Paul Forseth

[Criminal Code, November 18th, 1998]

Madam Speaker, I would like to summarize what we have heard today.

Sadly what I have heard from the justice department are some of the most arcane arguments that are not really relevant to the point I put before the House.

One of the main understandings we have to get with this motion is that it really supports community resolution of these conflicts without having to use a heavy handed approach. In these situations it is contemplated that the warnings are given. Generally if there is some legal sanction that backs up the warning, then alternative dispute settlement actually happens and no one is actually charged in the end because someone would know that if they cross the line then they will be charged. Therefore it positively supports community peace.

One of the other aspects that is often overlooked is around the area of domestic disputes. Restraining orders in themselves are not all that easy to obtain, especially from the supreme court or a provincial legislation such as non-interference with children orders. So the availability in those circumstances is often difficult. Then there is the ongoing viability. A policeman is called and some lady puts an order to the policeman saying she wants it enforced. The policeman does not know if the order is still valid and what the essential jurisdiction of it is. The whole history of these extra court orders to deal with ongoing difficult situations of an identified individual showing up on a premises is very poor.

This legislation would greatly help in that circumstance around child access problems and protecting the peace for children.

One of the other circumstances is public school grounds. Individuals who may be known drug dealers or whatever may not be carrying drugs with them but will come to an elementary school ground, hang around wanting to become familiar with certain children. We have had the circumstance of their trying to ingratiate themselves to individuals. The long term agenda as we know from discovering the circumstances later is that they want to get these children involved in prostitution. School authorities have had great difficulty protecting the sanctity of the public school grounds from these individuals.

I am really upset when I hear this hand wringing, do nothing approach from the justice department. It is just incredible. It fails to reflect the community mood about these obvious breaches of the public peace. The system appears absolutely incompetent to do anything about it.

Having someone lawfully removed in the first place is the trigger for this offence. It is not entered into lightly. Someone would have to be removed for the circumstance involved in the second instance. I believe this is in the public interest to preserve the peace. It is not a draconian measure. It is most reasonable and it does go a long way to preserve the peace and order of the community and especially to protect children.

[Criminal Code, November 18th, 1998]

moved that Bill C-207, an act to amend the Criminal Code (trespass), be read the second time and referred to a committee.

Mr. Speaker, it is certainly a privilege to begin debate today on my private member's Bill C-207 dealing with amending the Criminal Code with respect to trespassing.

The bill arises out of community response. My motivation is based on complaints from police officers, security at shopping malls and so on; my experience in dealing with family disputes being an officer of the criminal justice system in the past; and comments from the general public.

Certainly my motivation is to protect my community, to protect the viability for children in a library, at a skating rink, on the school grounds or at a local shopping mall. In domestic family disputes it would certainly go a long way to facilitate voluntary compliance in preserving the peace in residences to protect children there.

Essentially the frustration is that persons are trespassing on property, causing a public disturbance and destroying a sense of community and livability for children, yet are unable to be removed permanently for a small period of time. For example, malls are a popular place for youth to hang out, sometimes for young drug dealers to strut their style, or for casual gangs to want to show off and simply take over an area.

Security in malls consistently has a difficult time in maintaining civility. The main reason is that they have little, if any, authoritative jurisdiction when they want to give a warning to someone. They really cannot warn the person with anything other than saying that legally they could remove them from the property.

If the security staff of the mall, a library or whatever, is forced to remove a problem person, that person can just re-enter within minutes. There is no place in the Criminal Code that states the trespasser must stay off the property for any period of time. The only way the person could be charged is if he or she resists while being removed from the property. If the person never resists that act could continue over and over again, and it does in some cases.

Something that federal government officials seem to often forget is that teenagers are extremely street smart. I recall when serving on the Standing Committee on Justice and Legal Affairs we were dealing with the Young Offenders Act. A witness wanted me to believe that most young offenders have no idea of what the possible penalties were under the Young Offenders Act. That is certainly not the case.

