Mr. Speaker, I want to begin by making a statement, which is that suspicion is not guilt.
This past summer I had the occasion to travel to Edmonton to speak to some new Canadians and then some well-established Canadians from the Muslim community.
I was sitting with a gentleman who had been in Canada for 30 years. He had been a contributing member to the society in Edmonton for 30 years and was well respected in his community and in the broader community. He was telling me how, following 9/11, investigative officers from CSIS would drop by and speak to him about all the money that he was sending home, the money he had been sending home for 30 years to raise the standard of living for his family in his homeland, a commitment that we would all do.
In fact, I myself celebrated an anniversary recently of 40 years moving from New Brunswick to Ontario. In some people's minds that is like coming to a new world, at least it was in the sixties. Some of the good Canadians from the east coast would send some of their money back home in the same way. I was never questioned but perhaps I was fortunate that it was a different time or that I had different colour skin than the other gentleman.
What is happening to us as a country is a tragedy. It is an affront to our democratic processes that has occurred in the reaction that has followed 9/11. It has followed the Americans' approach to 9/11 and the Americans' fight on terrorism.
I rise to speak on security certificates, but I wish to heaven I would never have to do this again. I believe, along with the rest of the NDP caucus, that Bill C-3 continues to fail Canada and Canadians.
Canadians are not more free because of Bill C-3 and they certainly are not feeling any more secure. Furthermore, the NDP opposes Bill C-3 because, as we have heard repeatedly in this place, there are already measures in our Criminal Code to deal with the activities, to deal with crimes against Canada and crimes against Canadians. Security certificates themselves fail Canadians in a grand fashion.
A security certificate does not allow the presentation of evidence that would support the accusations against a person who is accused or suspected of terrorist activity. Instead, the security certificate simply removes the individual from Canada and in doing so, in my opinion and as expressed earlier by the member for Trinity—Spadina, it fails Canadians. If the individual is actually guilty, then a process should be enacted in this country to deal with that guilt.
A security certificate does not offer or support justice for either the accused or for Canadians. In fact, security certificates in themselves are an affront to Canada's national sense of what justice is. If the accused is guilty, the person should be charged and tried under our Criminal Code and the appropriate penalties applied and then the person should be deported, but not held in detention without the opportunity to face his or her accusers or see the evidence against him or her.
There is another side to this. The people in detention who proclaim their innocence and have not had a chance to speak to it in a court of law, the day comes when they are found to be innocent. If they had gone through our Criminal Code procedures, our courts, our justice system, they would have had a right to return to Canadian life, to pick up where they had left off, pick up the pieces. But they have spent years upon years in detention and again they have not been able to see the evidence against them, to refute the evidence, the most fundamental tenets of our justice system. That has put a chill through our country.
I alluded to the individual in Edmonton, Alberta, but there are more cases than that individual. Talk to Mr. Almalki who was detained in a cell which was more like a coffin for three months. We all know the case of Maher Arar. We all know when we fail, and we are setting ourselves up for failure again.
I am pausing because I tend sometimes to get a little emotional. I was raised to take great pride in our justice system, the fact that people can face their accusers and walk away. I am going to be speaking later today about a family incident and I will give a small piece of it here to make the point of what I understand is our justice system.
My sister was strangled to death as a 10-year-old child. My father was mistakenly accused of that crime. We were a poor family. A great fear went through us that we would not be able to save my father from those accusations. Later he was proved to be innocent and there was a mentally disturbed person in the family who was dealt with and spent time in an appropriate hospital following that. Let us consider for a moment the place we are putting people, where they cannot face their accusers and they cannot refute the evidence, and how terrible that is.
From time to time I will do my best to take a breath, but it is so crucially important to the sense of justice that all Canadians have that the people in this place pause, stop the rhetoric and think about the deterioration of our justice system if we gerrymander process, to put in place a process like this that is so ugly and disgusting. I cannot understand how anybody in this place could support it.
Our Criminal Code is among the best. Our justice system is among the best in the world. Canada will send people to other parts of the world to teach them our justice system. We should keep that pride. One of the few ways we can keep that pride is to ensure individual rights and the rights for people to face their accusers and the evidence against them.
For the NDP, the security certificate is an affront to civil liberties. There is a sense in my gut of how wrong this is that I just cannot put it aside.
We understand with Bill C-3 that the Conservative federal government is trying to address a flaw in the process that was pointed out by the Supreme Court. It is far more than a flaw. What it is trying to do today is move around something that was a violation of our Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
We should think about rights and freedoms for a moment. We should think about the fact that there are individuals detained in our country. Their freedom has been taken away and they have no rights. We have a Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Imagine the setting aside of well respected, fundamental terms of justice and how that was so cavalierly done. The detainees have not seen any of the critical evidence against them. Their legal representation has not seen the evidence against them.
Let us just say that tomorrow, for whatever reason, it is deemed acceptable that they return to Canadian society, that there had been an error. They will always be besmirched by the fact that they have been detained. They will always live beside neighbours who doubt them. If they returned to their country of origin, many of the countries those folks would return to are countries where we know torture is committed. It is time for our country to take a strong stand for the liberty, for the human rights of our citizens and guests in our country, as well.