Derek Lee

[Credit Cards, December 7th, 2004]

Mr. Chair, I have listened to the member's remarks and he has perhaps made some useful suggestions. I would not be prepared to accept that no criminal charges would emanate from a scenario where a policeman found an individual with a box full of 500 credit cards belonging to other people. I would ask the hon. member if he is of the same view.

It is similar to someone having another person's cheque book or credit card in his or her briefcase. In this case there are 500 of them in the trunk of someone's car. I think a policeman could infer an attempted fraud in that situation. One could probably also infer the intent just from the existence of all these other identities on credit cards.

I do not want to take away from the member's creative suggestion of looking at other ways to target this type of crime. Would he not accept that we are not clearly out in the cold in this scenario, that a policeman would likely have good grounds to act?

[Middle East, December 2nd, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, recent voting at the United Nations and statements by Ambassador Allan Rock may have left an impression that Canada has changed its longstanding policy toward the Middle East. Some say it may show a pro-Israeli shift. Could the Minister of Foreign Affairs indicate to the House the significance of these votes?

[Supply, November 25th, 2004]

Yes, the Conservative government put it out there. It is controlled by a public authority where there was federal, provincial and municipal representation. In fact the feds have a minority representation on the board. Why does the member not just admit that this is about Conservative values and about who owns it, and not about the future? Why does he not just admit that and maybe we can have a better debate?

[Supply, November 25th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, this debate has turned fairly partisan but how could we expect otherwise? The motion today has been put forward by the opposition. I am going to suggest very briefly that the opposition has been somewhat bankrupt in putting forward this issue. This debate, as the opposition has put forward, is not about the future. It is about the past. In the debate so far, the hon. member has talked about Sir John A. Macdonald, Pierre Trudeau and building the St. Lawrence Seaway.

The Liberal Party is looking to the future here. The debate today is not about land use. Farmers are using the land now. It is in agricultural use, so that is not the issue here today. It is about ownership. The Conservative Party wants to talk about who owns the land, not the use of the land.

Another very important point, I put to the member who just spoke, is that the land is now in public ownership under a 50 or 50-plus year lease. A public authority controls the land.

[National Defence, November 17th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of National Defence.

Earlier today there was an election in Brussels at the NATO meeting for a new chairman of the NATO military committee. Could the parliamentary secretary inform the House of the results of that election and the implications, if any, for Canada?

[Quarantine Act, October 22nd, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, these are my first remarks in the new Parliament. I want to thank the electors of Scarborough—Rouge River for showing their confidence in me by sending me back here to work with all hon. members.

I have a few thoughts, and they are not random. I have thought about them carefully, but I would like to place them on the record, both for this place and for the committee that will be studying the bill on the Quarantine Act.

There seems to be a clear measure of support around the House for the bill. The devil, if any, will be in the detail, although most of the bill involves updating concepts and laws that reach back quite a number of years.

On the face of it, Canadians at present and Canadians in the past have not objected to the concept of quarantine for the purpose of protecting the collective health of Canadians. Whenever there is a quarantine, or something like a quarantine, or an intervention by government, it is an imposition of the collective will over the individual will and the individual rights of the person. For that particular reason, we have to be careful that we do not stand up and say yes, let us collectively impose a burden on people at any one particular point in time, take away their liberties, impair their privacy and make other impairments of their rights, which are now happily guaranteed in our charter and in the laws of the various provinces.

The predecessor of this statute goes back to the 1800s. Since then we have the Charter of Rights and Freedoms which allows the citizen more aggressively to police or contain the imposition of authority and power by the state. Nonetheless, it is our job to proceed carefully and to develop legislation that is sensitive, not just to the need for collective good health but to individual liberties.

What are some of the issues that we should look at? Quite understandably, we have found it necessary to insert into the statute new concepts of personal mobility. That of course involves aircraft, which was not around 100 years ago. However, it certainly is now and the bulk of people move internationally by aircraft, not by sailing ships and steamships.

I noticed there was a reference in the statute to the use of DDT as a disinfectant. We have come a long way since then and the language of the act has to be broadened to incorporate new science, new biology and new pharmacology.

Another concept has to be added to the new statute. Prior to this, with some exceptions, it was always viewed that a quarantine scenario developed by something incoming. It was a person or group of persons who came to Canada and brought the disease here. That was the old concept and it was not always the case. We perhaps generated our own diseases here. However, the need of the state to intervene often involved the quarantining of incoming passengers.