For a long time now, Reformers have been calling for the Young Offenders Act to be strengthened in order to deter young offenders from committing crime. One of the reasons for that is the community reputation. The observation of outcomes from that act were known to be rather light or inconsequential. Therefore there is no respect for the law.

Before I became a member of parliament I served as a family justice counsellor and a probation-parole officer in the attorney general's ministry of British Columbia. I spent a great amount of time dealing one to one with young offenders. After a while in that kind of role one understands how they think. In many circumstances they know exactly what they are doing. Their actions are quite calculated. Many know how to beat the system. If there is a loophole in the system, an offender will certainly find it and the word quickly travels on the street.

What Reformers have been doing for the past five years is attempting to amend the justice system by closing some of these obvious loopholes, one loophole at a time in an orderly way.

Every province seems to have a different way of dealing with trespassers. In British Columbia trespassing laws are rather weak. Something has to be done with this most serious issue. With the provinces sometimes doing very little to remedy the situation, I believe that something should be done to amend the Criminal Code so that we can have a national standard of reasonable social behaviour in a public place, perhaps a Canadian identity of civility to one another.

Recently an employee of the Department of Justice phoned my office to inquire about the bill we are discussing. The official asked a member of my staff why we just do not lobby the provinces to amend their legislation as this change apparently borders on federal-provincial jurisdiction. My response was that we cannot always look to the provinces as an escape for federal inaction. We cannot simply blame the provinces and say that it is their fare.

Here is an example where the federal government needs to take some lead for once. It is rightly in the jurisdiction of the federal government to amend the Criminal Code, section 41, and it will not be trampling on the feet of the provinces.

The amendments that I am proposing in Bill C-207 would strengthen section 41 of the Criminal Code. Section 41(1) clearly states:

That every one who is in peaceable possession of a dwelling house or real property, and every one lawfully assisting him or acting under his authority, is justified in using force to prevent any person from trespassing on the dwelling house or real property, or to remove a trespasser therefrom, if he uses no more force than is necessary.

I am proposing an amendment to section 41 of the code, making it a summary conviction, that is a minor offence, for a person who has already been lawfully removed from real property or a dwelling house not to be able to lawfully return for just 24 hours. The reason for 24 hours is to provide adequate time for the individual to cool off. It is amazing how attitudes change the following morning.

It also provides a social intervening time for the crowd mentality behaviour and the show off behaviour to others to be interfered with. Often the issue is the timing. When someone is being legally removed the whole idea of their being able to come back within minutes and mock the system is often the game that is played.

I will give a hypothetical situation. A teenager is removed from a shopping mall for causing a disturbance short of a serious crime. That teenager then must stay out of the shopping mall for a total of 24 hours under my provision. Otherwise, he or she could be charged with trespassing and may be found guilty of an offence punishable upon summary conviction. In other words, the teenager would be given a ticket.

In another hypothetical situation a boyfriend enters the property of his girlfriend and little children and is told to leave. He will not leave so the police are called. They arrive and legally remove him from the property. But under the law there is nothing that stops him from repeating this an hour later and the lady will be forced to go through the same exercise over and over. The police know their hands are tied, especially if this happens on a Saturday afternoon rather than prowling by night on residential property.

The amendment to section 47 would keep this fellow off that property for 24 hours. Otherwise he would be charged with a summary conviction. When being removed for the first time he then could be warned of the consequences if he returned before 24 hours had passed. In the current situation no such warning could be given.

This is a real gap in the issue of domestic disputes and preserving the peace for children. Because of the way the government has manipulated Private Members' Business, Bill C-207 is unfortunately finished at the end of this hour. However I do not plan to give up on this issue.

It is the responsibility of the Department of Justice to make the criminal justice system loophole free and get rid of these problems. That is why from time to time we receive omnibus bills that deal with a variety of issues throughout the Criminal Code. We do have the larger agenda of trying to provide peace, order and good government and to have safer streets.

Today should have been the first hour of three hours of debate on Bill C-207, but the way in which the subcommittee on Private Members' Business conducts its selection is rather atrocious. It is a travesty that members who diligently work to create legislation are not allowed the opportunity to get something through parliament.

