Brian Fitzpatrick

[Canada—Costa Rica Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act, October 2nd, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, I will be voting yea to this motion.

[Supply, October 2nd, 2001]

Madam Speaker, paragraph (c) of the NDP motion seems to imply that the criminal code is deficient and our human rights commissions are not up to the task of dealing with the rising tide of intolerance and racism.

Could the hon. member for Simcoe--Grey perhaps enlighten us on that? Is the criminal code deficient in dealing with acts of racism, intolerance, hate and so on? My understanding is that there are ample provisions in the criminal code to deal with this sort of thing. Maybe he could comment on that.

[Supply, October 2nd, 2001]

Madam Speaker, I take the opposite point of view. The danger the U.S. and its allies is facing is if they are not really careful about what they do. If there are substantial injuries to the civilian population in the area it could ignite a holy war in the entire region. That would escalate the situation far beyond simply dealing with bin Laden and his terrorist cells.

This is something bin Laden would like to see happen. He is a devious and formidable opponent. He is certainly in the league of Adolf Hitler, if not even more serious than that. Part of his goal is to create an unstable world. This is a real danger. Most Muslim countries realize where this kind of thinking has taken their countries and societies. They are just as fearful about where this is leading as we are.

[Supply, October 2nd, 2001]

Madam Speaker, I agree with my colleague on the point that radical excesses in any type of religion have led to problems in history. I refer to the time of Oliver Cromwell in Great Britain, which was not a proud time in British history.

The reality is that there is a civil war in Algeria that has been ongoing for seven or eight years which involves radical Islamic movements. The Pakistani government has serious problems with that type of movement. Sudan has a similar type of government in power. Egypt has difficulties with this movement.

The Iranian revolution was not that long ago. I recall that the U.S. was the great Satan during that particular period of time. Salman Rushdie would have a few things to say about that period of time in that country.

We should not be under the illusion that we are talking about a few people in a cave in Afghanistan. The Taliban is a product of that type of thinking. These groups are a lot more significant than just a small fraction of the Islamic world. They are becoming something that we have to be aware of.

[Supply, October 2nd, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, I will address a number of important assumptions contained in the motion.

The first assumption, which is that if we had some international court in place that somehow the terrorists, the 30 cells thought to be in Germany and the people living in caves in Afghanistan, would just surrender to authorities and come to the international court of justice to be dealt with, is a fairly naive assumption. That will not happen. It flies in the face of historical experience.

I remember a person in about 1939 coming back from a meeting with Adolph Hitler in Munich. He waved a piece of paper around saying “peace in our times”. Thousands and thousands of people applauded him and said that it was a great accomplishment and that he was a man of peace.

However there was another man, Sir Winston Churchill, who said that appeasement never works with evil and terrorism. These people cannot be negotiated with. They have no respect for the rule of law.

I think we are dealing with the same sort of factor in this day and age. I have a lot of problems with the assumption built into the motion on that basis.

The other assumption I think could be very wrong is the assumption that nations under international law do not have the right to deal with criminals who have caused criminal harm in their territories. I think that is an age old international law and a law of the United Nations that nations have the right to take whatever legal action is required to protect themselves from criminal actions by individuals, and this is certainly a criminal action.

The fourth assumption is that the U.S. would be dealing with the criminals if it apprehended them and that somehow they would not get a fair shake in the American justice system. I have some problems with that assumption as well.

Anyone who is tried in the U.S. justice system has certain fundamental legal rights. People are presumed innocent until proven guilty. They are entitled to be represented by council. They are entitled to a full disclosure of the case in detail. They also have the right to determine how they are going to be tried, if by jury, to select who is on those juries. They have a concept called due process. A lot of people would say that gives the criminal element an advantage but the U.S. is one of those societies that believes it is better to err on the side of innocence. They also have a very elaborate appeal system.

The assumption is that maybe other people have a superior system and that an international court would be better. I wish the motion pointed to some real problems in this area. What about the Taliban justice system? Why does the motion not address the horrible justice systems we have in this world, such as the Taliban system where there is not really a rule of law.