Canada has signed on to international treaties and conventions where we now have an obligation to contain outgoing disease, if in fact there is some. We have an obligation to ensure that our outgoing traffic of persons does not send viruses and diseases out of Canada.

A quarantining or containing in relation to a disease now has to be seen as something we may have to do here to keep people from leaving Canada, not just keeping them out. We will have to require air carriers as well as ship owners to report where they are going, who they have on board and maybe things a little more intrusive than that, but it is necessary in these times. We have to look at isolation of these travellers.

Everyone will recognize the speed with which people move around the world now. It is not like the old days when we might have spent a few days or a week on a ship. The aircraft is actually here within a couple of hours. Therefore there is a real need for authorities in Canada and outside Canada, in cooperation with the carrier, to take steps to contain a disease or a virus if it is noted or found in transit.

For those reasons, they say it is necessary to take possession of an aircraft or a ship to make sure it does the right thing. A collective group of people will agree that we have to stop a certain ship or aircraft and take possession of it. That is all fine and good unless one happens to be on the aircraft. If we are on that aircraft when an action is taken to quarantine, we may have a different view of this. As we press the elements of this legislation, we should make sure that we take into account the circumstances of travellers on the aircraft or conveyance as that is about to happen.

Since this act developed and evolved a century ago, we also have a much better concept of privacy. We have laws that restrict how we deal with private personal information. In circumstances where there is medical information about individuals, we will now have to overcome that restriction on privacy and allow health authorities to exchange personal information in relation to health matters where these incidents arise.

We will have to look at that carefully. It means an exchange of personal information involving health matters between the federal government, an air carrier, a provincial government, a municipal government or a hospital authority. It is worth noting here that normally the provinces and the municipalities do most of the work in terms of health care response so we will have to look at that carefully to ensure we have a model that respects privacy and the appropriate jurisdictional level of participation.

The last thing I want to make reference to is the concept of the government making interim, regulatory orders in response to a health or infectious disease or a contagious disease scenario.

Again, it would be the collective view that the government should be in a position to make an order. In the Public Safety Act adopted by Parliament a year or two ago, we accepted the role of what are called interim orders. A public official is able to make an interim order of short duration which requires members of the public either to do something or not do something and that has the force of law. A public official does not have to come here to make the law. The public official is able to make the law under delegated authority. However those orders are only interim, time limited, and they must come back to the governor in council and they must be reviewed by Parliament before they become permanent.

I can assure members that the standing joint committee of this House and the Senate will continue its excellent work reviewing the constitutionality and the appropriateness of those types of orders.

It is worth noting, and I say this for the record, that the first material disallowance by that committee and this House of a regulation previously made by the government occurred in relation to the Indian Health Act, the Indian health regulations, about 10 or 11 years ago. The committee was of the view that the quarantine provisions of the Indian Health Act were unconstitutional and the orders were disallowed and taken off the books.

It was a happy event to see the House disallow government regulations. It was actually the second time that it occurred in our happy history here. I point that out for the record in relation to orders that may be made under this new statute.

[Supply, May 13th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I hope you will accept the latitude extended to many members today, this day being near the end of what is likely to be the end of our Parliament. I just want to note the hon. member's remarks on this subject, but as he has indicated he may not be back here.

I want to let the record show his contributions to this place, while he has been here on behalf of his constituents, in the area of access to information, public accountability and transparency. He was one of the few individuals in the House who had a background in security intelligence that allowed him to also contribute what I will call value added to this place, not just in that envelope but in many others.

He has in his remarks made reference to his private member's bill. It is the largest private member's bill I have ever seen here and as complex as any. I remember him working on this years ago, not just alone but in collaboration with other members, not just one party but all parties. He is a member who has made contributions here on issues involving members from both sides of the House. He has been able to focus on public interest issues in a value added way. He was able to put the partisanship aside and really focus on what he and others believed were in the best interest of Canadians.

I wanted to make that comment as a form of tribute. I will not take more time, but thanks to the member and thank you, Mr. Speaker, for allowing me to say that.

[Criminal Code, May 12th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak to the motion to send Bill C-35 to committee before second reading.

Bill C-35 contains a number of technical and remedial amendments to the Criminal Code, the DNA Identification Act and the National Defence Act intended to clarify and strengthen the present law which governs the taking of bodily substances for purposes of the national DNA data bank.

I intend to focus my remarks today on those amendments that will address a particular problem that has been identified by the commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police who manages the DNA data bank on behalf of Canadians.