I was elected in 1993. Since that time I can count on one hand the number of times I have had a bill drawn. Once I made it through that lotto I was rarely fortunate to have one of my private member's bills adopted into federal legislation which eventually became law. I was lucky at one point to have that happen.

The bill I introduced amended the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act. It was a minor amendment but it was significant as far as I was concerned. It closed a loophole and was similar in nature to what I am proposing today. The Minister of Industry at the time acted justly and adopted my bill into the government bill and the contents of my proposal is now the law in Canada.

It really did not matter where the bill came from. It was the matter that we got the job done. The issue is trying to provide co-operation and reconciliation in the House instead of always dividing on every issue.

The subcommittee on Private Members' Business held a round table discussion on the issue of making all private members' motions votable. It is my hope, and I am sure the hope of every backbencher in the House, that change will occur soon.

Every member of the House knows the Criminal Code has loopholes. When the justice minister introduced omnibus bills amending tiny flaws in the code the minister was admitting there were adjustments that needed to be made.

Canadians do not expect the Criminal Code to be perfect. It is an evolving piece of social legislation in some respects which reflects public sentiments and attitudes. It needs to be adjusted over a period of time to new realities. The public does expect government to act forthwith when a flaw is clearly pointed out.

I pointed out a loophole in section 41 of the Criminal Code. Bill C-207 would help to eliminate a great deal of problems for local authorities and citizens who have spent a great amount of time investing in their local community centre, only to see the peace and enjoyment of that centre or hockey rink degraded to the point where it becomes unusable and they are afraid to bring their children there.

There is a concern in my community. My constituents asked me to help to throw water on this little fire.

It is unfortunate that Bill C-207 was not made votable. Therefore I will have to tell my community that its voice has little weight in Ottawa because of the arrogance of the Liberal government. The people's agenda is not reflected here. It is sadly just the agenda of old tired ways.

The Minister of Justice is no more of an expert in community justice issues than any of us are. All she needs to do is once in a while look on the order paper at some of the bills introduced by backbenchers to see the needs are for better law and order in Canada. It is not complicated, not difficult. It just requires courage provided the minister and the rest of her cabinet cronies have the will to make Canada a better place to live. I have outlined a community need. May this House find the same sense of courage to act.

[Employment Insurance, November 6th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, concerning EI premiums, the government obviously takes far too much at this time for the reasonable future of the plan. Now he will make business spend Christmas worrying about Scrooge, always paying and never getting anything back.

I would ask for a more complete answer. Why is there a delay in the announcement of the rates? Why does he hurt business planning to serve a political agenda? I ask him to justify the choice of one over the other.

[Employment Insurance, November 6th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, every year the finance minister meets with the Employment Insurance Commission in mid-November to set employment rates for the next year. Businesses need some time to adjust to the new tax levels.

Why is the minister's announcement of rates now delayed well into December?

[Royal Canadian Mounted Police, October 29th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, in my riding there is a standoff between police and drug dealers.

Children as young as 11 years old are selling drugs. The government says that it is just a police problem, yet the solicitor general has cut police funding. The evidence of government failure is right on the streets of my riding.

When will the government act? Will it restore police funding, stop the drugs and not the police?

[Tax On Financial Transactions, October 28th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, to put it directly, I oppose the Tobin tax because I care about the poor and I care about the average Canadian who might wind up paying the bill in the long run.

Today we are really having a discussion about socialist myths. It is fine to have an academic debate for intellectual discourse but heaven help us if we ever allowed the world to slide into such a state where today's proposal would actually be realized. It would really hurt millions of people if the tax were ever large enough that it actually worked to its policy objectives.

The member for Regina—Qu'Appelle is urging the government to introduce a financial transaction tax, or the Tobin tax as it is known in the academic and university circles. In plain terms a financial transaction tax can be any tax. It can be any tax, fee or duty imposed by a government upon the sale, purchase, transfer or registration of a financial instrument. It can be broadly based or it can exempt a variety of instruments. It can be levied against transactions by Canadians or it can be levied against transactions in Canada, or both, cutting various ways across borders.