The other implication suggests that the U.S. and its allies will use some very brutal, terroristic methods to deal with this matter. We are heading into week four on this matter and I have not seen a single bomb, rocket or anything fired into Afghanistan. The U.S. is taking its time. It is building a coalition. I believe it has virtually every civilized country in the world on side.

The U.S. has consulted with them and are working as a team to deal with this problem. Dealing with the motion that has been presented, the United States is working through the United Nations just as it did during the Bosnian and Serbian problem, and the gulf war.

There is an implication that the Americans will work outside of our international system. That is not the case. They are working with it.

Something I am concerned about in this area is the British. The British 1999 social democrat government, led by Prime Minister Blair, passed anti-terrorism legislation that brings them squarely within the 13 resolutions that the United Nations has passed dealing with terrorism. It does not have any problems bringing itself up to snuff with the resolutions that the United Nations passed. It fits squarely within that.

The only reason I am raising that issue is that two weeks there was a motion in the House to at least study the British anti-terrorist legislation. Members who presented the motion in the House today voted against that motion. Now they want to see action by this government to comply with United Nations resolutions. There was a way to really fast track that if they wanted to do it but they chose not to.

I want to deal with the subject of intolerance and racism. I think everybody in the House realizes that the best protection against excessive intolerance and racism is an open, democratic society where the rule of law does prevail and people are judged on the basis of their character, their individual attributes and so on, and we do not get into the business of judging people on the basis of arbitrary things, such as race, religion or some other characteristic.

I think those are the basic values of American and Canadian society. In some ways, and I think this has been said before, the very attack on the twin towers in New York City was an attack on those concepts. Our best protection against racism and intolerance is to have an open society.

The converse would be the Taliban. That would be a society where people would have legitimate concerns about excesses in terms of racism and discrimination based on religion. They execute people in that country for having a different religion.

The media in this country have some responsibility in this area. Certain town hall meetings put on by the people's network during this crisis were not conducive to bringing forward better relations between communities. I thought those town hall meetings were an attempt to reinforce some stereotypes that were not so good, the stereotypes that hate-mongers like to seize upon and use to their advantage. I thought some of those town hall meetings were not very good. They were not just toward Arabic and Muslim people, they were also with respect to attitudes toward the Americans.

A lot of closed societies in this world that do not have a strong history of respecting individual freedoms would be well advised to look at the systems that we have in the United States and Canada as a beginning point for reforming their societies.

My NDP colleagues make much of getting to the root cause of things. Maybe one of the solutions to root causes of things is the rule of law and respect for individual rights and democracy. Some of these countries have been preoccupied with dictatorial types of government where they have no respect for these sorts of things. They use scapegoats.

Someone else is always to blame for their problems. Perhaps they should look inward to their own societies to start finding the solutions from within and look at some of the success stories.

I will put on record that militant Islamic fundamentalism is a dangerous force in our world today. We are not talking about a small, insignificant element. It is a powerful and dangerous force in the modern world and goes much beyond Osama bin Laden. If we do not recognize that in the west, particularly in countries like Canada, we are doing it at our own peril.

[Supply, October 2nd, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, the act of terrorism is a disregard for the rule of law. That is an important point to make in respect to this particular motion. The motion also makes some assumptions that I would like to address.

[Supply, October 2nd, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, I certainly share the sentiments raised by the NDP with respect to the Arab and Muslim community. The folks I have talked to in that community are as outraged as I am over what happened on September 11. I think it is the vast majority of those people who feel that way.

I want to raise another issue that is springing out of this topic. I believe in the last 20 or 30 years we have promoted some half truths about the U.S. and promoted an anti-Americanism in the world. The American people were kind of foisted into the cold war. Post-second world war they became the arsenal for democracy, so to speak. I agree that a lot of things happened in the cold war that were not so nice. There was a communist battle against our ways and a lot of things happened on both sides that were not nice.

There are some points I would like to address and then I will get to the question. The Americans did not bring in the Balfour declaration. The Americans brought in the Marshall plan that rebuilt Germany and Japan. Woodrow Wilson was looked at as the founder of the United Nations. There have been three attempts to bring peace between the Arabs and the Jewish people through the Americans. I am concerned when we are talking about promoting hatred against a group that the Americans are also in this fold as well.

