Madam Speaker, I am pleased to take part in the debate on Bill C-52, Retribution on Behalf of Victims of White Collar Crime Act.
I believe this is something that has unfortunately affected too many victims in recent years. We have every right to expect the government to amend legislation to reflect this situation, which is not new. However, in the context of the deregulation of financial markets and changes in technology that now make possible operations previously impossible to hide or to carry out, it is clear that the government must modernize our laws in this regard.
Unfortunately, the bill the government has introduced is way off the mark. In fact, it appears more like a public relations operation to show that the government is doing something. It looks more like a public relations move in keeping with the ideological battle the Conservatives are waging to introduce into Canada a sort of justice based on the American model, which is currently being challenged by the harsh economic reality.
In California, for example, more is spent on the prison system than on universities, because the laws have been tightened over the years automatically and without thought. The problem is a serious one. California, on the brink of bankruptcy, has had to release 40,000 prisoners because it could no longer feed them.
In order to avoid the extremes a number of American states had to face, it seems to me there should be a much more vigorous and broad public debate on the type of justice we want, rather than what the Conservatives are offering us. They in fact are offering us measures piecemeal that aim to establish a justice system that has nothing to do with the values of Quebeckers and Canadians, I am convinced, with no public debate and no real examination of all the aspects.
This bill is therefore off the mark, as it will not contribute in any way to fighting white collar crime. On the contrary, it includes a whole series of neo republican Conservative themes, on minimum sentences, for example. I will come back to this.
There should be a debate on the way to modernize our laws, in matters of justice, in particular, but it applies to everything to do with the regulation of the financial sector. It is very clear that we cannot continue in the environment engendered by the 1990s. There must be new regulations for the financial sector worldwide and within individual countries. The debate must get underway. It is in this context that the Bloc Québécois has decided to vote in favour of this bill, even if it does not meet the target it claims it wants to meet, so that it may be studied in committee. At that point we can introduce measures that might bring real solutions to white collar crime.
Very clearly, this kind of debate cannot be held piecemeal, as the Conservatives are trying to do with nearly half of the bills before us amending the Criminal Code or dealing with the justice system. We have to have a genuine debate where all of the principles on which a justice system should be based are front and centre in the public discussion. Obviously, the members of this House must be participants, but Canadian and Quebec society as a whole must also take part. The bill will be considered in committee and a number of proposals will be made that seem to us to be much more promising than what we see in the bill. Once again, the bill does not reach all the targets it says it wishes to reach.
When we look at it closely, as I will have an opportunity to do in a moment, we see there is a fly in the soup, as one of my friends used to say. That means there are some hitches, some measures are proposed that are essentially a smokescreen.
I will start right off with the question of minimum sentences. The Conservatives want to implement minimum sentences everywhere.
We are currently debating Bill C-42, which proposes to eliminate conditional sentences in order to create two things at opposite ends of the spectrum. We will have either suspended sentences or minimum sentences of imprisonment for two years. That is going to be completely untenable for judges. We will have situations in which accused persons who should have been given a conditional sentence, for example, find themselves with suspended sentences or with no sentence at all, in order to avoid a minimum of imprisonment for two years. There will also be people who will be sentenced to two years for whom a different approach should have been taken, in terms of rehabilitation. What we are seeing in C-52 is a debate that has run through this entire Parliament, an obsession on the part of the Conservatives.
Minimum sentences serve no purpose. That is shown by every study, and I think the example of Americans, or of the USA, as my colleague from Sherbrooke likes to say, demonstrates this clearly. That society has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, and that incarceration rate in fact has a perverse effect, because it artificially lowers the unemployment rate. Every time the unemployment rate in Canada and Quebec is compared to the rate in the United States, we have to add 1 to 1.5 percentage points to it. There are so many people in prison, for all sorts of sometimes relatively minor offences that could be remedied by other kinds of interventions. As I said, the incarceration rate means that an entire segment of the population that could be in the labour force is artificially and temporarily eliminated from the statistics.
