Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to speak to Bill C-15.
There are three Royal Canadian Legions in my riding. I am proud that these legions help our veterans and active military service people. I have met with many Canadian veterans who tell me about the issues that are important to them. Bill C-15 is about military justice, which is an important issue.
I am happy to raise my concerns today with the House over a misguided policy that would ultimately hurt members of the Canadian Forces. Bill C-15 proposes some solutions to ongoing problems with military justice, but this is also not the first attempt to deal with such problems.
I will start by noting that our country's military service men and women are held to a very high standard when defending Canadian values abroad, values of democracy, justice and peace. The Canadian Forces deserve a military justice system that respects these values in all instances, including the grievance system and complaints commissions. The Conservative government chose not to do that.
The government has decided to go against an amendment already passed at committee, which would allow changes to the composition of the grievance board to include a 60% civilian membership, amended clause 11 in Bill C-41. The parliamentary committee's recommendation was simple, and that was that some members of the Canadian Forces Grievance Board should be drawn from civil society.
Why did the Conservatives not retain the amendments proposed by the NDP that passed during the study of Bill C-41 last spring? By failing to include these amendments in Bill C-15, the Conservatives undermine the recommendations of the Canadian Forces representatives during the last session of Parliament.
When defining the grievance process and highlighting its importance, the Lamer report in 2003 stated:
—unlike in other organizations, grievors do not have unions or employee associations through which to pursue their grievances...It is essential to the morale of CF members that their grievances be addressed in a fair, transparent, and prompt manner.
That is one of the primary reasons we cannot understand why the NDP's proposed amendments to Bill C-41 have been dropped. I will continue to speak about the reasons why we will unfortunately not be able to vote in favour of this bill.
This bill was introduced after a series of bills that were passed in the House of Commons over the past 10 years. First there were bills C-7 and C-45, which died on the order paper when Parliament was prorogued in 2007 and the election was held in 2008. In July 2008, the government introduced Bill C-60, which came back stronger and simplified the structure, but it too died on the order paper. In 2009, the Senate Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs studied this bill and recommended nine amendments, but it went no further.
In 2010, Bill C-41 was introduced, and it reached committee stage, where amendments were proposed. Unfortunately, it too died on the order paper. That brings us to Bill C-15. As my colleagues have mentioned, amendments had been proposed in committee and accepted, but they are now being dropped.
I would like to comment on what my colleague just said about the arrogance of the government. It repeatedly tells us that we do not want to work with it, that we vote against its bills and that we are opposed to all kinds of things. Then it comes and tells us that we are opposing a better bill on military justice for veterans.
This bill contains many things that we cannot accept. Furthermore, we had proposed some amendments that I believe were very appropriate. We had recommended changes to the composition of the grievance board to have it consist of 60% civilians. We had recommended that authority be given to the Chief of Defence Staff in the grievance process, in direct response to a recommendation made in the Lamer report.
We had proposed that a person convicted of an offence in a summary trial ought not to be unfairly subjected to a criminal record.
I would like to return to the criminal record. At the moment, the Canadian Forces system is very strict and discipline is very important. These people represent our country. They have to be upright, fair and, as it were, highly disciplined.
At the moment, five of the offences considered minor do not lead to a criminal record. This means that out of 27 such offences, 22 can lead to a criminal record.
I have not looked at my list, but my colleague from Trois-Rivières just mentioned that one of the offences was being absent without leave. I find it ridiculous that being absent without leave can result in a criminal record.
I am going to tell you about a personal experience. Before coming to this place, I taught adults at two schools, in Sherbrooke and Quebec City. Unfortunately, a lot of young adults in my courses had criminal records. They told me how much that restricted their lives and complicated their efforts to look for work, for example. They always had to answer the question about whether they had a criminal record. They obviously had to tell the truth. Those people told the truth. They said they had a criminal record. Naturally, that can scare an employer. If you are more knowledgeable and you know what sort of behaviour resulted in a criminal record, that can change things.
Having a criminal record can also prevent you from travelling. It is harder to go to the United States, for example. Someone who has completed his military career and saved up money to go to the United States and spend a weekend with his children at Disneyland could be denied entry to the United States because he has a criminal record. This can take on grotesque proportions.
I feel we have an opportunity to change that. Some things are abnormal and disproportionate. You can have a criminal record for being absent without leave. These are things that we can change, and we should seize the opportunity to do so since we are studying the bill.
The government tells us that the wheels of bureaucracy grind slowly and that moving things forward takes a long time. I agree: sometimes it does take a long time and that is why we have been studying the bill for 10 years.
We do not want this bill to die on the order paper. We want it to be passed, but passed logically and responsibly so as to move things forward.
We can decide that some offences that are considered minor will not result in a criminal record. This is the opportunity to do so now, and we must not miss it.
I wanted to add to what the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association says, that military officers who impose sentences at summary trials want to maintain unit discipline and discourage future offences—everything is fine to that point—not to inflict on the accused consequences consistent with having a criminal record in the civilian world.
The British Columbia Civil Liberties Association thus emphasizes the fact that a criminal record has consequences in the civilian world. We would not want to go too far.
As I mentioned earlier in my speech, it is very important for the military world to be highly disciplined, but this goes a little too far.
We are definitely in favour of reforming the legislation concerning the military system.
The bill does not go far enough. Only 28 of Justice Lamer's 88 recommendations were adopted, not even half. None of the amendments put forward by the NDP was adopted either. In our view, this bill does not go far enough, and we will vote against it in the next vote for that reason.