Yesterday the Minister of State for Multiculturalism said that people were allowed to say what they want in this country. Well I am no so sure that is the--

[Courts Administration Service Act, October 1st, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, what is the purpose of Bill C-30? It is a very simple bill consisting of 94 pages in length. The bill would establish a body that provides administrative services to the Federal Court of Appeal, the Federal Court, the Court Martial Appeal Court and the Tax Court of Canada.

What is the benefit of Bill C-30? The auditor general said one benefit might be some cost savings if the bill were passed. The member referred to the independence of the administrative side of the court system as one rationale for this. I am not sure what that has to do with the independence of the judiciary.

A third benefit we should look at is a greater efficiency of the court system, although the other side of it has a cost factor attached to it. Presumably there will be cost savings by bringing this administrative regime into being. However will people be laid off now that we are consolidating all the courts into one administrative system? If one administration system is to be instituted, will there be some labour savings from it?

Will there be empty government spaces as a result of the consolidation? Will paperwork be reduced? Who will manage this change and who will measure whether we get the results the government says we will get out of it? I do not know how clerks and other people who work in the court system have anything to do with the question of greater independence of the judiciary. Who will measure it to see whether it is worth all the time and trouble to do it?

In the name of saving some dollars and bringing greater efficiencies, there are 54 pieces of legislation affected by this one little change. How much time did lawyers in the justice department spend to find out which 54 pieces of legislation will be affected by this one minor change? How many hours did they work on it? How many hours will it take to fully implement the legislation?

If there were 1,000 copies of a piece of legislation that the government needs to carry out its duties affecting 54 pieces of legislation in both official languages plus the regulations that go with it, it could work out to something like two million pieces of paper. Yet the government says that it is for the environment and that it will not waste resources and so on.

Who will check the quality of this administrative system? We went through all the trouble of tinkering with the bill. Is there anyone in charge to see whether we will get any quality improvements from our judicial system?

There are many people outside the judicial system who have tons of complaints about the system and the lack of response to their needs when they required justice. Is there anything in the bill that measures quality improvements in the delivery of our judicial services?

Liberals believe that if there is a problem out there all they have to do is have the justice department manufacture another law and order a result. I am sure in the government's mind it could get cats to bark if it got the justice department to work on it. All the cats in Canada would be barking the minute the government passed it through the House, got it through the Senate and made it law.

This is the problem I have with the bill. It is a knee-jerk reaction to consolidate administrative services under one roof, with the assumption that all these pluses will come out of it. I am very skeptical that any real results will come out of it.

The government has a tendency to believe that if things can be centralized and consolidated they will get better. For 125 years it has managed native and aboriginal services in the country from coast to coast out of one centralized department in Ottawa. Do we have anything positive to show for that? We have welfare dependency, poverty, and a lot of problems that we do not like. That is the government's way of dealing with it.

The government said it would be a good thing if it ran our pension system to guarantee pension benefits for Canadians. What do we find after 30 years of it operating our pension system? We have a very dismal type of benefit package in relation to what people have contributed to it. We have a huge contingent liability. We are imposing huge surcharges and extra charges on other people to deliver those things.

I like the fisheries department. The government has been running the fisheries department for a long time. If I look at the fisheries correctly, the Atlantic Canada fisheries are almost dead. The B.C. fisheries are close to that. There are probably more people working in the fisheries department than there are fishermen in the country.

The Liberals have a lot of belief in that sort of thing: if they could build a few more stories on top of the justice department and pass a few more pieces of legislation then everything would look up.

With all the changes to 54 pieces of legislation how much time will it take the government to retrain all its administrative people so they can learn all the new changes that will take place? Will it be holding a whole series of meetings over the next six months to retrain people on the great changes it has introduced under Bill C-30?

That brings me to the area of whether we will get any real benefits from consolidation. At one time there was a supreme court trial division, provincial courts of appeal and the Supreme Court of Canada. We did not have the Federal Court of Canada. For over 100 years the country got along without the federal court system.

The Liberals thought they needed another court system, a federal trial division and a federal appeal level, even though we already had those in existence in the provinces with our provincial courts of appeal and trial divisions of the superior courts. The Liberals appointed those judges and set their salaries, but we had to have another layer of judges.

