Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak to Bill C-286. The intent of it may be admirable. We all know of spouses who need protection in one form or another. Many organizations across the country and in my own province assist spouses who are having difficulty and need protection. Most of these cases involve women, but not all the cases with which we end up dealing.
As the individual before me said, the purpose of the bill is to extend the scope of the witness protection program to include persons whose lives are in danger because of acts committed by their spouses. Somebody can correct me if I am wrong, but in my reading of the bill it does not indicate if the acts are criminal or not. The wording of the bill is very broad and that gets legislation in difficulty from time to time.
The Bloc critic said that the approach was basically the wrong vehicle to do what was intended here. I agree with that criticism. That member also mentioned the cost of implementing this kind of protection. We are looking at anywhere in the range of $400,000 to $500,000 per individual. I believe those kinds of dollars could be used in better ways than what has been proposed in the bill.
This is a poorly thought out proposal. Beyond that, there is the issue of the human resources that would be required to manage this kind of protection. Personnel are involved. I realize dollars are available, but what will the impact be on the RCMP? The government opposite has gone to great lengths to talk about increasing the number of police officers, and that is a good thing. It is following on what we did previously. The way the bill is currently designed could in fact draw down those numbers and the human resources originally intended would not be there.
Others have spoken of the difficulty of qualifying to get into the witness protection program itself. This bill would change the thrust of the program from the way it was originally designed to operate. In my former capacity as a minister, I looked at this program fairly closely. There have been lots of complaints about its operations, everything from not enough funding to the lack of support to build a new life and a new identity. That also is one of the difficulties in the design of the bill.
First and foremost, individuals suffer the trauma of facing the abusing spouses and needing protection from that abuse. Fear and intimidation goes along with that abuse. Then they are put into a program where they lose, to a great extent, their former identity. Where is the counselling that will be needed? It is not in the bill. Moneys would be far better spent in that area, although the government opposite seems to be more comfortable building jails and that kind of stuff rather than building infrastructure to deal with some of these problems. The government does not seem willing to put infrastructure in place that would assist those people who need counselling, protection and support.
One of the great criticisms of the current witness protection program is that individuals lose that typical history that they have with their identity. There is the inability to get a job because they have changed to a great extent their life. There is also the difficulty in terms of getting references. They do not have the history to get an identification.