Madam Speaker, it comes down to bargaining power. My colleague is a union organizer and negotiator. Often in the situation when we are bargaining with a strong company, the union does not have the power that it would like to have to advance the legitimate interests of working men and women.
In the same situation, often the provinces are just not in a position to push that envelope. I have seen glaring situations where RCMP police officers, under contract to the province as their provincial police, have been involved in municipal highway traffic situations. They stop a motor vehicle under a provincial law and find a million dollars in the trunk of the car. That money is seized and given to the federal government. The federal government gets 90% of it, if not more.
It comes down to the agreement that is made. If there were some way that we in the House could actually supervise some of these agreements in a more direct fashion and not simply leave each attorney general fighting the might of the federal government, it might help. The federal government is mighty in these kinds of funding arrangements, especially at a time when the costs of policing are astronomical.
I cannot offer any specific comments right now, other than perhaps bringing the matter back to the justice committee to talk about that issue once the amendments have gone through. We might have to install some kind of a review process and hear from attorneys general as to how effective it is.
One very brief thing is that there is a bit of a loophole that criminals could avoid forfeiting their property. In the legislation, as I understand it, a court may also decline to make an order of forfeiture against the property if the court considers it in the interests of justice. Is it in the interests of justice if a lawyer, for example, is not getting paid, his criminal client has all this illegal money and the judge says that it may be in the interest of justice that the lawyer scoop all the money as opposed to the Crown?
We have to be a little clearer in terms of the discretion we are giving to the courts in this context. The money may never flow to the provinces or to the federal government if there is that kind of loophole. That is one thing we need to examine in the committee.