Derek Lee

[Federal Accountability Act, June 21st, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, we are dealing here late tonight with an interesting bill. It looks like we will be able to pass it before the summer. The bill proposes a lot of changes to the conflict of interest rules and is generally framed as a fix to some of the accountability mechanisms which we have in the federal government.

The bill includes provisions dealing with whistleblowing. I see those provisions recycling a previously introduced bill in the House. There are new lines of financial reporting from departments, a few changes to the political contribution rules, minor changes to the conflict of interest rules, and some new post-employment provisions for public office holders which now involve not just cabinet ministers but senior civil servants a little further down the pecking order.

Most of us see this as fixing something or providing a better framework of accountability. That is the general intention, but it struck me that as the bill was introduced and the lead-up to it, there were an awful lot of allegations coming from the Conservative opposition members then, and even in government now I still hear these allegations. They use the word “corruption”.

I thought I would do some research and see if I could figure out why they were using these words. I was also curious why from time to time the Speaker would not have thought it a matter of some concern that many words of that nature were being thrown about in the House and why some of them were not found to be unparliamentary. That never happened, and my party and I took the verbal blows.

I wanted to do some research to find out why the Conservatives, and perhaps the NDP, were so concerned about corruption. I started going back in time. I was looking to see if there have been any members of Parliament charged or convicted of fraud or corruption offences. I have been here about 18 years, and you have been here longer, Mr. Speaker. I have looked and I cannot find any Liberals on the list.

Let us admit right off the bat that there have been members on both sides of the House who have encountered personal problems, problems with relationships, and problems with alcohol. I am not talking about those kinds of problems here in terms of corruption. These are personal issues and they sometimes percolate up in the life of a member from anywhere in Canada, and those things have been dealt with reasonably well by the House.

I want to talk about real Criminal Code fraud and corruption. I have found the last six individuals who were charged and convicted. I am just going to go through it. I am a little uncomfortable doing it, but these are the individuals who have been charged and convicted.

The first one is a Mr. Gravel. He was convicted on February 13, 1989 of 15 counts of influence peddling and bribery. He was fined $50,000 and jailed. He was a member of the Conservatives.

The next one is a Mr. Grisé, and son of a gun if he was not also a Conservative. He was convicted in May 1989. There were 13 counts of fraud and influence peddling. He resigned from the House of Commons. He was fined $20,000 and served a day in jail. He was a Conservative.

Here is another one. This is Mrs. Jacques. Son of a gun, she was a Conservative. She was convicted on October 13, 1989 of two counts of fraud, one count of conspiracy, and one count of influence peddling. She was sentenced to two years less a day, conditional sentence, plus community service. She was a Conservative.

There is another one. This is the fourth one on my list that I have found. This was Mr. Desrosiers. He was a Conservative as well. He was convicted in 1990 of fraud. In exchange for having all of the other charges dropped, he was fined and given probation for one year.

I kept on with my research and then found number five. This was Mr. Fontaine, also a Conservative. There are an awful lot of Conservatives here. He was convicted in 1999. He pleaded guilty to three counts of fraud. Before the trial was to begin, he was sentenced to a $15,000 fine, and remained in the House while his case went through the system.

That is an awful lot of Conservatives and it is the Conservative Party that is alleging a whole lot of corruption.

Another one was Mr. Stupich, a New Democratic Party member of the House of Commons. He was convicted of fraud and contravening the gaming provisions of the Criminal Code. That was called “bingogate”.

I looked and still I could not find a Liberal member of Parliament who had been convicted, let alone charged, with any corruption offence. I could only find a whole list of Conservatives.

I was very disappointed, if I could put it that way, to hear all of these allegations over the last two or three years coming from Conservatives in the House. It seems to me that the Conservatives and perhaps even the NDP must have been drinking their own bath water. Maybe they were so concerned about corruption because they had it in their own benches. The Conservatives really understood corruption because it was found in their own benches here.

