Mr. Speaker, I agree that the regulators have primary due diligence control over many of the frauds, but not all fraud comes from the markets.
However, the three biggest incidents recently have been Vincent Lacroix, who got 13 years; Earl Jones, who I think got 11 years; and Stan Grmovsek, who got 39 months. The biggest problem with this bill is that they were treated by the law that exists probably no different from the way they would have been if this bill were law.
This law was delayed because of prorogation. Therefore, for the year or two that it has taken to get the bill this far, and by the end it is going to be three years, we have seen about $10 million more fraud committed per year, while the government did nothing.
When I say they did nothing, they brought a bill forward and then prorogued Parliament so it did not become law. That legislation, which was Bill C-52, or this one we are speaking of, Bill C-21, does not do enough either. It perhaps gives people a false hope, if they watch the six o'clock news in Conservative ridings, that the government is doing something about white collar crime. It is not very much.
They might really be just beating up on judges, taking away discretion and making sure they look at things as though they were schoolchildren, and judges are not, when in the history of the three cases I mentioned, the perpetrators, the fraudsters, were treated very severely under the existing law, more severely than this law indicates. As the old saying goes, where is the proof in the pudding of this legislation?
Hopefully we can get it to committee and we can have a broader discussion of what needs to be done to attack white collar crime and get out and address the issue that all parliamentarians care very much about.