Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure today to speak on Bill C-25, An Act to amend the Proceeds of Crime (Money Laundering) and Terrorist Financing Act and the Income Tax Act and to make a consequential amendment to another Act.
At the outset, I will illustrate for a moment why this is so important. Let us look at a place half a world away where our troops our dying. When President Karzai was here, he said “if the poppy crop is not eradicated, then the poppy crop will destroy Afghanistan”. I believe all members remember that. If we do not eradicate the poppy crop in Afghanistan, it will eradicate Afghanistan.
Why is this important and how does this connect to the bill. The poppy crop is a substrate upon which narcotics are made, in particular heroin. That heroin is processed and sold. It goes on to cause untold hardship, pain, suffering and sometimes death within our country and with many other countries in the world. That heroin also enables organized crime gangs to make enormous amounts of mount.
We could put an advertisement on television, “Use heroin and support the terrorists”. If people use heroin, they are providing the money that enables our troops to be killed in Afghanistan.
Drugs are one of a number of products that are used by organized crime and terrorist organizations. They provide the funds that enable them to buy weapons and infrastructure to carry out terrorist activities against us and our allies, which cause untold instability in various parts of the world.
In fact, if we do not get a hold on the poppy crop in Afghanistan, the mission there will never be successful. That is why it is critically important, and we have heard this recently, that the west not change its approach to drugs. However, if we go in and wipe out vast poppy crops, it leaves farmers with absolutely nothing. That is why some of those people are joining what we call the neo-Taliban. This is not the same group of Taliban that was there in 2001-02. It is a new group. Part of that group is made up of farmers who have had their livelihood removed. As a result, they have joined the Taliban and taken up arms against us.
The failure to deal with the poppy crop not only is a failure to deal with the economic wherewithal to engage in actions against our troops and against our allies, but it also is a poison and does not enable Afghanistan to get on its feet. My personal view is that we need to call a regional meeting to deal with the poppy crop. I personally hope the crop is bought, destroyed and other alternative crops are given to those farmers.
Unless we can provide those farmers with an alternative form of living, when we go in there and wipe out their livelihood, then we have left them with nothing for themselves, their families and their communities. If we do not, they go from being a subsistence farmer to abject poverty. With the Taliban holding out its arms and also some money for these farmers, they take up arms against us.
This is the on the ground reality of why the bill is important and why it is important for us to deal with the poppy crop and the drug trade.
Let us look at South America and Colombia where cocoa is produced. Colombia is the primary cocaine producer in the world. The United States spends $800 million a year in its so-called war against drugs. It is a war that will never be won.
Organized crime gangs and terrorist groups are the ones that feed off the products of cocaine, the FARC, the ELN, the paramilitary. Those groups are not ideological groups. They are organized crime groups, organized militias, that make money from the drug trade. Interestingly enough, those groups in South American are also attached to al-Qaeda. They are all connected again to what we are talking about here, which is trade in money laundering, the trade in various products.
Another point I want to talk about is gems. If we look at west Africa and countries such as Sierra Leone and Liberia, where people live in abject poverty, diamonds can be found on the ground.
One will find in these areas organized crime gangs working with various local warlords, so to speak, in order to take those diamonds, pay a small amount of money and earn huge profits from them. The reason why diamonds are used is that they are very easy to move around. They are very difficult to track. It is very easy to sell them for very high amounts of money, with huge profit margins.
That is what these organized crime gangs rely on. They rely on huge profit margins on products that can be bought and sold very easily to make the large amounts of money that are used in their nefarious activities.
According to the police, the most effective way to deal with these issues and with organized crime gangs, which I would put at the forefront for us domestically, is to cut the money supply out from underneath them. That is what this bill does.
My colleague articulated a number of our party's concerns with the bill. It is not that we oppose the bill. We would like to strengthen it.
What the United States did was very bright. The Americans adopted something called the RICO amendments, the racketeer influenced and corrupt organizations charges. What they recognized is that the best and easiest way to undermine organized crime gangs is to go after the money. If we go after the money, we weaken them.
When the Liberals were in government we actually put together RICO-like amendments for our country. We have proceeds of crime legislation. I think it needs to be strengthened and I would encourage the government to look at it to ensure that we have the ability to take away those resources.
I will give members one example. There is one thing that can be done. If people have made vast sums of money and have been charged and convicted of organized criminal activity, then the onus should be upon their shoulders to prove that their large wealth was actually generated from honest, law-abiding means. If we actually make the change that the police have requested, then we will be able to go a long way in removing the resources that tend to continue to circulate through organized criminal activities.
Getting back to trafficking in gemstones, one of the things the Liberals put together, and which the government should look at, is the Kimberley process. Through the Kimberley process, it was the first time we were able to deal with blood diamonds. Not only diamonds are addressed, but other semi-precious gemstones that can be easily trafficked are as well. We have to do a better job of strengthening the Kimberley process so we are able to ensure that legal gemstones are traded, bought and sold but that we stop the illegal trade in so-called blood diamonds and other gemstones.