That does not have any dissuasive effect. The United States is not a society at peace with itself. People may feel safe, but they do not feel at peace. They close themselves off now in gated communities where they are isolated from society. This is not a well-integrated society at peace with itself. It is not even real safety, just the appearance of safety. This is what happens in a country that has increased the number of offences with minimum sentences. They have no dissuasive effect.
Fraud over $1 billion is pretty rare. Not only is it unusual, but when it happens, the sentences are for more than two years. A provision was included in Bill C-52, but it is just for show, to say that the Conservatives will be tougher. The reality is that whenever there is fraud over $1 million, judges take all the circumstances into account and pass sentences of more than two years. The Conservatives are flogging a dead horse here, but no one is fooled. It is just an insidious ideological campaign conducted around justice and how justice is perceived.
When we asked the Minister of Public Works to give us an example of a case of fraud over $1 million in which the sentence was for less than two years, he was unable to provide one because these cases do not exist.
In cases of fraud of this magnitude, the sentences are about six or seven years.
The Conservatives created the impression they are passing tougher laws, but it is just a public relations exercise. This may also have been a bill that was quickly cobbled together by the Conservative government in view of the disgust expressed by much of the public and the victims of the various fraudsters. There were Vincent Lacroix and Earl Jones, of course, but also various other people in financial and business circles who have behaved badly over the last few years. I am thinking, for example, of the fiddling with the books at Nortel and at Enron in the United States. The government probably wanted to act in view of all the public pressure but did something that will not produce results. This bill is terribly makeshift.
They have also added aggravating circumstances. If you look at the court's decision in the Vincent Lacroix case, you will find that all the aggravating circumstances put in the bill by the government—for example, the psychological effects of fraud on the victims—were included in the reasons given by the judge, in the Vincent Lacroix case, to justify his sentence. If my memory serves me well, he was sentenced to 12 or 13 years.
Once again they are flogging a dead horse. They are trying to give the impression that they are making tougher laws to deal with economic crimes and white collar criminals. But in fact they are just codifying the existing decision-making process used by the courts.
Restitution orders are another example. It is quite logical to ask fraudsters to return the stolen money to victims when possible. However, these restitution orders already exist. They are expanded somewhat in the bill.
We can also question whether or not it would be feasible, in the case of Vincent Lacroix, Earl Jones and many others, to recover the money—given that nothing is being done about the means used by these fraudsters to make it disappear, either through financial schemes or tax havens. I will come back to that.
The prohibition restricting the activities of convicted offenders is interesting. But that, too, is an existing practice whose scope has been broadened.
When we take stock of what Bill C-52 has to offer, we find that there is nothing new in the bill and that the measures are often inferior to what we already have in our system.
I would like to mention the example of the minimum sentence of two years once again. If the current standard is six or seven years, are they giving judges and the courts a signal that sentences should be lower? That is exactly how this bill, if it is ever passed, could be interpreted by some judges.
So they missed the target. The Bloc is taking it to committee in order to broaden the debate on the real ways to fight economic crime. One of these ways is advocated by the legal profession and those who write about crime or legal matters and it is eliminating the granting of parole after one-sixth of the sentence has been served.
Since the start of the week, the responses by the Minister of Public Works and Government Services and the Minister of Justice have intimated that this is a highly complex matter, when in fact, it is a matter of repealing two sections of the Criminal Code.
A decade ago, parole was not granted after one-sixth of a sentence had been served. This practice appeared over the course of the years. So, we could backtrack, given that it does not allow for criminals found guilty to be sentenced or to serve much of their prison term. So the matter of serving one-sixth of a sentence can easily be reversed by repealing the two sections that gave rise to this measure.
They do not get it. There is no logic in the responses by the Minister of Public Works and Government Services and the Minister of Justice. Why is the government delaying the implementation of this measure, which has the full support of all groups and which would be very easy to implement?
