Derek Lee

[Retribution on Behalf of Victims of White Collar Crime Act, October 22nd, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, I applaud the member for giving great notice to the Minister of Justice of the first question he is going to ask at committee. Let us get the answer, because it is an important question. Just how many times has the sentencing for serious fraud offenders involving large amounts of money gone in the wrong direction, at least from the point of view of the common man?

Bill C-52 is an important reform, and there are reasons it is happening now and going ahead as opposed to having happened 25 or 50 years ago.

The Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Transport suggested that opposition parties were joining the Conservatives in their get tough on crime agenda. I just want to signal as one member that that is absolutely not the case, but there are many members in the House, and I think all opposition parties are going to support the bill for good rational reasons.

I would like the hon. member to comment on the insinuation that somehow the get tough on crime agenda has been adopted by all parties in the House.

[Privilege, October 22nd, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, I have a couple of comments on the same point.

The issue raised here, with respect, is not about embargoed copies. It is fairly customary for ministers to provide embargoed copies of bills to opposition critics just prior to the introduction in the House. It is a courtesy that helps the other parties, the members and the critics to prepare in doing their work. This is not about the giving over of embargoed copies. It is about a minister and the government pre-empting the role of Parliament by having a news conference about a bill before it is introduced in the House.

I as a member did not get an embargoed copy of the bill and did not have an opportunity to see this. Apparently, the news media had an opportunity to hear comments from the minister.

If I may suggest, Parliament has always regarded these matters quite strictly. There is a reason that a bill is secret before it is introduced in the House. It is marked secret and it is secret. It is not just a pro forma little stamp that is put on a bill. However, this may be another attempt by government to do what governments want to do politically and that is go out and sell the thing before it is in the marketplace.

We in Parliament cannot let that happen. This may be an example of the thin edge of the wedge. It may also involve informal discussions among House leaders prior to the introduction of the bill. However, as a member of the House, none of that matters to me. What matters is that a bill cannot be placed out for public debate in the public domain, through press conferences or whatever, before the members of the House have an opportunity to see that bill.

That is the line that must be drawn and maintained. I believe the minister is offside here, and if it is not clear, then, hopefully, an appropriate committee can deal with this if, Mr. Speaker, you feel you cannot.

[Criminal Code, October 20th, 2009]

Madam Speaker, it is a good question and I think there is a good answer, but it may not be the answer the member wants to hear.

First, the member is not talking about people selling worthless bags of dirt dug up from fields. What he is talking is fraud in real estate transactions. Real estate transactions and the whole jurisdiction of real estate is provincial. The management of those transactions, the verification of the documents and the procedures are all provincial. Up to now that has been the case in securities matters. Those are provincial transactions and they regulate them.

When it comes to fraud, the Criminal Code has a fairly robust and very old fraud section. Therefore, all the illegality in fraud, to which I think the member is referring, will be currently covered by the Criminal Code fraud provisions. However, we do not have to say it is a fraud involving real estate, or involving securities, or involving currency, or involving the sale of bananas, or apples, or goats or horses. It is a fraud.

Therefore, there is Criminal Code coverage for it, but in terms of those who would falsify a mortgage in a land transaction, those offences, the false document presented to a provincial land registry, whether it is a mortgage, a deed or a transfer of land, those are covered. It can also be a federal offence.

However, I accept that there is not a specific Criminal Code section that says that if one does a fake land transfer, it is a special Criminal Code offence, buy it would be a Criminal Code fraud.

[Criminal Code, October 20th, 2009]

Madam Speaker, I am pleased to indicate to the House my support for Bill S-4, as I think all members of the House have indicated today and previously. I do not recall very much dissent, although some caution is urged in relation to one or two sections of the bill.

The bill has been a long time coming. I guess it is pretty clear on the record that we are at third reading stage. Somebody offered earlier today to expedite its passage but it would be pretty tough to expedite it much faster than the speed at which it is already going. I do not know whether I am the last speaker but at some point today the debate will end, the House will adopt the bill and it will be over. I congratulate all those who wanted to expedite it because they will get their wish.