I am still looking for a case involving a Liberal and I cannot find one, no cabinet ministers and no backbenchers involved in fraud. Yet, some members of this place have the audacity to get up and allege that my party and my colleagues over here are somehow corrupt, when it is the Conservative Party that has sown the seeds of corruption and has the convictions.

There is a whole list of charges, not convictions. The convictions were overturned on appeal. I could go through that list, but I am not going to because I do not think it is fair to the individuals. A lot of the charges have been overturned or not proceeded with. I have done my research and I can say they were all Conservatives as well.

I am not saying that every Liberal on this side of the House is perfect, but what I am saying is that if people are going to allege corruption, they should look in their own house first. I do not think that was done. I wanted to put that on the record.

The last thing I want to say is not about corruption at all. It is about the contribution limits contained in the federal accountability act, the act that was generated because the Conservatives thought the Liberals were so corrupt, which turns out not to be true.

I do not know how it is all going to work out, but there is a contribution limit in the bill now of $1,000 per person. My experience in the political system now is that some members of political parties will, in the ordinary course of a year, by following through all the political activity that goes on, including provincial, federal, regional or leadership conventions, will actually end up spending convention fees of a significant amount, between $500 and $1,000.

If they are spending that kind of money participating in ordinary political activity, will they have any room to make an actual cash donation to the party for an electoral purpose? I am suggesting that they may not. I think it is unfair that those who participate a whole lot in the political process with their parties will not have any contribution room when it comes to donating at the time of an election to a candidate or party.

I do not think that is fair. I think that is inequitable. I wish that the bill did not have that limit. I wish the bill had a provision that allowed for a higher limit in circumstances such as I have described.

I thank the House for letting me get through those remarks without a whole lot of cat calling. I guess the House is in a better mood tonight.

[Criminal Code, June 12th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member takes the slam the cell door closed and throw away the key approach. I think every sentencing decision is based on its own merits and we rely on judges to do that with the general direction of appeal courts.

However, as a parent I would be concerned about any crime, but let me put this back to the member as a scenario. With the proposed mandatory minimum sentencing, what if a very well intentioned Crown prosecutor decides he or she wants to take a guilty plea to a lesser included offence? Instead of getting the mandatory minimum which the member would like to see, we end up taking a summary conviction plea or another lesser included offence and we end up without the mandatory minimum at all.

By imposing mandatory minimums across the board, defence counsel and Crown attorneys across the country will attempt to both use the higher penalty to induce plea bargaining and an attempt to avoid incarceration rates that will come with that.

As sure as night follows day and day follows night that will be a consequence of ratcheting up the mandatory minimums. I do not mind if the person culpable of the offence outlined by the hon. member is put in jail for five years or ten years provided that is a fair sentence determined by a court after a fair trial determined by a judge. I am happy to see the person put away for a long time, but not just on this chart of lock'em up and throw away the key approach that seems to be contained in the bill.

[Criminal Code, June 12th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I am going to resist getting into that pushing and shoving match which we just witnessed. I want to get to the issue of sentencing, as we debate Bill C-10.

As we all know, Bill C-10 bulks up the number of mandatory minimum sentences that would be in the Criminal Code. While there is room in every Criminal Code for some mandatory minimums, the easiest one is the sentence for first degree murder, which has a mandatory minimum sentence of life, at least in our country. Other countries have other penalties.

We are not really debating whether there should be a mandatory minimum sentence in place for any particular crime. We are debating the extent of those mandatory minimum sentences.

I used the term that the current bill bulks up. It really does bulk up or materially increases the number of mandatory minimum sentences that would be in the Criminal Code, if the bill passes, with particular reference to firearms offences. At the end of the last Parliament, an attempt was made to increase, by a small margin, the number of mandatory minimum sentences associated with the criminal use of firearms. In fact, the House passed a bill only within the last few years which did precisely that.

When I looked at the data, I came across what I thought was an interesting perspective on crime statistics. It has to do with how we look at crime statistics across the country. Although I have had many occasions to look at statistics over the years, I had not noticed any of this before. Members may or may not relate to this.

