Garnett Genuis

[Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, June 12th, 2017]

Madam Speaker, I appreciate the attestations of the parliamentary secretary, but they do not in any way answer the specific question, so let me keep this tied in and really clear.

For the parliamentary secretary, are they now tracking the numbers of religious minorities that are coming in? He said they are taking members of religious minorities. Are they tracking the numbers? If so, how many Yazidis and how many Assyrian Christians have been brought here through the refugee process? If they are not tracking the numbers, then how can they know that they are accepting the most vulnerable, especially recognizing the problems minorities have in accessing the UN certification system? How can they know that they are actually succeeding in doing it if they are not tracking the numbers?

I would like answers to those specific questions.

[Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, June 12th, 2017]

Madam Speaker, the government has a real issue when it comes to identifying vulnerable communities for refugee selection.

I asked a question earlier about the fact that we know there are certain communities around the world that face ethnic cleansing and genocide. It is important that our refugee policy be able to identify those communities and ensure that we are indeed taking the most vulnerable.

I note in this context that in many cases, there is a challenge for those most vulnerable communities to actually even access the refugee certification process. Very often they may not feel safe in refugee camps, where even in those situations, they may be vulnerable to persecution. This is something we have heard, in particular, about Yazidis and Assyrian Christians.

The government has accepted the principle of accepting the most vulnerable, at least when it comes to Yazidis. We are still waiting for it to even address the issues affecting Christian communities in the same region.

I want to share with the House a particular exchange from a technical briefing given by immigration officials to reporters at the end of 2015 on the refugee program.

The question was, “Last week at the briefing one of my colleagues asked about breakdown by religious minority. You said you didn't track that. I want to ask you again if you have that information because you had access to it under the previous government.

“Back in September we had numbers to that effect. Both you as the bureaucrats and the ministers keep saying Canada wants to help the most vulnerable. We all know those are the religious minorities. How are we to believe that you don't track that if you say you're there to help the most vulnerable?”

The official response was, “I can't comment about leaks of confidential documents under the previous government. Our standard processes and our standard systems do not track anyone's ethnicity or religion. We don't put it in the system, therefore we can't get it out.”

In the follow-up question, the reporter said, “Two things off that. One, how did it exist before? You said you can't comment on leaks of documents but obviously it existed if it was leaked. Two, if you're not willing to track that you said you want to make helping LGBT get out of the area a priority. It seems odd you're willing to track that but not are you a persecuted Christian. What's the difference?”

The official response was, “With regards to your first question, information that may have been available for a small sample of cases does not reflect the standard processes of the government of Canada in our refugee resettlement cases. We do not ask people at interviews are you a Sunni, are you a Jew, are you a Christian of which denomination and record it in our systems in a systematic way.

We don't have data fields for it.”

The government thinks it is standing on some kind of virtuous principle by saying that it does not track and it does not discriminate when it comes to different communities. The reality is that in the regions we are looking at, people are specifically vulnerable because, often, of their membership in a religious minority community. They are being targeted for that.

I am sure the parliamentary secretary knows that the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, 1951, to which Canada is a party, defines a refugee as someone who has fled his or her country owing to:

....well-founded fear of being persecuted because of his or her race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.

It is fundamentally relevant what someone's religious background is, because it likely informs their degree of vulnerability in the context from which they are escaping. It is also a good practice in terms of basic data collection. If the government is not even collecting data about which vulnerable communities people come from, then it may well be that they are unintentionally being completely excluded from the selection process, yet the government has no way of knowing it.

I challenged the government, and I challenge it again, to step up and provide a better and credible answer about how we ensure that we take the most vulnerable, those facing genocide, like Yazidis and Assyrian Christians, and how we ensure that those people are not being excluded or, at the very least, are being included in our refugee selection. What is the government doing for persecuted religious minorities, and has it finally fixed its data fields?

[Citizenship Act, June 12th, 2017]

Madam Speaker, I want to follow up on the question about people who fraudulently obtain their citizenship. I believe, and I think my constituents believe, that it is important that we maintain the integrity of our system. This means that when individuals obtain their citizenship through fraud, we should not draw out the process unnecessarily, that we should recognize that is a problem for the integrity of citizenship and people should lose citizenship in that case.