As members have said, the concept behind the bill has been in the drafting stage for about 10 years. There were complexities that did delay it in the early years. There was a bit of a moving target with respect to personal information. This is an area of evolving legislative activity. I think it was the intention of the original drafters that we get a good definition of what “personal identity information” is, and the bill has a pretty good definition, which I will get to later in my remarks.

I recall going through the bill very carefully at the justice committee one or two Parliaments ago. The bill, however, was always pre-empted by a parliamentary dissolution. It was not that nobody wanted to see it pass. It was always a problem of Parliament ending in a dissolution before the bill was fully passed.

However, there is a section that has created an offence involving the possession of a Canada Post mailbox key. This type of key is the one postal workers use when they distribute and pick up mail on the street. All Canadians are familiar with those big post boxes and those big keys that the postal workers use. I think the original intention was to create an offence for anyone who was in possession, without authority, of one of those keys.

Now, that makes sense. Why did it take us 100 years to get to this point? I am not sure. Maybe it is because the post office always did a pretty good job of keeping control of its keys. However, it has become a problem, which is the basis for this proposed offence. I think this has been expanded to include possession of any key that would open a post box receptacle, which means my post box key and the keys of everyone here. There are probably millions of post box keys across the country.

I think somebody has thought this out, but it is not an offence just to be in possession of somebody else's post box key. There needs to be an intent to use it fraudulently or to commit an offence described in the section. However, had I had such an opportunity at committee, I would have scrutinized very carefully the implications of creating a new offence that made it an offence simply to be in possession, with a fraudulent intention, of something that is so common. I could say that if we are going to make it an offence to possess someone's little mailbox key, then why do we not make it an offence to possess somebody's house key? The house has much more value than a post box. Here we may have unwittingly treaded into a territory that we have not thought through.

However, in any event, it is in the bill and I will not object to it but my gut tells me that down the road, at some point in time, there will be a case and a fact scenario that will raise potential issues with respect to somebody's possession of a simple mailbox key. I am not talking about the big post office key. I am just talking about an ordinary residence or apartment building mailbox key. We all have them.

I am very pleased to see that in the bill we grappled with and nailed by definition the concept of credit card and debit card in a way that would allow police and authorities to clearly identify an offence when it happens. Up to now, a credit card was just a piece of plastic with some information printed on it but we all regard credit cards as something more than that. It is our access to credit, cash or whatever. Up to when we started amending the Criminal Code, that little piece of plastic was just a piece of plastic. The bill, essentially, completes the initiative to place an intrinsic legal value on the information contained on the credit card. Credit and debit cards have magnetic strips with personal information, credit information, digital information and now they also have chips, with who knows how much information, but all intended to better secure the credit realm, if I can put it that way.

Also, the bill gets into the issue of identifying and defining the personal identification number, the PIN, that is a necessary partner to some types of credit or debit access, either person-to-person or machine-person-to-machine. That would be helpful for the police as they carry out investigations. For example, if there is a reason to arrest somebody who is suspected of being involved in a fraud or a crime and that person was in possession of what appeared to be PINs, up to now, those numbers would just be numbers and it is actually not an offence to be in possession of a bunch of numbers. However, if they could be identified as personal identification numbers to be used in association with credit and debit transactions, it is a new offence, and that is a good thing.

Up to now, when there was theft from the mail, the police, authorities and prosecutors always had difficulty trying to figure out who was the owner of the mail when it was stolen. Certainly when it is in the possession of the post office, there were offences dealing with theft from the mail from the post office, but what if the post office had not taken possession of it yet or what if the post office had already delivered it to a residence? After it has been delivered by the post office to a box sitting outside a front door somewhere, is that theft from the mail or is it theft from somebody in the house? What if the name on the letter does not match the name of the owner of the house? These were always problems.

