John Bryden

[Youth Criminal Justice Act, February 4th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, with due respect to the whip's intervention, I will not be voting in favour of the motion.

[Youth Criminal Justice Act, February 4th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, my concern with these amendments before the House is the amendments themselves, because as I understand it they require judges to take into consideration whether a person is aboriginal during sentencing.

I would ask the minister, is that not asking judges to consider race in sentencing rather than other factors like ethnicity, poverty or societal circumstances?

[Youth Criminal Justice Act, January 31st, 2002]

No, Mr. Speaker. I said that I agree. Quebec is a distinct society. But so are Ontario and New Brunswick. All the regions of the country are distinct societies.

There are also ethnic and other groups who speak other languages. It is impossible to have federal laws based on all kinds of distinct societies. We must have laws that apply to all young people.

I absolutely agree that Quebec is a distinct society and I am very proud to be associated to it.

[Youth Criminal Justice Act, January 31st, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, my problem is with the subamendment and the amendment that is before the House. I supported the original bill when it went through the House. No individual MP here can be cognizant of everything that goes on in every piece of legislation.

I trust my colleagues on the justice committee and I trust the opposition members on the justice committee to have worked out as best they can the problems that were in the original legislation. I trust the process that took the bill out of committee into report stage and beyond report stage into third reading.

My problem is something has now been introduced into the bill I originally supported with my vote which I do not support. It was introduced at a stage beyond the House and is returning to the House.

I can assure the House that, when my turn comes to rise on this particular amendment, I will consider very careful how can I best represent the people who have sent me to this Chamber. I will be treating this amendment in my conscience as a free vote.

[Youth Criminal Justice Act, January 31st, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, one of my colleagues on this side just answered for me. I will repeat his answer. I have always voted according to my convictions.

[Youth Criminal Justice Act, January 31st, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, do forgive me. I should keep on the topic. The topic of my remarks will be the amendment and the subamendment before the House.

I would like to begin by commenting on some of the remarks made by the member for South Shore. Hansard will show that the member for South Shore got himself into a contradiction in his argument where he supported the original amendment and its call for particular attention to be paid by the judges to the circumstances of aboriginal young persons.

The member, as Hansard will show, made the argument that aboriginal did not really mean race. What it really meant was something to do with societal, as he said. If that is the case, I think the member for South Shore was correctly brought up short by the member for the Bloc. If he feels that that amendment and aboriginal refers to something that is exclusively societal, then he should be supporting the Bloc's subamendment that calls on the bill to be rejected because it does not reflect the distinct character of Quebec.

The distinct character of Quebec, I would suggest, is societal, just as the distinct character of P.E.I., of Vancouver, of Saskatchewan, of Hamilton or of Linden. Wherever we are in the country, there are societal differences that have nothing to do with race. In fact we will find aboriginals in every part of Canadian society. The suggestion that the word aboriginal does not refer to race is a specious suggestion.

Let us pursue this whole idea of aboriginal and society for just a moment as well. A member of the reform party asked whether or not judges would be expected to determine the aboriginalness of the defendants before them by blood test. In fact, it can be determined by an Indian status card which is determined in turn not by the societal context in which aboriginals find themselves. It is not a matter of whether aboriginals are on reserve or not on reserve. The Indian status card is determined solely by the ancestry of the individual concerned. In other words, his genetic makeup, his race, his blood. I would agree, by any standard, this is not where this society and our laws ought to be going. I have always felt very opposed to the suggestion that anyone in our society should get any special attention or any special privilege based solely on race.

I will give an example of the type of dilemma that the original amendment presents for us. In Oakville, which is one of the richest communities in Canada per capita, one can easily find people who are aboriginals who come from families who are very rich, who have jobs in the high tech industry, whose kids go to private schools and on and on it goes. Yet these young people who come from these families who have all the wealth of the nation can have and do have Indian status cards.

What do we have here by this original amendment? We have the suggestion to the courts that when youth appear before them, when a crime is committed in an affluent area of urban Canada, the judge is called upon to take into account special circumstances among the youth before him if one happens to be an aboriginal. This is unacceptable and I do not and cannot support the amendment. It just flies in the face of everything I believe Canada ought to be about. We are different in our language. We are different in our ethnicity. We are different in our countries that our parents came from, but we are all one as human beings and I absolutely refuse to distinguish people solely by race.

I find myself in the awkward circumstance of actually being on the same side on this question as the Canadian Alliance. This has happened extremely rarely in the eight years that I have been in the House. However this is a House of Commons. This is a place where we have open debate and where it is very important for all of us to express our true feelings no matter where we sit in the House.

However another issue has come forward here that I think is so interesting. That is the question of whether or not a member of the government side should feel the same obligation to support a bill or a measure before the House that emanates from the Senate.

