Mr. Speaker, Bill C-31 is a very interesting bill.
I am pleased to be here today to say a few words about the challenges related to justice.
As hon. members know, I am a member of the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights. It was a great pleasure for me to join that committee following my first election in 2006.
In the riding of Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, many concerns have been expressed about the victims of crime. Sometimes the law works, but other times, it does not.
It is in the interest of the entire country and the general public that I want to say a few words about Bill C-31.
I speak to people in general about this bill and about the system of justice in general, because it does not matter what riding one is from, people have concerns. Whether it is about victims of crime, whether it is about crime rates, or whether it is about the safety of their community in general, they look to the justice system for explanations.
I have been here since January 2006. I have never known government; I have never known what it is like to be on the government side. I have never been in the government lobby to even know what it looks like. The promised land, I have not seen.
I do know, however, what the new Conservative government in 2006 did with respect to justice issues and it did not lessen the anxiety. As a team, the Conservative justice group did not lessen the anxiety of the general public In Canada. It did not make Canadians feel safer. In fact what it did, which really has not stopped, with a series of nightly television station visits, it has put the public into a state of anxiety beyond anything that ever existed before.
I know this is not a controversial bill. I am saying that with respect to a fairly non-controversial bill, nine-tenths of which I think I could support. Imagine what I would say with some of the legislation that was clearly designed for the five o'clock drive-by photo op and had very little to do with fundamental change to our criminal law that would give everybody in the House and the people they represent a higher sense of security.
There is one truth in all of these justice issues that is so self-evident it needs not be said. Every member in this House wants his or her community and all Canadians to feel safe. Every member of this House wants an increase in the perception and reality of public safety.
Mr. Speaker, what would you do if you were in charge of the criminal laws of Canada? Most people would expect that you would listen to law enforcement. Most people would expect that you would talk to the attorneys general and premiers of the provinces and territories. Of course you would talk to the people and you would talk to committees and all that sort of thing.
Police forces across the country have been asking for various things, but at the top of their list, they have been asking for more police officers. It really has not been delivered by the government.
Attorneys general across this country have been asking for modernization of the Criminal Code in general, and specifically with the tools of investigation for crimes across the country.
The aspect of Bill C-31 which is wonderful is the modernization of the telewarrant aspect. It is a great thing, but if I look at the big clock of years, I have been here three years and ten months, and it was evident three years and ten months ago that attorneys general were asking for that modernization, and here we are almost four years later.
According to the words in the government's lead-off speech, the member for Edmonton—St. Albert mentioned that the government is enacting recommendations in part from a conference of territorial and provincial attorneys general with the Minister of Justice of Canada in 2008. We are still moving very slowly on what are very important amendments to the Criminal Code.
I remember very well just this spring that Wally Oppal, the attorney general of British Columbia, made the plea for much more modernization of the Criminal Code to give those in law enforcement the tools they need.
I opened my debate on this bill by saying that much of this we can support. Much of it has been much needed. Why did it not come sooner? People in Canada are wondering why.
The government prefers to go to an evening television station to talk about a law that it may introduce instead of getting to the boardrooms of the attorneys general across this country and putting into effect simple modernization of the criminal law. Why not sooner for the modernization of telewarrants?
As I say, there are some very good points in this bill and there are a great deal of items that are housekeeping in nature.
I am going to give a brief overview of some of the highlights of the bill. I am also going to spend some of my time floating some very serious questions about the aspects of fingerprinting and about the aspects of the enforcement of warrants in extraterritorial jurisdictions.
I am also going to highlight some new areas in which people not so much in law enforcement but in the tourist industry and in the municipalities across the country are looking for modernization. Those are the definition of prize fighting and parimutuels.
I was the mayor of a city. I know how important it is on the one hand to secure a community, keep it safe, keep the feeling of safety with respect to police and the laws, but also with respect to tourists and civic activity issues.
It is interesting to see that this bill has a number of items that can be seen as housekeeping, that can be seen as good for the economy, that can be seen as modernizing language. Then, almost as is done in the United States, there is a multi-clause bill and hidden in it is a big truck.
The truck is the issue of fingerprinting anyone who has been arrested and disguising it as somehow being a convenience to the person who has been arrested. Never mind being a good citizen, the person will be fingerprinted and photographed. Those records will stay in the database forever. This is a means of making sure that the good citizen is not inconvenienced in the evening. The good citizen may go home and enjoy the rest of his or her life being part of a public record. Obviously, I am talking about the fingerprinting aspect of the bill.
It seems passing strange to me because we have just had a fairly rigorous preliminary debate with respect to the elimination of the long gun registry.
Many of the people in my riding who were not fans of registering guns I do not think would be fans of having an extension of the government's arm into aspects of fingerprinting and photographing people who have been arrested for an offence and subsequently acquitted, let go or not charged.
It would seem to me that the same people that many of the Conservatives on the other side call ordinary good folk in general would believe in is the concept that one is innocent until proven guilty, that big brother should not in an Orwellian sense keep records forever of people who have never been charged with anything. That strikes me as something that Conservatives cannot believe in.
We are going to test it at committee. We are going to see what exact allegations, crimes or the actual offences are that would allow the police to do this. This is what committees are for. Contrary to some of the discussion in Parliament today about the justice committee, the justice committee works very well. I think the committee will dig into this. Perhaps we will schedule some offences. Maybe we will say that it is important to do this in terms of someone who might be a flight risk, someone who might escape the confines of the country. Maybe that is a good idea, I do not know.
However, I have seen nothing in the legislative summary, the bill itself and I was certainly not reassured by the words of the member for Edmonton—St. Albert that it will not apply to every offence, that in every case where someone is arrested and before the person is charged there will be a photograph and a set of fingerprints taken of the person.