I think that I speak on behalf of Canadians when I say that taxes discourage positive activity, especially excessive taxes and disincentive penalty taxes. A financial transaction tax would ultimately discourage financial transactions. This would not be good for our economy. This idea responds to the symptoms rather than the causes of financial disorder.

Several weeks ago representatives from all opposition parties got together and in unison voiced a concern to decrease the premiums placed on employment insurance. All opposition parties wanted a reduction in a specific tax. What each party wanted to do with the surplus was rather different, but every party was at least against the increased levy because it hurt the employment rates we desire in Canada.

It is obvious the financial transaction tax is not viewed in quite the same way as the employment insurance tax. However my illustration was simply to show that people hate taxes, period, and in general they are hurtful if they are usurious.

Why was it that Canadians were so opposed to the GST even though some prices on consumer goods were reduced as a result? It is simply that new taxes are hard to sell to the public and they almost always create distortions in the market.

The NDP and socialists around the world want this tax to be implemented. They see it as a way to raise money for social issues but often without practical political accountability. One of the areas Professor James Tobin uses in selling his proposed tax to various countries around the world is that revenues could be used to finance the United Nations, or as others have suggested, to aid in various worldwide campaigns like that on land mines. A nice result to help the medicine go down.

To the uninformed or the resentful the idea may sound good on paper but we need to examine it closely to see how the revenue is handled. The main purpose of taxing something is for the revenue it brings. The NDP can say what it wants about how this tax would straighten out the world markets, which it certainly would not, but the bottom line is its secondary agenda.

In 1995 a group of environmental NGOs got together to form the Halifax initiative. Spearheaded by the Sierra Club of Canada the group urged for Canada to be a leader and initiate a financial transaction tax during the Halifax meeting of the G-7 leaders.

One of the briefs put forward by the Halifax initiative stated: “There are two key political issues involved with putting such a tax in place. First, it would be necessary to forge agreement amongst the major countries to implement a uniform tax, and second, there would have to be agreement on the collection and distribution of the revenue”. Perhaps it should have added a third issue, for all countries to simply agree there also is a Santa Claus.

I could say that collection might theoretically be done but even that is the easier part. The hard part is where does the money go? If the proceeds are returned to various governments, what rules would determine which country gets what amount? Whose money is it anyway?

Would redistribution favour countries that have important financial centres? Would redistribution favour countries based on their voting shares, say in the International Monetary Fund? What about assigning revenues to global causes? How could any international organization possibly get all the countries to agree? The power struggle that would occur would be disastrous.

Proponents of the tax are suggesting that all countries in the G-7 get together to create this tax. Perhaps these same proponents should look at what is happening with other countries that have had some experience with such types of disincentive taxes and how they hurt people.

Japan has a financial transaction tax in a form and has had some considerable difficulty with it as the tax has had negative effects on the Japanese market. The story is similar in the United Kingdom. It has raised some money but there is concern that much more could be achieved without the tax. The U.K. is considering getting rid of the tax. Sweden has also had bad experiences with the tax. Germany has decided that the costs and the problems of the tax far outweigh any benefits when we get into that kind of revenue generation.

To get all countries onside appears to be an insurmountable task. According to Tobin, “a transaction tax on purchases and sales of foreign exchange would have to be universal and uniform, would have to apply to all jurisdictions, and the rate would have to be equalized across all markets”. That is his criteria. Obviously that would be absolutely impossible to achieve.

There are other reasons to oppose the financial transaction tax, one being to shift to other jurisdictions. It is impossible that all jurisdictions will subscribe to the methods of the Tobin tax. Therefore, members of the financial community will simply use offshore tax havens in order to evade the tax. Complicated schemes will be developed to get around the tax. There is no end to it.

