Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for pointing out that it would be wrong to point out any particular ethnic group or type of people when we are criticizing what I call loansharking and leg-breaking, et cetera. It certainly was not my intention, but under section 347 of the Criminal Code dealing with usury, which is what the term is when a rate of interest is charged which is higher than that allowed by law, there has been only one charge in recent years. It was the province of Manitoba that levied the charge against the company and it is still tied up in endless appeals.
We are concerned that there has been a lack of enforcement, which should not be a matter for politics or the political realm, but for some reason, I suppose, there has been no confidence that we can make these charges stick. Without legislation that accurately reflects the reality of what is going on in the marketplace, and without a modern, efficient language, we are not going to be able to make those charges stick.
My colleague's point is well taken. We need to modernize the Criminal Code so that it at least bears some resemblance to what is actually going on out there in modern-day Canada.
This is a fairly recent innovation and it takes evil people to exploit it. I do not know how they devise these schemes, but bad people stumble across these opportunities and exploit them. They research them. They do not just look for loopholes. They look for poorly enforced clauses of the Criminal Code. That is what has happened. It is against the law to charge 2,000% interest, but these people had the temerity to try. When they did not get busted, more people were motivated to try, and then more and more. Word spread like wildfire.
If one is of the human nature of that sort, who would willingly exploit people and capitalize on human misery, this is a golden opportunity. If one is that kind of person and is that low as a human being, the Government of Canada and our criminal justice system apparently are not going to interfere, because we have appealed to the government. We have tried. We have begged. We brought it to the highest level and nobody seemed willing to interfere with what these guys were up to.