I represent a Toronto area riding. When I looked at the crime statistics for the Toronto area, the census metropolitan area called the CMA, the Toronto CMA was number 26 on a list of 27 Canadian metropolitan areas for crime. That means there are 25 other municipalities in Canada that have crime rates in excess of that in Toronto for the timeframe that ended with the year 2004. I thought that was peculiar. I would have thought the big cities would have had the highest crime rates. It turns out I am wrong.

Toronto was 26 on a list of 30 for criminal statistics kept by police forces across the country. Those are reliable statistics, too, but vary slightly from Statistics Canada. I will mention some of the places that were near the top of the list. This is not for the purpose of maligning these communities. A problem with crime in Canada is a problem for all Canadians as well as the communities involved. All five of the communities with the higher overall crime rates, Regina, Saskatoon, Abbotsford, Winnipeg and Vancouver, were all cities removed from the eastern part of Canada.

If I were an MP coming one of those communities, I would be telling the House that there is a relatively high crime rate in my community and that we have to do something about it. If I come from a community with a lower crime rate, I will say that there is a crime problem but we have to look at it in perspective. I had always been curious as to why there was a difference in perspectives among members of the House when it came to the current data.

Perhaps that is part of the explanation for communities that have higher crime rates. I am not talking marginally higher, I am talking double and triple the rates in some of the other eastern Canadian cities. If I were to be representing a high crime community, I would be pulling the chain a lot more firmly in terms of getting an appropriate response to dealing with those crime levels.

I want to point out that the sentencing regime, the sentencing used for both the cities with the lower crime rates and the cities with the higher crime rates is the same. Therefore, I do not think we can say it is the sentencing that is responsible for the higher crime rate.

We might also want to say that it is not the sentencing which is responsible for the lower crime rate. However, we are talking about material differences in crime rates, but the same sentencing regime.

We ought to look at the real crime data. I will ask members to look back 15 years or more to a report of a committee of the House, the justice committee. It was chaired by Dr. Bob Horner. At that time we looked at the crime rates in the United States of America. It had the highest imprisonment rate of all the countries where there was data on incarceration.

Looking back at our report, we said that if locking up all those who violated the law contributed to safer societies, then the United States should be the safest country in the world, which it was not. The U.S. Senate judiciary committee agreed. Using 1990 data, it said that the United States was a world leader in reported murder, rape and robbery rates. Yet it had the highest incarceration rate. The higher incarceration rates did not noticeably improve, in any way, the risk and crime rate levels in the United States.

At about the same time, it is true that the crime rates in Canada were relatively high. They had gone up, the prior 10 years leading up to 1991. Starting in 1991, the crime rates began to drop, and they have been dropping ever since in Canada, not because of the Horner report and not because of what Parliament did or did not do. Looking back, it probably had a lot to do with the sociological factors that caused crime.

I would love an opportunity to go into those today. I will not have a chance. I will simply make two or three points.

First, I believe enforcement is a major component of reducing crime. I think that has been proved in the community I come from. It is being proved now as police and prosecutors are learning how to do better enforce.

Second, crime prevention initiatives have payoffs, but it involves the long run. Factors that give rise to crime are poverty, physical and sexual abuse, illiteracy, low self esteem, inadequate housing, school failure, unemployment, inequality and dysfunctional families. These have all been identified as the root causes of crime. Increasing mandatory sentencing does not address any one of those at all.

That is with regret. That is why I am having difficulty with a wholesale entry in mandatory minimum penalties. I could accept that there would be a few serious crimes where society had an interest in increasing, the denunciation factor, the desire of Canadians to say that this offence is so serious that we have to attach a mandatory sentence, a one-off. However, the bill does not do that. It takes a whole file, a whole truckload of offences and creates mandatory minimums. I suggest that is not the way to go.

I encourage us to continue the debate here or at committee. Let us look at the sentencing principles contained in the Criminal Code. They are well enunciated. They were established by the House approximately 12 years ago. They are very good and they speak conceptually against the concept of mandatory minimums.

[Divorce Act, June 5th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I thought the time was coming to an end.