If amendments emanating from the Senate were treated as free votes that would empower the Senate. It would not diminish the Senate as was suggested by the member for South Shore. What it would mean is the Senate could then feel that if it had before it a piece of legislation, which it was really concerned about that had passed through the House of Commons, it could hope that if it did put an amendment forward, the amendment would go before the entire House of Commons and the government members would treat it not as a vote to be whipped by the government side, but treat as an expression of conscience, an expression of genuine concern from the Senate and that it should receive the individual consideration of every member in the House.

I think there is the potential there for a parliamentary reform, and we are always saying here that we should try to reform this House, that would be most welcomed. I do not want to see an elected Senate because I do not think it advances the progress of democracy. The model we see in the United States where there is an elected senate and elected house of representatives is not an efficient model as far as democracy or the advancement of legislation, we have a good model here.

It is true that the Senate as an unelected body has not been functioning as effectively as it might. If the Senate truly acted as the conscience of this parliament, then the way to give it that conscience and give it that empowerment is to treat Senate amendments when they do come back to this House, as free votes.

[Youth Criminal Justice Act, January 31st, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, I hope you feel the same way about electronic voting as you do about cellphones and that this Chamber does not see that type of intrusion either. That is another thing.

[Youth Criminal Justice Act, January 31st, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, the member for Langley--Abbotsford would be interested to hear that I agree with the main point that he made in his presentation.

I feel very strongly that laws should not be based on race. They can be based on economic situation, even ethnicity in certain instances, but race alone, people are always the same regardless of their race. It is other factors that make them different, and the law can take an account of those other factors but not race.

I would suggest to him, if he does not mind if I extend my comments for a bit, that the analogy he might consider is the situation in Winnipeg where there is a lot of urban poverty. That urban poverty involves not only aboriginal young people. It also involves non-aboriginal young people, people of other ethnicities, people who have come to Canada from Asia or Europe or somewhere else in the world. Yet the amendment would suggest that, all things being equal among the poor young people in Winnipeg who might be tempted to crime, the aboriginal young people should be treated differently, and I would agree that this is unacceptable.

I also sympathize with the government, however, because this is something that was raised in the charter of rights and I think has created a pattern of legislation that derives from an original mistake, if you will, but the member for Langley--Abbotsford raises another point in his speech that I found most fascinating, and that is this whole question of how this House should respond to amendments from the Senate. The problem, as he rightly points out, is that if a government stays in power for a very long time then it will dominate the Senate, and he was suggesting that this amendment would never have made it through the committee and it is going back to this House possibly through a back door.

Well, I do not know whether that is a fair analogy but I will say to him that perhaps parliament, perhaps members on both sides of the House, should consider Senate amendments in the same sense as private members' bills. In other words, perhaps Senate amendments that really do not reflect the will of the elected representatives should be treated when they come to the House as free votes. It will be interesting to see the outcome of this particular vote.

[Youth Criminal Justice Act, January 31st, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, I would just like to pick up on a point from the speech of the member opposite. Currently aboriginal communities and reserves are not under the Access to Information Act. Has he any thoughts about whether it might be proper to bring reserve finances and aboriginal self-government community finances under the Access to Information Act, given that this ultimately is taxpayer money that is being spent?

[Committees of the House, December 13th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, I want to congratulate the member on his excellent speech, even though it is coming from the opposition benches. He touched on many points that are of great interest to all Canadians of compassion.

He touched on one point that was especially interesting to me. That is the suggestion that there should be some exchange of information between departments like Revenue Canada, or whatever it is called, the revenue agency, and human resources development in order to identify those Canadians who are most in need of the types of programs that the government would like to give to them.

The problem is it is a privacy issue. The reason this information is not exchanged is because interpretations of our present Privacy Act make it impossible for government departments to trade that information.

The member will recall that the Minister of Human Resources Development found herself in a terrible quandary when it was revealed a year or so ago that human resources development was keeping this type of cross-file information and the privacy commissioner had complained. Furthermore I would like the member and I, and others in the House on the backbenches, to address this issue because this interpretation of the Privacy Act is doing great damage.

The member, who has many aboriginals in his community will be familiar with the non-insured health benefits program. This is a case where free drugs are available to aboriginals. It is well known that some aboriginals, a very small percentage, are abusing the program to the point of receiving so many drugs that deaths are occurring. This could be prevented, as it was almost prevented, by Health Canada ensuring that the information from doctors and pharmacists is exchanged through a central clearing agency which exists. However an interpretation by Health Canada of statements made by the privacy commissioner stopped this interchange of information. Consequently we have had people dying.

We have had other instances where former civil servants have accessed government programs that they should not access. All we have to do is access the files that contain their pension information.

I wonder if the member opposite would address this issue of privacy. Should we not be revisiting the Privacy Act to ensure that Canadians are better served by the programs?