I suppose I could ask why it has taken us 100 years to figure this one out, but the answer is that in the good old days, in the early 1900s, maybe there was not so much theft from the mail. Maybe it was not a big problem. However, the police and prosecutors have identified it now as a weakness in public security. We have managed to clarify that so mail that is sitting delivered to a house, a residence or in a box, not only is the key somewhat protected but so is the mail and that will allow better police enforcement.

I want to raise a concern, as my friend from Windsor—Tecumseh did earlier, about the exemption of public officers from prosecution when they use a forgery technique in their work for public safety.

The exemption is somewhat circumscribed. The alleged offence, and only an alleged offence because it says they are exempt, must be committed for the sole purpose of establishing or maintaining a covert identity for use in the course of the public officer’s duties or employment. As my friend pointed out earlier, the term “public officer” is quite a broad definition. One wonders why this particular exemption could not have been folded into section 25 or subsection 25(1) of the Criminal Code where there are statutory exemptions from prosecution for police or public officers in the course of their duties.

The most common case one thinks of is the work of an undercover police officer who assumes a false identity for the purpose of a covert undercover investigation. Citizens accept that. However, under section 25 of the Criminal Code when a public officer commits an act that would otherwise be a criminal offence, there must be a record of it and a justification for it in writing. The exemption claimed by the officer and agreed to by the police force that he or she is a part of is recorded in the House. A report is introduced in the House every year that describes each and every instance of exemption of a police officer from prosecution when an act is committed that would otherwise be a criminal offence.

One wonders why we would not require this type of exemption in this bill, clause 368.2, to be included in similar reports. Some people will say that there is just too much police and public officer covert activity going on and that instead of having a small volume filed in the House of Commons, the report would be 12 or 24 inches thick. That is possible, which is why I wanted to put it on the record and join my friend who spoke earlier on this as raising a possible concern.

The public should be much more satisfied that the bill has managed to bring in protection for a whole lot of personal identity techniques and information, which I will read for the record. The identity information protected includes: a fingerprint, voice print, retina image, iris image, DNA profile, name, address, date of birth, written signature, electronic signature, digital signature, user name, credit card number, debit card number, financial institution account number, passport number, social insurance number, health insurance number, driver’s licence number or a password.

I wanted to get those on the record because so many people routinely use all of those things. I wanted the record to show that this legislative amendment captured all of those things and gave people at least some protection under the Criminal Code. It does not mean that there will not be thefts of identity. It just means that the code identifies these things as protected items and, if they are stolen, used or misused, the prosecution will be easier and more focused.

Will it deter the bad guys? We do not know. The bad guys will always be out there looking for a chance to steal and plunder, although we hope there are fewer and fewer of them out there, but at least this amendment attempts to capture all of the things we have become used to as personal identity items.

The bill has a sentencing component. I am very pleased it does not engage in this mindless political posturing of throwing the book at those convicted with mandatory minimums. The bill quite properly proposes sentencing ranges for those convicted of these offences. Sometimes it is up to five years, or it is up to 10 years, or it is by indictment or it is by summary conviction, but the sentencing ranges look appropriate.

As we have always done in our Canadian justice system, and in most justice systems in the modern world, the decision making on sentencing is left to informed judges. I wanted to make this point because a number of the criminal law amendment bills we are looking at in this Parliament, and in the previous Parliament, all seem to have as their objective the rewriting of the sentencing regimes. In some naive way the proposers of the bill think that by tweaking the sentencing, we are going to get a safer country. I do not understand this.

I have had a close-up look at the Canadian justice system. I have been privileged to be in the House for many years. I was on the justice committee for 15 years. I had the privilege of seeing the criminal justice system up close, and it was not always pretty. I saw it working reasonably well. It is not like there were never any mistakes.