It strikes me that if there is not an explanation as to the seriousness of those types of offences or the extenuating circumstances, then this is something that we as a party cannot support.
There may be an argument given by the government on this and we are yet to hear from it on this in full, that we should move to a system that every citizen in Canada, every visitor to Canada, every person here on a visa should submit records of their fingerprints and a photograph for the easy identification by government officials of who they are, where they have been and what they are doing. I cannot see this as something that Conservative members would really jump up and embrace. I would like to see them go home to their constituencies and say that the government is going to start fingerprinting and photographing everyone just so the government knows where everyone is. I cannot see it, but we will see in committee.
I wonder why in this large canvass of Bill C-31 it has been decided to insert this Trojan horse of fingerprints for all. Perhaps “fingerprints are us” could be the justice department's new motto, its internal slogan.
On fingerprinting we certainly have had some objections already. It is not just me who would suggest that there is some concern.
There are concerns. Clayton Ruby, a member of the Ontario Bar Association and someone who is well known in Toronto, said in an article, and I quote:
Providing fingerprints is self-incrimination and the Constitution protects us from this. The line that is drawn is when you are charged. And to allow police to compel you to incriminate yourself before that moment is open to abuse.
On a website, as reported recently in The Province newspaper, it was said:
The proposed amendment requires anyone who has their fingerprints and pictures taken to apply to have them destroyed. It does not require the police to comply with the request, nor do they have to explain why they have declined.
So, once you're on record, it's basically permanent. Those who fall back on the pathetic excuse of, “well, the cops wouldn't have arrested you if you didn't do something wrong,” wake up.
That is not an esteemed member of the bar, but it is a person out there who has seized the sense in perhaps slowing down the process of the Conservative aim to have us all fingerprinted and photographed.
There is another element to a person having his or her fingerprints and photograph taken upon arrest. There is the aspect of retention. My friend from Edmonton—St. Albert again, when the question was put to him directly, could not give us a comforting answer that those records would be released or expunged in the event that there were no charges. What he did was cite courts of appeal cases that said courts are allowed by law to keep those records. They have no obligation to give them back. It is really not a question of once they have them; the question is, why did they get them in the first place? We have to give this a very thorough examination at committee.
Enough on fingerprints. There is one other disturbing element that I will raise now, but as I say, I am generally in favour of the legislation. This element has to do with the aspect of people under warrant for arrest who have been accused of a crime. They are charged in New Brunswick and they are under warrant for arrest in New Brunswick for not having attended at a court date in New Brunswick. Let us say they go to British Columbia. Perhaps economic reasons propel them to go there. Perhaps they are under some mistaken belief; maybe they had a lawyer who did not inform them properly, but they are under a warrant. They show up in British Columbia. This new piece of legislation will not only ensure that people in large urban centres will be sent back to face what they are accused of in their home province, which is all fair and just, but it will ensure that they will have a penalty on top of that.
I understand and sympathize with, for instance, Vancouver Police Chief Jim Chu who has said that the main effect this would have is a disincentive for people to leave. That may be the case.
I am looking at the committee to examine the incidences of this happening. In Vancouver alone, statistics suggest, for instance, that 53 people have been arrested in Vancouver and 35 were sent back to their provinces since the Vancouver Police Department instituted a program dubbed as Con Air. This allows the Vancouver Police Department to gather up people under warrant, and ensure that those warrants will be enforced by sending them back to the provinces in question.
The unintended consequence of this in a time of budgetary recession is that Vancouver, Calgary and other places might incur fairly extensive expenses by making people return to the jurisdictions from which they came or in which they were charged. There has been no discussion on this bill or at any intergovernmental level of who would pay the costs of that.
There is a reason I have some preliminary worry about this. I mentioned the example of the fairly innocent person who is probably facing a larger offence by ignoring the warrant than the actual offence from which it came. I am concerned by comments particularly from the Conservative side throughout my time in being interested in politics that go toward not having respect for people who come from other parts of Canada. I do not need to talk about the former mayor of Calgary. I do not need to talk about comments from the Prime Minister with respect to a culture of defeat. I am a very proud maritimer, an Atlantic Canadian. It is very insensitive for any politician to say anything disrespectful about people from other parts of this country. When leaders say those things, it is very disheartening and it does not make the country meld together the way it should.
This aspect of the extraterritorial warrant has to be handled at committee with respect and with good back-up evidence as to why this should be done. The efficacy of it has to be certainly examined. With that caveat, we will look at that aspect very thoroughly.
Some of the modernizations I spoke of earlier go to what may not seem like a justice issue, but to the updating of definitions with respect to prize fights. It may be interesting only to a lawyer that the definition of prize fight comes just before the sections on terrorism in the Criminal Code. In any event, people may not know that prize fights, as defined by the Criminal Code, are not permitted in the provinces unless they are part of an exception.
Last night in Moncton, New Brunswick, over 12,000 people attended our new outdoor stadium to receive the Olympic flame. It was a wonderful event. Moncton is the Indianapolis of Canada in promoting sports activities. We have a fourplex arena, the largest and the best east of Montreal, and a coliseum that houses our Moncton Wildcats. It is known as a sports venue place.
The competition that brings Canadians together is evident in the House when members of the Quebec Junior Hockey League, coming from outside Quebec, can beat teams from Quebec City proper. That is a wonderful thing about Canada, that the Moncton Wildcats can beat teams that come from other parts of Canada, including Quebec, in the Quebec Major Junior League.
The definition with respect to prize fight must be modernized to understand that we do not live in the Marquess of Queensberry rules. I am looking at some members now who probably know all about altercations, but we are talking about serious altercations involving the hand and the foot. Often politicians use the foot but in a different way.