In response to some of the other comments and how the Liberals seem intent on approaching this amendment, is it not fundamentally in the public interest to ensure we maximize the disincentive to citizenship fraud to ensure upfront that people know that if there is citizenship fraud, there will be a strong response? Is that not an imperative if we are to have a strong and effective immigration system that works for everybody?

[Local Officials in Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, June 12th, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, Alberta will have municipal elections this fall, so now seems a fitting time to pay tribute to the current municipal officials, some of whom are not seeking re-election.

Local mayors and councillors have been great allies and partners as we worked together to advance the priorities of Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan. When it comes to supporting the energy sector in particular, local officials have been outspoken advocates for pipelines and for a response to the unemployment crisis facing the province.

I recently welcomed the local leaders to Ottawa. They were here lobbying on behalf of the Alberta Industrial Heartland Association. This association is an initiative of local municipalities advocating for the downstream part of the energy sector. Municipal officials work on issues big and small. I once called my local councillor at 11 p.m. to get his advice on dealing with an animal that had gotten into my house and, much to my surprise, he answered the phone. That was before I was elected.

Whether it is dealing with political animals here in Ottawa or animals in my basement, I know that I can always count on the important partnership between my office and local municipal officials. I thank them for their service.

[Business of Supply, June 8th, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, I have a simple question for my colleague. Does he think it would be considered progress if we lived in a world where the United States, Great Britain, or France no longer had nuclear weapons but Russia, China, and North Korea continued to have nuclear weapons? Would he regard that as an improvement to the situation we have right now?

[Business of Supply, June 8th, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, I certainly enjoy working with my colleague on human rights issues. There are cases when we agree, but I do not think this is one of them, unfortunately. In principle, Conservatives would reject the idea of unilateral disarmament. We certainly favour the idea of seeking disarmament on a multilateral basis, but when certain nations that are more likely to respect international law unilaterally disarm, that potentially puts them at risk relative to other nations.

I will read a quote from Margaret Thatcher and ask him to reflect on it. I am sure he is a big fan, by the way, as she was a strong female prime minister. She said:

A world without nuclear weapons may be a dream but you cannot base a sure defence on dreams. Without far greater trust and confidence between East and West than exists at present, a world without nuclear weapons would be less stable and more dangerous for all of us.

She said this in 1987. Is she not right that we create greater risks for ourselves through unilateral disarmament if we then give a strategic and military advantage to countries that do not share our values and do not have any regard for international law?

[Cannabis Act, June 7th, 2017]

Madam Speaker, in terms of its being easy to access, marijuana is a plant. It is, I have been told, not that difficult to grow. This is the challenge we have in limiting access to it, but if we now make it legal for people to grow it in their homes and distribute it to others, even for minors to possess and distribute it to other minors, of course it is going to be easier to access. There is more we can do in the context of continuing criminalization to address the ease of access. We do not have to accept the status quo as being sufficient, but that certainly does not mean that we should move in the wrong direction toward legalization.

The member is quite right to point out that the government is not at all sending consistent messages about the risks. Again, I would hope that, at very least, through this debate we could send a clear message about the genuine risks associated with marijuana use. Members of the government are supposed to be leading and setting a positive example, and in the case of the Prime Minister, he used marijuana while being a member of Parliament. That is a real problem in terms of the message it sends.

The reality of the political process by which this has come about is the government trying to appeal to people who think there is no problem with marijuana. All of the best and real science shows that there are significant risks associated with marijuana.

[Cannabis Act, June 7th, 2017]

Madam Speaker, with the greatest of respect for the parliamentary secretary, he should read the legislation insofar as the sections, because the strict regulatory regime that the Liberals talk about is actually just for people to grow their own at home. People can grow up to four plants that can be a metre high, yes, but who is going to police that when there are no notification or registration requirements whatsoever for those who grow it? Municipalities are not going to be informed. The law says that people can grow their own marijuana at home. That is not a strict regulatory framework at all, and it is quite disingenuous to suggest that it is.

[Cannabis Act, June 7th, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, last night, I noted the government had said its marijuana legislation was designed to keep marijuana out of the hands of children, and the profits out of the hands of organized crime. It is positively Orwellian. This legislation would very clearly do the exact opposite.

Last night, I spoke about the impact on children. To briefly review, the legislation would remove any criminal penalties for children aged 12 to 17 who possess up to five grams of marijuana. That is the equivalent of about 15 joints. It would also allow for people to grow marijuana in their own homes where, very likely, children would have access to it. Yes, we could put it in a locked room which has sunlight, but marijuana is a plant, so we cannot exactly store it in the same way we would store prescription drugs or alcohol.