Today in question period, the leader of the Bloc Québécois wondered whether the Conservative government—and this brings me back to my introduction—did not want to use a perfectly logical, effective and fully supported measure, namely eliminating parole after one-sixth of a sentence has been served, in order to include other measures which are far less popular, effective and transparent.
We are used to having these little poison pills with the Conservative government in connection with perfectly valid measures that have the support of consensus and has been proposed often by the opposition. I would point out that the Bloc has been proposing eliminating parole after one-sixth of a sentence since 2007. This is not something we invented in response to the white collar crimes of recent months. It comes from in-depth study by the Bloc and its supporters over the years. This is what we fear, and our fears are based on experience.
One I remember, for example, is the bill that created a whole set of tax measures, into which the government had inserted a little, tiny clause that meant that funding could be denied for films or works that were considered not to be in the public interest. If I recall correctly, that was Bill C-10. No one had noticed it in this House, in spite of the work done by the Standing Committee on Finance. The Senate noticed it, and the government, rather than take responsibility for the problem and eliminate it, did its utmost to try to keep it. This is one example, but we have seen a number of others over the several sessions since this Conservative government has been in office.
Eliminating parole after one-sixth of sentence would be an extremely easy thing to do. We could include it in this bill. We could even, in the cases of Vincent Lacroix and Earl Jones, make sure that the two of them serve a healthy portion of their sentences rather than what will be the case as a result of this government’s inaction. In January 2011, Vincent Lacroix will be as free as a bird, or very nearly. I cite these two examples again because they are the best known in Quebec.
This bill does not include those elements. Another major element that has not been talked about and that the government does not want to talk about is the question of tax havens. I come back to what I said a moment ago. This means that people commit fraud and think they will be able to come out of it just fine, based not just on the fact that they will be released after one-sixth of their sentence, but also on the fact that as a result of all sorts of mechanisms that are allowed under the Canadian Income Tax Act, that money will be sitting in tax havens, safe from the Canadian tax authorities. The negligence of the Conservative government on this issue is blatant.
Two weeks ago, Statistics Canada revealed that, if I recall correctly, there is $146 billion owing from Canadian taxpayers. These are mainly very wealthy individuals. As we know, an ordinary taxpayer does not have the resources to pay the accountants and lawyers they need to make use of all these mechanisms. There are also companies, the banks among them. We know that the Canadian banks, in particular, use tax havens to a huge extent. This is money that is sitting in tax havens, as a result of negligence on the part of Liberal or Conservative governments. Eventually, when these fraud artists are released, they are going to be able to get the victims’ money back, safe from the Canadian justice system and Canadian tax authorities and, it has to be said, with the complicity of the Conservative government of Canada.
Here is one of the examples we gave this week. It had to do with signing an agreement to weaken the border between Panama and Canada. Everyone knows that Panama is a tax haven. It is notorious. We just signed an agreement to make it even easier to transfer money from Canada to Panama. That is completely counter to current policy directions espoused by responsible governments, such as the administrations of President Obama and President Sarkozy, who have condemned the situation and are seeking solutions. Not only are our government and our Minister of Finance not seeking solutions, they are creating new problems.
Here is another example in addition to the agreement with Panama. They are not doing anything about the tax agreement with Barbados. When the Conservatives were in opposition, they made much of the fact that Canada Steamship Lines, which belonged to the Minister of Finance, Paul Martin, who later became Prime Minister, used schemes allowed in Barbados to avoid paying taxes in Canada. Not only have they maintained the tax agreement with Barbados since coming to power, they have reversed a decision made in one of the budgets to prevent double deduction of interest in the case of foreign investment. We are moving backward instead of forward like almost all of the other G20 countries.
It is all smoke. We will study the bill in committee and come up with concrete solutions for the justice system, specifically with regard to the practice of serving only one-sixth of a sentence, and, more generally, for ways to curb the use of tax havens by fraudsters who shelter their assets from Canadian justice and tax law, and we will find ways to give the stolen money back to the victims. That is what the Bloc Québécois will do in committee.