It is critically important that this is dealt with, because countries like Liberia, Sierra Leone and Angola will never be able to get on their feet unless those natural resources are actually used and bought and sold legally, with the moneys poured back into the countries that produce them. In that way, these countries can build up their primary infrastructure, health care and education for the benefit of the people. If that does not happen, the people of these countries will continue to live in abject poverty and will never be able get out of their current poverty cycle.
The other issue relates to oil and what is called bunkering. What is happening now in west Africa from Angola to Nigeria is that oil is extracted, but ships come alongside where the oil is produced and a certain percentage of the oil is put onto these ships and disappears. Oil is bought and sold illegally and those moneys can then be used to fund terrorist activities. It is a very lucrative area that is not explored, but unless we deal with this, it is going to be a major problem.
A lot of those moneys wind up in Swiss bank accounts and in other areas where the tax regimes are not as transparent as they are in countries such as ours. These regimes are very opaque even though they are those of western countries. I would encourage the government to work with other countries that currently have opaque tax regimes, to put together and establish agreement on a rules based mechanism and standard in which we could have more transparent tracking of these moneys as they wind themselves inexorably through our current international financial mechanisms.
Again I want to emphasize that a failure to do this will ensure that we will never ever get a handle on organized crime gangs, organized criminal activity, and terrorism, because these three areas rely on these transactions, on taking a product that is sometimes illegal, like narcotics and other illegal drugs, selling it for a vast profit and then laundering those moneys through legal means.
That is why Bill C-25 is so important. That is why my party is supporting it to go to committee so that we will be able to make amendments to strengthen those areas that we feel need to be strengthened.
It is important in dealing with this issue that we also listen very closely to the police. In my province of British Columbia, more than 60% of the illegal activity comes from organized criminal activity, and a large chunk of that comes from the trade in illegal drugs. I know that the government likes the approach of the so-called war against drugs, but I would submit that it is a so-called war that cannot, has not and will not be won. It simply cannot be won.
There are now only two countries in the world that officially support the so-called war on drugs approach: Canada and the United States. If we look south of the border and at the objective parameters on where this war has taken the Americans, what we see is very stark and very frightening. For example, the U.S. has a higher use of both hard and soft drugs. The Americans have higher incarceration rates, higher disease rates, higher death rates, higher sickness rates, higher HIV rates, and higher rates of hepatitis B and hepatitis C, both connected with intravenous drug use.
Why is that so? If the war on drugs was so successful, why has this approach, by any objective parameter, been an abysmal failure? Because it does not work.
So where does it work and how can it work? I think we have to take an approach that marries two groups together. The first is the provisions in this bill that could be strengthened to enable us to track, undermine and undercut the trafficking and money laundering associated with these substances. The other is a rational medical approach toward substance abuse. Where can we find that? We can find that in northern Europe. We can find that in Germany. Frankfurt has an outstanding model. The Swiss have some very good models, as do the Swedes and the Finns.
All of those countries have procedures and integrated approaches to substance abuse that are rooted not in a judicial approach but a medical approach. They involve the following components. They involve harm reduction and, yes, safe injection sites. They involve detox and psychiatric counselling. They involve training programs. They involve housing issues. They involve work.
If we take a look at all those components, we will be able to have an effect because, interestingly enough, many of the people who have substance abuse problems, particularly those we find on our streets, have what we call dual diagnoses. A lot of them also have psychiatric problems, so we cannot disconnect the people who have substance abuse problems from those who have psychiatric problems. They are connected.
To take a judicial approach against those people, I would submit, is not only factually incorrect and will be ineffective, but also it is inhumane. These people do not need to be thrown in jail. They need a medical approach that is going to help them and deal with some of the underlying problems they have, problems that can be dealt with.
I would encourage the government, which in my view has taken a very blunt and very ineffective approach against this problem, to open its eyes, deal with the statistics, look at the facts and adopt those solutions that will have an effect. All of us in all of our communities know that this is an issue that affects all of us, and none of us want to see people get into this death spiral with the use of illegal substances that can ruin lives. All of us have seen on the streets in our communities people whose lives have been destroyed, for many reasons, and it does not have to be so.
It is incumbent upon us to work with the provinces, the managers of health care, in order to be able to use and take that integrated approach. I personally would like to see that in my community, in Victoria on Vancouver Island. I would like us to be able to take on this integrated harm reduction strategy and work on the housing issues, the medical issues, the psychiatric issues, the counselling issues, the skills training issues and the work issues that are at the forefront of solutions to address this problem.
In my city of Victoria, this is a very big problem. The police are looking for help. The police recognize that this is the route to go. The police want help on this. Their hands are open, as are those of the community. I would encourage the government to listen to us and work with us to implement those solutions that will work.
In closing, for the sake of our troops in Afghanistan, for heaven's sake let us start to deal with the issue of the poppy crops in Afghanistan, in a rational approach. The poppy crop can be removed, but we have to replace it with alternative livelihoods. Afghanistan and the southern area used to be a very--