Great care was taken in the initial design of the DNA data bank legislation to carefully balance the protection of society achieved through the early detection, arrest, prosecution of offenders using DNA technology and the privacy rights of individuals on the other hand. Up until now, under the Criminal Code, judges have only been authorized to make DNA data bank orders against offenders convicted of a specific designated Criminal Code offence.

A DNA data bank order made by a judge under the Criminal Code authorizes the police to take samples of bodily substances from a convicted offender for the purposes of the data bank. After the samples are collected, the police forward them along with a copy of the judge's order to the national DNA data bank in Ottawa.

Under procedures established by the commissioner of the RCMP, before the samples of bodily substances from a convicted offender are subjected to a forensic DNA analysis, the DNA order is examined again to verify whether it in fact relates to a designated offence. However, since the DNA data bank legislation came into force, almost four years ago, over 400 DNA data bank orders have been made against persons who on the face of those orders appear not to have been convicted of a designated offence.

These are referred to as facially defective DNA orders. In essence, there is a mistake on the face of the document which shows the order of the court. The biological samples that accompany these defective DNA data bank orders have not been analyzed by the data bank. To have processed the samples could have violated the privacy of those persons and undermined the integrity of the data bank.

The commissioner of the RCMP should be congratulated in this case for having respected the intent of Parliament by carefully examining and screening the data bank orders submitted to him.

There is now a need to create a procedure to determine whether the errors on the face of these orders are merely a clerical error which can be corrected or whether they are clearly cases where the court lacked authority to make the order. In the latter case, there is a need for the DNA Identification Act to provide clear authority to the commissioner to destroy the bodily substance obtained under these orders.

I want to say a few words about the procedure set out in the proposed legislation which will ensure that only those DNA samples that have been taken in conformity with the law are analyzed.

First, one observes that there is now a duty imposed on the commissioner to review the information transmitted to him, along with the DNA sample taken from a convicted offender, to ensure that the offence referred to in the DNA order is a designated offence.

Second, if the commissioner is of the opinion that the offence referred to in the DNA order is not a designated offence, he is required to retain the DNA sample and to communicate with the attorney general of the province, where the order was made, to initiate a review of that order. The attorney general of the province is responsible for the prosecution of Criminal Code offences in that jurisdiction and will review the order and the court record to determine whether the offence referred to in the DNA order is in fact a designated offence. A defective order will have to be revoked by the court of appeal for that province and in that procedure.

If the attorney general is advised that the DNA order has been revoked, the commissioner will have a duty to destroy the DNA samples that accompanied the original order. In a case where there was just a clerical error in the drafting of the order and the commissioner receives a corrected DNA order in which the offence referred to is a designated offence, he can proceed to analyze the DNA sample and to include the offender's DNA profile in the convicted offenders index in the national DNA data bank.

Under the DNA Identification Act, DNA profiles of convicted offenders that have been placed in the convicted offenders index are compared with the DNA profiles derived from biological substances found on or in something related to the commission of an unsolved designated offence. Where there is a match the local police are advised of the identity of a suspect.

In closing, I also wish to indicate my support to adopt the bill here prior to second reading and send it to committee. I note there is substantial support around the House for this. In the context of the time we have now, I suppose I could say we had better hurry, but I am sure when the House has an opportunity to deal with this bill again, it will receive prompt disposition and passage.

[Committees of the House, May 10th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I have the honour to present, in both official languages, the first report of the Standing Committee on Justice, Human Rights, Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness entitled, “Improving the Supreme Court of Canada Appointment Process”.

The report, which responds to the Prime Minister, the government House leader and proposals of political parties represented in the House, presents the views of committee members as we construct an appropriate role for members of the House of Commons in the process of appointments of judges to the Supreme Court of Canada.

[Supply, April 27th, 2004]

Madam Speaker, I was delighted to see the hon. member reach the subject of debate in the last minute of his speech. The issue is really why would one opt for fixed election dates. It is a question where there are probably reasons for and against.

The royal commission on electoral reform looked at this issue about 10 years ago and found several cogent reasons why we should not have fixed election dates. One was that once we went for a fixed election date, it would decrease the ability to make the government in power accountable because the government could be defeated on a vote in the House. We would then go for a general election. However, to put in place a fixed election date would remove that mechanism of accountability.

There are other reasons for and against, but simply on that one issue, would the hon. member to tell us how the fixed election date would increase accountability here in the House?