It is very confusing in a jurisdictional sense. It is very complex and difficult to decide where an action or proceeding should take place, whether it should go through the provincial or federal court system. However when it gets to the Supreme Court of Canada it all ends up in the same place.

If the government really wanted to consolidate things and bring some real clarity, accountability and savings in terms of tax dollars, it would consolidate the federal system with the provincial court system.

It would eliminate 200 judges and save $4 million a year at the bare minimum without even getting into all the clerical help and everything else. That is an area in which we could benefit from some consolidation, but the Liberal government does not do things that way. It does not want to downsize the empire it helped to build. A lot of its pals in the legal community would lose potential esteem by being appointed to one of these courts.

There were some comments made by a colleague about the independence of the judiciary. I have a lot of problems with that argument.

Our system is based on the British system we have inherited and refined. In the final analysis the 301 people who came to the House of Commons, providing that public sentiment is with us, should have the final say on the laws of Canada.

It is not the courts. They are not elected and not directly accountable to anybody. They are there for life or until they retire. They do not have to face the media or parliamentarians. If we say something that is not quite right for some of them, we can be held in contempt of court by them. They have a lot of power. I am disturbed at how much power we have transferred to the courts.

If we look at the Ressam case that we dealt with in the House, one of the problems with Ressam and our immigration refugee system was the courts. They decided that we did not make the rules in the House, that they did, and that if they did not like someone being sent back to some country like Algeria they would not send him back.

I do not agree with transferring power from a democratic institution to an institution that is not democratic, and then transferring more and more power. I do not know how the secretaries, the clerks and the administrative people in the court system have anything to do with judicial independence and the separation of powers of the judiciary in the court system.

It is another tendency where we are transferring fiscal power from the House of Commons, from the finance minister and so on, to the courts. They are making court decisions that are imposing huge financial burdens on Canada and on the taxpayer.

Indirectly they are now getting to a position where they can start deciding who in the public service comes within the ambit of judicial independence. They will have the final say on the benefits package, the salary benefits that are paid out to these employees. I find this disturbing.

I would have thought that based on experience the government would realize the tendency to move in this direction is wrong and that we will have to back off in a lot of areas. The Americans will make us back off in a lot of areas, as will the United Nations with its conventions on deportation of refugees. We will have to back off, get off our high horses and use some common sense.

I am disturbed the government would be giving more power to our court system. The courts have plenty of power and do not need any more than they already have.

We are kind of reluctant supporters of the bill. It is a very timid type of bill. If the government had some courage it would be looking at a serious consolidation of our judicial system and at some of the big time savings we could have on a year by year basis.

I doubt whether the bill will save anything. By the time we are finished implementing it, changing all these laws and retraining everyone, we will be in the hole for a long time. My Liberal friends figure that if they pass a law, bingo, everything will be okay, that tomorrow the law will be in place and everything will fall into place.

It is not the way things are managed in the world. If we want results we manage those results; we do not order them or command them. The government has to learn that. It is very poor at that and it is time it started looking at a whole different way of doing public administration.

[Export Development Act, October 1st, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, in 1979 a couple of teenagers started a company in the U.S. that today is very close to being the largest capitalized company in the world. They basically did it without any support from the government.

I believe that the market has the ability in the long run to sort out winners from losers. I heard my colleague on the other side of the House give a big spiel about how the government can do a crackup job in this area. Where does the government get this extra wisdom to be able to pick winners and losers? I do not share the member's enthusiasm for that, and the more time I spend down here, the less enthusiasm I get for it.

I wonder if my colleague from Calgary could comment on where the government might have some wisdom in picking winners and losers in the marketplace.

[Terrorism, September 27th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, what is the government's moderate and balanced approach to the threat of terrorism? We are 17 days into the crisis and the government will not say what it is doing to protect Canada. The defence minister will not say what military resources will be available, probably because he knows we have none available. The solicitor general will not say if any assets have been frozen and he will not say why not.

President Bush's statement about bringing the terrorists to justice is in sharp contrast to the behaviour of the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister chose not to visit New York because a Liberal Party fundraiser was more important where he continued to talk about the Canadian way of doing things, which must be the Prime Minister's description of doing nothing. The hour demands leadership but the government is not responding to the call.