Mr. Speaker, I heard someone say from the other side that there were none, and that is not being fair.
I also want to say to the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada that I am sorry I referred to him earlier as the parliamentary secretary for public safety. I think that was actually a compliment to him, but I will leave it at this point.
In terms of judicial review of both sections that are purported to be renewed and extended at this time, the parliamentary secretary raised a number of provisions that were safeguards. In that regard, I want to say again that it was part of the fight we in the NDP had to try to build in as many safeguards as possible at that time in 2001 when we were trying to minimize the draconian aspects. We pressed to have them included.
However, the bottom line is this. We live in a country where the rule of law applies, and we can only rely, and I say this to members of Parliament, on our judges to the degree that we give them discretion. If we give them discretion to impose, and I am going to use the preventive detention areas as an example, there are provisions in there that give sweeping powers to our judges as to what conditions they can impose on an individual after they conduct the initial investigation and the initial hearings.
Those initial hearings, by the way, are going to be very limited in terms of what the person is going to be able to do to defend themselves, because he or she is not going to be told a lot about what the evidence is against them. That is a provision in the anti-terrorism legislation. The person is entitled to representation. We see this with the way our security certificates function. We have authorized our judges to be able to review this in a system that is totally contrary to our criminal justice system in many respects, and which has been criticized by those same judges, but we are in effect forcing them to function. That is what this legislation does.
Up to this point it has not been used, but if it ever is, what we are really doing is switching from saying that we as a Parliament, as legislators for this country, are saying that these are the standards we have to meet. We are lowering those standards and then saying to the judges that it is within these scopes and these parameters that they operate. That is really what we are doing.
That is what we have done with the security certificates. That is why it is so necessary to get rid of them.
This is what we are doing. We are replicating the same system in this act, we really are. It says that we are going to shuffle this off to the judges, but we are going say to the judges that this is the authority they now have, which they did not have before because our Charter of Rights and Freedoms would not let them do that before. We are now empowering them to do that.
As members may know from the number of times I have criticized the current government for its attack on the judiciary, I am a great supporter of our judiciary. I believe we have the best judiciary in the world, but they are not perfect. We can go back historically and point to any number of times when they have transgressed and have not protected the rights and freedoms of people in this country.