There is one last contextual piece that I would like to put forward for consideration just to put it on the record and not to militate against the spirit in which the bill is put forward. It has to do with the whole evolved envelope of the criteria which the court now uses, much of it judicially generated, in deciding what is in the best interests of a child.

This particular amendment would be added to the Divorce Act beside the best interests of the child criteria, if I could put it that way. We could end up with a lack of clarity about just which criteria are the most important in dealing with child custody and access.

This particular section would be a side piece, a collateral piece. There is every prospect that when the courts get a hold of it, it would not be clear as to just what degree of strength or what degree of importance this new section would have. It may prove to be unclear to party litigants and also to judges. This may invite a temporary destabilization in the criteria.

Just to draw an analogy, about 10 or 15 years ago, Parliament put in place sentencing criteria. The initiative put all the criteria in order. We tried to rank them so the criteria were all there. No new criteria have been put forward since then. Those sections of the Criminal Code that set out for the courts the criteria appropriate to sentencing decisions are all there in one code.

If this section were adopted as part of the Divorce Act, it could destabilize or significantly alter those established criteria for determining what is the best interests of the child. We could have a whole list of things that are criteria for those best interests and then one new one, death or terminal illness of a parent, which may trump all the others, but it is not clear from the legislation.

I will leave that on the public record and hopefully that may be helpful to colleagues in the event they have to review this legislation further.

[Divorce Act, June 5th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have an opportunity to address the private member's bill put forward by the hon. member for Lethbridge.

As the parliamentary secretary outlined, the bill is derived from a laudable desire on the part of the member that a hypothetical or perhaps real constituency out there has concern for circumstances following or during a divorce where one of the parents is terminally ill. There may be seen to be rigidities in allowing the child the ability to see the parent who is dying. That circumstance would tug at the heart strings of everyone. The bill would be an assertion of that circumstance of that context in the Divorce Act and would essentially require the court to allow the child to have contact with the terminally ill parent, provided it was consistent with the best interests of the child.

On the face of it, there really is not a problem. Most people would say that if the parent is dying, why not? However, the bill does not answer the question of why not. There may be why nots and perhaps the why nots are covered off in the phrase “the best interests of the child” to which the courts always look.

The bill does raise a couple of questions. I will not attempt to answer them because if the bill is successful at the second reading vote, I know that the committee which would look at the bill would navigate these issues. They may be seen as sidebar issues, but in terms of the law in the Divorce Act, they are quite real.

First, I want to point out that it does raise the spectre of the factual circumstance of the prospect of a death much higher arguably than it would be in real life. No one would suggest that in a court hearing the court would not be in a position to take account of the context of a dying person. The question is whether it is in the best interests of the child to see the dying parent.

Second, because this involves the Divorce Act, it does not involve separation. We have the prospect possibly of the absence of symmetry between custody and access decisions under the Divorce Act and custody and access decisions under provincial legislation. This would be put into just the Divorce Act and would not be put into the provincial statutes.

Third, if there was a parent dying at the time of the divorce, one could deal with the issue, but in most situations the potential passing or death of one of the parents would not be foreseeable.

There is a variation application section in the Divorce Act, where a parent can go back if there is a huge change in circumstances. Most separation agreements have these variation clauses. After the custody and access are settled, circumstances are probably not all foreseeable, so a parent could go back to the court and attempt to revise a custody or access provision. If it is for the purpose of a dying parent and the child wants to see the parent and the parent wants to see the child and everybody is happy about it, there would be no need to go back to court. It would probably happen because family members would make it happen. However, where there is a conflict and other issues extant, there is the prospect of litigation.

In the context of somebody dying, there is the reopening of a custody and access scenario which has already been settled by the court, maybe one in which the child simply has never seen the parent. Maybe 10 or 15 years have gone by and there has been no contact between the parent and the child and the parent who is deceased or a family member of that dying parent decides they want to take one last kick at the cat in the custody and access regime in place and would rely on a section like this to go back and try to destabilize the context of the child.

Those circumstances may or may not have been in the mind of the member who put this bill forward. I know the member put the bill forward in good faith and in an attempt to deal with compelling and compassionate circumstances. In the law things can go sideways fairly quickly once two or three lawyers begin debating, arguing and interpreting.

