Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to speak to Bill C-51. Fortunately, I have the time to do that, despite the fifth time allocation motion in five days and the thirty-eighth since the beginning of this Parliament.
Since this is my first opportunity to speak to this bill, I want to point out that this morning, the Minister of Public Safety stated that everyone was in agreement on this bill and that since no amendments had been put forward, a debate was pointless. Yet I have been here since early evening and I have been listening to a very interesting discussion on available resources and on the next steps to be taken in the area of witness protection, which is the focus of Bill C-51. This underscores the importance of having a debate to bring these problems to light. Even if these are not settled this time around, at least we will be able to proceed with due diligence in future.
That said, to echo the words of my colleagues, I want to say that the NDP will be supporting this bill since it favours improvements to the witness protection program. Many criticisms have been levelled against the program since it was first introduced in 1996. To finally see the government make some improvements is a positive step, even if it has taken far too long, in our opinion. We will therefore be voting in favour of this bill.
However, as I said, a number of problem areas were discussed this evening. I would like to focus on a few of them.
The first one is very important and may seem rather ironic to some extent, since it concerns witness protection. This bill disregards an important recommendation contained in the report released in the wake of the Air India tragedy. This recommendation focused on the transparency, review and accountability of the program.
It is important because, as I said earlier this evening when I put a question to one of my colleagues, the RCMP oversees the witness protection program, but often it ends up investigating the very same individuals at the same time. Often these persons are also implicated in the crimes in question. Therefore, there is a conflict of interest, so to speak, and that can be a problem.
Therefore, accountability and transparency mechanisms need to be put in place. This is extremely important in order to ensure that the RCMP acts properly. I want to stress that this is not a criticism of the RCMP's work, which is excellent. The members of the RCMP are deserving of our praise, but at the same time, in a society like ours, it is vitally important to have in place mechanisms to ensure transparency.
This is one of the important problems highlighted, particularly since this recommendation was contained in a report drafted in the wake of events having to do with witness protection. There is no reason why the government could not include these mechanisms in this bill. We hope to see this happen in the future.
The other major problem is obviously the issue of resources, which has been noted repeatedly. This is interesting because the Conservative Party member who preceded me said that all the NDP wanted was resources and spending. However, what is funny is that we in fact want to avoid burying the provinces and municipalities under more expenses. We are facilitating co-operation between the RCMP and local and provincial authorities. If we improve co-operation and expand witness protection admission criteria, more people will actually enter the program. Consequently, more spending will be incurred. That seems obvious to me.
The question thus arises as to who will absorb those costs. The RCMP, of course, already has resources, but municipal and provincial authorities will receive more applications and will accept more of them as a result of more flexible criteria, and they will have to cover the necessary costs.
However, municipal and provincial authorities are very concerned. We know they are because that is what we heard in committee. The RCMP is not concerned because it says it has the necessary resources, and that is a good thing.
As for provincial and municipal authorities, as my colleague from Toronto—Danforth said, everything will depend on how the federation is managed, how the government works under collaborative federalism.
I think it is a major problem for the government to introduce a bill when there has been very little consultation, knowing that it will result in additional costs. That is one of the criticisms we want to make.
I will conclude by saying that we support the bill. However, we wanted to point out those two extremely significant deficiencies. However, we hope that we will be able to rectify the situation in future and that this will be a lesson to the government to co-operate more with local authorities so that they can lower their costs and not succumb to the effects of bills that, like this one, are introduced unilaterally.