I cannot accept that by throwing a mandatory minimum sentence into a particular offence, we are suddenly going to have a reduction in the number of offences. The criminals out there, the would-be criminals, the maybe criminals do not know what the sentence is for any particular crime. In fact, I challenge anybody here today, any member of the House, to get up and tell us what the sentence would be for a particular offence, even under this bill. One could not know. The reason is we have provided for sentencing ranges. When people are convicted, they do not know what the sentence will be until the judge finally decides.

If we do not know what the sentence is, how could those would-be criminals out on the streets know what the sentencing would be? In their mind, as I have always seen it, it is binary in reaction to the criminal justice system. Either they are going to get their deterrences, or they are going to get caught or they are not. It is not about what the sentence is. They do not get out their little calculators and calculate what the sentence is before they hop into the car. Their whole view of this is whether they are going to caught. If they think they are going to get caught, they are not going to do it that night. If they think they are not going to get caught, they might.

I do not understand the mentality that urges upon the House that if we suddenly put in a whole bunch of mandatory minimum sentences, all those bad guys will know what the sentence is and they will stop their criminal activity and we will be safer. I just had to get in that sentencing issue.

I am pleased to have had a chance to talk about the bill. It looks like we are going to have ourselves an identity theft bill.

[Canadian Northwest Passage, October 5th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to participate in the debate on this private member's business, focusing on the naming of what a lot of people have up to now called the Northwest Passage.

This has a lot to do with the issue of Canadian sovereignty. I cannot imagine anybody in the House dissenting from a purported exercise in Canadian sovereignty, and I will speak to that at the end of my remarks if I have time.

A bundle of issues are associated with the issue of Arctic sovereignty and they are all apparently made more urgent at this time in history because of changes in the environment. Global warming has made more of the Arctic territory ice-free for at least part of the year. Improved transportation technologies have allowed humans greater access to that part of the world. Improved technology allows us all to view and monitor what has happened in that part of the world.

The world's voracious appetite to find and exploit natural resources is what brought the Europeans and the Vikings into the Arctic in the first place. All of this is going on at an enhanced pace now and there is focus on the Arctic Archipelago. I have never been there myself, but I have seen it on maps, winding its way through.

I recall the story of the RCMP vessel, the St. Roch, that made its way through the passage one summer in the 1940s. Canadians were proud at the time. It was strange for the mounted police to make a passage as opposed to a military vessel, but the Mounties opened up the European settlement in the north. They took the king's law and order into the north, so it was probably pretty natural for the RCMP to make the first voyage through.

In any event, the geography up there is badly in need of regulation to protect the environment and to regulate human activity. That should not be a surprise because the United Nations has pretty much done the same thing in Antarctica, where there are all kinds of significant and strict regulations on what can happen there. Treaties have been signed by many countries, including Canada, on just those kinds of regulations.

That has not happened in the Arctic for other historic reasons. One of the reasons is because Canada is there. The Arctic Archipelago is part of Canada so there would not appear to be a need for an international treaty.

Other countries have made claims to portions of the Arctic and for this reason there is an ongoing international process. A number of countries have come together and embraced the process for delineating the boundaries of their countries in the Arctic region. That is not to say in the Arctic Archipelago, but even further north of that. I refer to Denmark for Greenland, Russia, the United States for Alaska and maybe Norway. There are a few other countries and Canada itself. That process, which is being done in a peaceful and science-based basis, should come to an end in just a few years and it will establish the boundaries.

That process does not deal with the passage, but someone has to take care of the Arctic. Canada has been taking care of it and we are going to continue to do so.

The passage runs right through the Arctic Archipelago. It is part of our inland waters. We are not just going to talk the talk, but we are going to walk the walk. Canada will continue to regulate what goes on in the passage and in the Arctic Archipelago.

The motion proposes a name change to cosmetically impress upon everyone that it is not just the Northwest Passage for anyone. It is actually the Canadian Northwest Passage. They are internal waters. We will continue to view them that way, and I support that. In case the member had any doubt, I support the motion in this instance. Perhaps we could have given it a whole new name. Maybe we should have named it the Sir John A. Macdonald passage. Then it would be clear.