I raise these cautions in relation to the bill. I do not dispute the spirit of the legislation as it is put forward. In any event, if colleagues wish to see this bill adopted at second reading, there are any number of issues they may want to look at when considering the bill at committee.

[Criminal Code, May 31st, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to participate in this first debate of a private member's business item in this new Parliament. As my colleague earlier mentioned, it is great to have the private members' business underway. I know the quality and content of debate in the House will improve immeasurably with this new content added to that of the government's orders.

First, I do not feel I can support the member's bill and not because I do not support the objective of protecting children. However, it is not clear to me, and I will try to explain in the few minutes I have. The bill probably will not achieve the objectives.

The member has explained that he wants to bring the punishment within the threshold contained in the bill that would revise the conditional sentence legislation before the House. I understand that part. However, simply doubling the penalty, if that were his objective, with a view to ensuring that the convicted person would do hard time, does not in my view accomplish his objective.

All the sentencing options on convictions still remain within the section with which he is dealing. He has simply increased the indictable provision from five to ten years. He has not addressed the summary conviction provision which allows a judge to convict or a prosecutor to proceed on summary conviction. Summary convictions are punishable by a prison term of up to six months only and a fine of $2,000. By doubling the penalty, does not get the member and his colleagues to where they want to go.

Let me state right off the bat as well that I do not agree to doubling sentences just for the heck of it. We could double the sentence for all kinds of offences and say that we are being tough on crime. Going to the list of all the offences in the Criminal Code and doubling them for the sake of doubling it, is not going to get us anywhere. What about the parent or guardian procuring sexual activity of the child? The maximum penalty there is two years. Maybe we should double it, triple it, quadruple it or maybe have a life sentence. We could do that.

Then there is the householder permitting sexual activity on the premises of that person. That is a two year maximum penalty. What about corrupting children? There is a term not exceeding two years if one is convicted of carrying on activity that corrupts children.

The hon. member, while he is justifiably concerned about the new luring risks on the Internet, has missed a whole lot of other sections, about 100 of them, where the penalties are all in a range within which we have lived for many years. I do not have to go through the whole code. I know the member, if he has done his research as he has said, would have looked for the offences of disorderly conduct, nudity in a public place, causing a disturbance, interfering with a minister from carrying on his or her religious duties, obstructing a minister, trespassing at night and vagrancy. All these things have penalties punishable on summary conviction or penalties of two years to five years.

In addition to that whole piece of what is an appropriate sentence for a particular criminal offence, this provision will not remove the other sentencing options that are available to the court, for example, probation. That option is still available to a sentencing judge. I am not saying that is the sentence he or she is going to give, but it is still there even though the member is trying to get rid of the conditional sentence option.

I would say a conditional sentence is often superior to a probation, but conditions can be attached to both, or a fine. The fine option has not been removed either as a sentencing option.

I was going to talk a little bit about the new government's attempt to make Canadians feel like there is a whole lot more crime than there used to be and that the only way we are going to be secure in our homes and neighbourhoods is if we throw everybody in the slammer and increase all the sentences. However, on listening to the member it appears to me to be fairly clear that was not his intention, that he is really just trying to bring this sentence within a range so that it could be dealt with under the new conditional sentencing provisions.

I will not go into my diatribe on what I would call the neo-con politics of fear. However, if all of these sentencing options are available to judges now, then in order to accomplish his broader objective of deterrence and denunciation, which I believe are part of his objective, then this bill and the provisions that he is urging upon us are going to have to be tweaked two or three different ways.

I suggest to him respectfully that this whole process of trying to use the Criminal Code as a means of reducing crime is a much more complex piece. Simply doubling penalties, creating mandatory minimum penalties across the board and great big wholesale reforms is not a method that I can accept as one that is going to achieve the objective we seek of denunciation and deterrence to crime and dealing with criminals in a way that achieves the various objectives that society has. By the way, all those objectives are set out in the Criminal Code now. Thanks to the sentencing bill that was passed here in the early 1990s, there is a whole regime of sentencing objectives.

