Mr. Speaker, I too would like to acknowledge the hard work of the member for South Surrey—White Rock—Langley and thank her for bringing this very important issue to the attention of Parliament.
While we are not here to debate the importance of dealing with poaching, the issue is whether the bill in its present form is the most appropriate mechanism for addressing poaching. In my view it is not. The bill takes existing offences and essentially duplicates them in the Criminal Code.
Bill C-280 does not have the appearance and elements of a true criminal law scheme. The scheme in Bill C-280 proposes what is essentially a regulatory scheme and drops it into the Criminal Code. The Criminal Code is not an appropriate statute for this kind of law. This is especially so where there is a range of existing federal and provincial laws that directly and indirectly regulate the same subject matter.
Even in the absence of all these other relevant inapplicable laws, the measures in the bill would be best dealt with by regulation rather than by amending the Criminal Code.
The bill expressly provides that the offence provisions in respect to wildlife that is not a threatened or endangered species do not apply to persons who act in accordance with a licence issued pursuant to a federal or provincial statute or regulation. This is usually associated with regulations. The essence is that if we have authorization we can do something but we are in violation of the law if we do it without authorization. This is often what regulations look like, but the Criminal Code does not work the same way. The application of a criminal offence provision does not normally rely upon whether a licence to conduct a prohibited activity has been issued by federal or provincial authority.
Another feature of the Criminal Code offences is that they almost always apply to everyone. It is extremely rare for the Criminal Code to specify exemptions for criminal liability in respect of particular offences. The exemptions set out in sections 204 to 207 inclusive of the Criminal Code relating to the gaming offences and part of the code are notable exceptions to the usual rules against exemptions. We can see the contradiction between the two. On one hand we want to deal with one specific problem, but by doing it through the code, we are brushing everybody with the same brush and making that exemption become quite problematic.
Nonetheless, it is extremely rare to specify exemptions that depend upon the exercise of discretion by a member of the executive branch of government. However, subclause 447.8 of Bill C-280 would grant discretion to the Minister of the Environment to issue an order exempting “any person or class of persons” from “application of all or any” of the offence provisions in respect to threatened or endangered species. In my view this feature is highly unusual and highly unheard of.
It is also rare in a Criminal Code context to have a member of the executive confer with an advisory body in order to determine whether the subject matter of the offence, in this case wildlife, falls within a particular category. I note that subclause 447.7(1) and (2) respectively would give the Minister of the Environment the discretion to determine whether a species of wildlife is an--