However, there is one point I will make. Passing this does not only involve a name change. It is an exercise of our sovereignty. If we pass the motion, we are saying that those waters and that passage are Canadian and it will be an exercise of our sovereignty with respect to that. It should be clear to all. I cannot imagine any other country even thinking about doing anything like this. This is our job. I do not know how the members will vote, but I will support the motion when it comes up for the vote.

[Committees of the House, June 17th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, I have the honour to present, in both official languages, the sixth report of the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates in relation to its study on supplementary estimates (A) for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2010. I am pleased to report that the committee considered some of the votes referred to it and reports the same.

Mr. Speaker, I also have the honour to present, in both official languages, the seventh report of the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates in relation to its study on the federal government procurement processes and small and medium-sized enterprises.

[Petitions, June 5th, 2009]

Madam Speaker, I have a petition from over 100 residents of the area I represent in Scarborough.

The petitioners bring the attention of the House to the plight of many thousands of displaced Sri Lankan persons in camps in northern Sri Lanka following the civil war there. Many of those displaced persons are now contained in camps surrounded by military and barbed wire.

They urge the Government of Canada to bring every diplomatic means to bear to assure that aid is delivered to these people and that they are assured appropriate human rights.

[Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, June 5th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to ask the member two short questions.

Perhaps some of us around here are watching too many movies about criminal organizations. In the context of this debate, as many members criticize mandatory minimums, the warehousing, the life-wasting, blind mandatory minimum sentences, we should not lose sight of the fact that the custodial sentence is a fundamental component of our justice system, and it is a necessary one to ensure public safety. We should put this in that context, in my view. Would he not agree with that?

Second, the government measure to impose mandatory minimums of one year foists the burden upon provincial governments and provincial correctional institutions, not federal institutions, of keeping these individuals in prison. Apparently it is not going to cost the federal government a nickel, so it is a rather cynical move.

Would he not agree that we would get better bang for our buck if we resourced our police better? Even though most of our police are not federal police, we get much more bang for our buck and much more effective public safety when we properly resource our police to do their investigations. When the police turn up the heat, crime goes down and public safety goes up.

[Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, June 4th, 2009]

Madam Speaker, in my remarks, I did distinguish between the person likely to be involved in and convicted of an impaired driving offence. But going over to the drug side, in a basic hypothetical situation, if we took a big dealer in a prohibited drug, and we caught him or her, proved all the elements of the offence, and it was a big crime, I do not think many people would have a difficulty with a sentence that was at least a year.

In many cases, someone who is a big dealer in prohibited drugs of that nature is going to get a sentence much greater than one year. The problem is that we may get an individual who is not the hypothetical one, a person who falls into the category of trafficking just by a hair and falls into the kind of person that the member for Marc-Aurèle-Fortin mentioned earlier, where someone was misled about what was inside the books, the drugs, the cocaine, the heroin or whatever it was, and the relative injustice that is perpetrated because we have this cookie cutter sentence of minimum one year.

That is where the minimum sentence falls short in my view.

[Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, June 4th, 2009]

Madam Speaker, I do not think our colleagues opposite have wilfully foisted the recession upon us, nor do I think that they think that putting people in jail is the economic fix that we need for the country.

There is quite a bit of difference among the different parties in the House as to how we should respond to the recession. There are those in particularly dire straits, those who do not perhaps have access to the EI system, and those who have fallen between the cracks in various parts of the country. There are increasing numbers of people out there in dire straits, not just single people but there are families. There are men and women with children and dependants.

Maybe we are not grappling too well with that as a federal Parliament. Maybe the provinces are expected to play a role in this as well and municipalities. However, I take the member's question as notice of a huge problem out there and I would not blame my colleagues opposite for all the bad stuff that is out there right now.