view that is a good way to kill a fish because it puts it out of its existence quickly. For ice fishing most people just throw the fish out onto the lake and it slowly freezes to death.
In this subsection everyone commits an offence who negligently causes unnecessary pain, suffering or injury to an animal. According to this definition the fish has a vertebrae so it is an animal. Under the legislation any sport fisherman could be looking at a charge under the section. Animal rights groups would be hiring their own lawyer to prosecute the case.
The Liberals say they have put something in place that would protect people against private prosecution. There would be a preliminary hearing first to decide whether the charges should proceed or not. That is just absolute nonsense. I know what a preliminary hearing is; I practised law for 25 years. It is a trial within a trial. There is a magistrate, a lawyer on the other side and witnesses.
I envision the fisherman walking into a courtroom full of animal rights activists, their witnesses and their lawyers. That will be a very costly venture. People who go in there had better have a lawyer and some witnesses or they will lose and face charges. That is just that one subsection.
However it does not stop there. In subsection 182.3(b) it reads:
...negligently fails to provide suitable and adequate food, water, air, shelter and care for it;
When a farmer hauls livestock to market it is an hour and a half drive and it is 85° outside does that mean the facility that he is hauling in should have temperature adjustments so the livestock is being hauled in at 72° or room temperature? If it is 5° above freezing should there be a heater in there so that it is 20° above zero? What about the food, water and other matters that are raised in there? Should the truck be stopped to feed the animals and give them water? Subsection 182.3(c) states:
negligently injures an animal while it is being conveyed.
When we look at all of these provisions I suggest there is not an existing agricultural practice that would not be open to attack under the legislation.
People say I am just pandering and raising fears that are not real. They should look at the experience in Europe, England and the U.S. where this type of legislation has been introduced and listen to what the radical animal rights groups are saying.
I find it particularly disturbing. We had one justice minister who got on his high horse to introduce this useless firearms registration. It is all about politics and nothing about good public policy.
The thing I find disturbing, when I go through the animal rights website and look at the material, is who the animal rights groups backed, strongly supported and put all their resources into in the last federal election to make sure they won and defeated all those “crazy firearms people” and “wing nuts” as they call them.
In the Edmonton riding, where the past justice minister came from, they backed her to the teeth and now she is delivering the bacon. She is delivering a piece of legislation that they wanted.
There is another provision in the bill that really bothers me. It is how what is negligent is determined. I doubt anyone on that side of the House has the slightest clue what process would be used to determine what negligent is. Sometimes I wonder whether any of the folks on the other side of the House ever spent two minutes in a court of law in the country, let alone knowing what that would mean. Subsection 182.3(2) states:
For the purposes of subsection (1), “negligently” means departing markedly from the standard of care that a reasonable person would use.
I know what that will entail; I have seen it. When one is involved with negligence cases in the court one hauls in a whole pile of expert witnesses and they tell the court what they think reasonable care is. Usually the people who have the most and best experts win the case. They are very expensive. Expert witnesses can easily cost $5,000 a day and the more the better. The rich and wealthy have a major advantage in this sort of thing.
It would have been so simple. The Canadian Alliance and other parties wanted a simple amendment whereby we would determine the standard based on the practices of the industry. In agriculture the practices that have been longstanding would become the test under this arrangement, but no, the government would not accept that proposal. We would not stand in the way but it did.
This is another area that seemed so simple to me. When talking about fishermen and the way they kill fish, the accepted practice would be an absolute defence. For a livestock producer, the acceptable standard would be an absolute defence to the charges. It would alleviate the concerns that all these groups and producers in our economy are concerned about, but the government would not do it. It is so simple.
I guess the reason it will not accept that sort of standard as a defence is because it is promoting the radical animal rights groups objectives. They want to challenge every existing standard we have in place. They want to challenge every one of them and make it perfectly clear that is their objective.
Bill C-15B underscores the whole approach of the Liberal government. There was a government recently elected in British Columbia whose name matches up a lot better with liberty than that party's does. It actually believe in that word. The government in British Columbia committed itself to reducing one-third of the regulatory burden in that province.
It defined regulatory burden as a regulation that restricts the freedom of an individual or imposes obligations on the individual. It found 400,000 specific regulations that fit that definition. I would be curious to know if the government across the floor would submit itself to that sort of review, how many regulations we would find in Ottawa. It would absolutely be frightening.
Another thing the government of British Columbia discovered when it looked at the regulations and analyzed them was that for every dollar it costs the government to create laws and regulations, and enforce them, it costs the people affected on average something like $17 to $20. Here is a government that is passing a cruelty to animals law but it does not care about the consequences to the industries affected. It passed it because the minister made a deal with animal rights groups to get this thing shoved through. This will cost the affected industries a lot of money.
The government is good at that. It likes to pass laws and interfere with our day to day lives and our abilities to make decision without worrying about the costs. It just does it. The government is always pushing for environmental impact studies before something is done. I wish sometimes that before we pass laws in the House that we have an economic impact study of the laws before they are ever passed.
In conclusion, the Liberal way is more about more regulation. The Liberal way is more about more government. The Liberal way is more intrusion in our day to day lives as citizens. Liberals, contrary to their name, place very little value on personal freedom and liberty. They believe the government is better equipped on this matter to take over that role, to start making the decisions for individual citizens and to transfer more and more power to the bureaucracy in Ottawa. This is despite the fact that the Canada pension plan is in huge difficulty. We have probably more people working in fisheries in this town than we have actual fishers. We have an agriculture industry--