The member may wish to urge upon us some new sentencing objectives. That would be quite rational and it may be that we could tweak this. But I know that the sentencing provisions deal with the whole issue of child victims. As far as I can recall when the House dealt with it, nothing was left out of the sentencing prospectus that we urged upon the court.

Please remember that prior to that point in time in the early 1990s, there was no sentencing provision. All the sentencing guidelines had been developed by the courts themselves. That was the first time Parliament in this country said to the courts, “When you sentence, Mr. or Ms. Judge, here are the criteria,” and they were listed in an order. In fact we changed the order as the bill moved through the House and through the Senate.

I accept the member's objective. I and every member of the House want to do what we can to protect children from predators, on the streets, in the schools, on the Internet, wherever they are. I am sure every member in this place wants to do that. This bill has adopted a method which I just do not think is going to get us to where the member would like to be. Therefore, my preference as a private member is not to support the bill but to urge him to continue focusing on this envelope of public policy with a view to improving it. We will probably be doing that into infinity because the Criminal Code always has to be adjusted to adapt to current conditions.

[Criminal Code, May 29th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, the simple answer is yes. The sentence for a crime should reflect the seriousness of it, whether or not the offender is a first time offender, the denunciation factor which I had referred to earlier. Clearly, there are actually seven or eight different criteria set out in the legislation for sentencing. Right up there near the top is the denunciation factor. In other words the state and the people are saying that if individuals do that which is so serious, we will take away their liberty and they will be incarcerated for a period of time.

Running along with the denunciation are the other factors which I have referred to, which are in the legislation. That is there for everyone to read also. We are doing reasonably well at it.

I know the member would like to have more statistics that would enable him and police communities, who are working across the country to protect us, to show the sources of what they regard as the persistent crime that irritates them so much and I hope they can find that.

The connections between the propensity to commit a crime and the causes all relate to the poverty issue raised by the hon. member, the lack of success in school, and what happens to a young person growing up. Just because one is poor does not mean one is a thug or a crook. Of course it does not.

Half of Canada was poor during the depression, but the country did not grow up with thugs and crooks. It is the disadvantaged among us who are more likely be drawn into crime. It is that group that our social spending should be aimed at. That is what we should keep in mind as we discuss public policy in sentencing.

[Criminal Code, May 29th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member makes a wonderful point that our crime is usually connected to a cause of crime. I would say that the justice committee went down this road as well with the crime prevention report in 1993. It was called the Horner report. It was chaired by a member of the Conservative Party at the time.

That report linked growing up in poverty, lack of success at school, learning disabilities in school, and other related items to the source of crime. If we can continue to make progress, as I said earlier, in addressing poverty, particularly children in poverty and we have made huge progress but there is so much more to do, the more progress we make in dealing with poverty, the more progress we make in dealing with the causes of crime. If we remove the causes of crime, we will reduce the crime.

[Criminal Code, May 29th, 2006]

Yes, we watch television, we listen to the media and we read magazines. The media is filled with crime stories and victimization. Some of the stories are not even real but we watch them like they are. Where do most of those stories come from? They come from a location that has a homicide rate of 5.90 compared to 1.95. No wonder people are afraid. The drama, the statistics and the life experiences that they are watching come from a place where the crime rate is triple that of Canada's crime rate.

The real TV, the murder and crime shows, all from the United States, might have something to do with it. It is great entertainment but that might have something to do with it. I do not know. I do not have enough wisdom to know all of that but I think that is a factor.

[Criminal Code, May 29th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member does make a good point. Yes, 35 years ago in 1970 it was quite different. The data actually shows that the crime rate was slightly less than it is now. Between then and now, crime went up and now it is headed down again.

The member asked if I had more data and statistics. These are not my statistics. These are our statistics. They are there for everyone to access, look at and study.

He also raised another good point. He asked why people now are seemingly more afraid than they were 5, 10 or 20 years ago. I do not have all the answers to that but I do know we watch a lot more television than we used to.