In 1995 the IMF wrote a paper on financial transaction taxes. It spoke clearly about substitutions. It is stated in the paper, “If transaction taxes applied to transactions only in domestic markets, investors could substitute foreign trading as a means to avoid the tax. Shifting the location of trade in financial assets is relatively easy, with trade shifting to other countries or to locations with established financial markets. For instance, a considerable amount of trading in the equities of the United States takes place in London”.

The stated goal of the tax is to slow the velocity of foreign exchange markets. But once the tax was established, pressure would be there to continue to raise the tax until it actually began to work. It would then become a very difficult disincentive for the overall world economy.

The bottom line is that there are insurmountable loopholes through this idealistic scheme. Financial markets contain numerous products that are close substitutes to other products. A government bond is a close substitute to a high quality corporate bond. Bank deposits are substitutes for money market funds. If we tax one product, any investor is going to search out for a replacement.

I think my NDP friends would agree that even in a perfect world not every country would sign up to such a tax treaty as they are proposing. Therefore, if a country refused to institute a financial transaction tax, it would essentially become a magnet for foreign exchange trading operations of major banks worldwide. This would be disastrous for countries that went ahead and implemented the tax. It would be a disincentive for them. It would be a competitive advantage for those countries that stayed out of the scheme.

The volatility of foreign exchange markets is a fact of life in the global economy. My recommendation is for governments to pursue credible fiscal policy and encourage strong transparent financial sectors instead of punishing currency traders. Money moves when there is a failure to perform. Accomplishments in a working market are rewarded. Those who do not perform wither. Often the volatility of money in the world has to do with seeking higher performance. That is the best kind of discipline wherein we all may be better off.

On paper the theory may be convincing to some, however in reality it simply would not work. Therefore, I directly oppose the idea of a Tobin tax.

Within our purview, the government has much more pressing matters to deal with with respect to its financial house and getting our finances in order. It is my hope the government will begin to diligently work at reducing the employment insurance premiums for example in order to rebuild the deteriorating confidence Canadians have shown in respect of our domestic financial markets. We need lower taxes. For markets to work better, rather than have a bureaucrat deal with money, it is better to leave the money in the hands of a taxpayer, a consumer or an investor.

Money markets worldwide are volatile. Eventually it is revealed that the underlying fundamentals of these—

[Apec Inquiry, October 23rd, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, the APEC issue is about the constitutional rights of Canadians: the right to speak out against injustice, the right not to be arrested for only political purposes, and the right to fair process before a tribunal. These things have all been suspended by the government.

Now the fix appears to be in and the commission has been adjourned to November 16. We do not know where this is going to go. We need a judicial inquiry to clean up this mess.

What will the government do to restore the constitutional rights of Canadians that it has tossed aside?

[Personal Information Protection And Electronic Documents Act, October 22nd, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, looking at the area of compliance costs and the climate the government creates for the commercial world, an article in the Financial Post which is very timely by Neville Nankivell says the Fraser Institute has just delivered another withering report on the consequences of overregulation in Canada. It estimates compliance costs to the economy could now be as much as $83 billion compared to the $58 billion in the mid 1970s. He concludes his article by saying regulatory business is a growth industry in Canada but not the kind that is good for the economy and jobs.

Will the member reassure us that this piece of legislation is going in the right direction and is setting the appropriate regulatory climate? It is certainly not the proper role of government to artificially puff up businesses or the creation of interventionist government or unreasonable controls as they are very costly to the taxpayers. It has been shown in study after study and often these types of efforts are largely ineffective and do not give a good dollar value for measured outcomes.

Will the member reassure us that the controlled climate we are entering into is one of balance and also cognizant of the fact that we are in a world of competition? Where will this place us in the world community of competition?

[Canada Customs And Revenue Agency Act, October 21st, 1998]

A little bit.

[Petitions, October 9th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, pursuant to Standing Order 36 I am pleased to present a petition today from 327 British Columbia residents who want to ensure that marriage, as it has always been known and understood in Canada, is preserved and protected.

The petitioners pray that parliament enact Bill C-25, an act to amend the Marriage Act and the Interpretation Act, so as to define in statute that a marriage can only be entered into between a single male and a single female.