Making marijuana legal would obviously make it easier for children to access it. In general, though, it would make it more prevalent, more readily available, and removing penalties for accessing it, naturally, would remove the risk associated with it. We have seen this across countries. In every case, where there is legalization, there is increase in use; most notably in the Netherlands. After marijuana use was legalized, consumption nearly tripled among 18 to 20-year-olds, and many municipalities in the Netherlands subsequently moved to ban so-called coffee houses completely.

This is clearly the result of legalization, and it is beyond fanciful that a government would claim that if we legalize something, if we make it easier to access and use something, if we make it legal for people to grow something in their own homes, we are to see less use. Yes, marijuana use is too high, and we can talk about the reasons for that right now, but it is fanciful to the extreme to suggest that making it easier to grow and get something will make people less likely to access it.

Let me speak, now, to this issue of organized crime. The government seems to believe that if we make something legal but still have rules around it, people will necessarily follow rules, and that it will necessarily starve out organized crime. The argument goes that if we eliminate a particular business in which organized crime is involved, organized crime will just close up shop. This is intuitively appealing, perhaps, but demonstrably false.

In addition to selling all kinds of drugs, organized crime is, or has been, actively involved in selling contraband versions of otherwise legalized substances, things like tobacco, and there is a major problem with contraband tobacco. Organized crime is associated with illegal practices in many perfectly legal industries. It has a history of being involved in areas like construction, garbage collection, gambling, and politics.

In fact, if we look at the history of organized crime, we see the roots of it are often cultural or sociological, as opposed to purely economic. The Mafia system, for example, originated in a Sicilian response to external occupation. Sicilians, over a long history, developed a system of self-government which, essentially, could exist in spite of, or in defiance of, occupying armies or ordinary rulers. It was a way for ordinary people to mediate their economic, social, and criminal justice relations in a way that did not involve going to occupying authorities. That, very clearly, was the history.

Organized crime will participate in illegal businesses where there is a profit to be made, that is certain. However, its existence does not depend on illegal business. It will apply its modes of collusion, corruption, and intimidation to legal, as well as illegal, businesses, and make a lot of money in the process.

Developing that Mafia example a bit further, of course, we can look at the history of the Mafia in North America. The Mafia benefited from alcohol prohibition. However, its history stretched for hundreds of years before that. It was a response to emergent cultural phenomena that led to that. Its ultimate decline was not the result of legalization of anything; rather, it was a change in the criminal law, with the introduction of laws that allowed law enforcement to target organized crime directly.

It is very clear with the set-up of this law that it would be very easy for organized crime to continue to be actively involved in the marijuana business, selling it to minors, facilitating the kinds of transactions that are illegal, but it would be legal and, therefore, much easier for people to carry around large amounts of marijuana, up to 30 grams for adults, up to five grams for minors.

It just does not make any sense to say this is going to be the end of organized crime, or even this is going to be a hit for organized crime. We are going to see, very likely, the evidence suggests, increased use, and new opportunities for organized crime to get around many of the fairly anemic, though they be, rules the government has put in place.

The point here is that the government is trying to use justifications for the law that it knows do not accord with the reality. It talks about children. It talks about organized crime. In reality, we are going to see increased use of this by children. Also, this will create new opportunities for organized crime to circumvent the laws that involve selling to children because adults and children will have a much easier time carrying marijuana around without detection.

We have a clear alternative. We do not have to accept the status quo as an acceptable reality either. Our party supports a ticketing option that allows a reasonable and effective criminal justice response, not one that applies disproportionate penalties to this but one that I think can emphasize treatment and public health while also still allowing a legal intervention to address that risk. I think the approach we have emphasized is a sensible alternative. It allows that kind of necessary intervention. This is the position that was endorsed by the association of police chiefs, not decriminalization but a ticketing option.

There is a lot of development that could be done around that proposal. Perhaps we might require people who are facing the possibility of conviction to seek an alternative that would involve education and becoming aware of the impacts of marijuana use. We could use the criminal justice system as a way of directing people toward treatment without being overly punitive. Our friends in the NDP caucus have pointed out the possibility of lifelong criminal convictions. We can address those issues through reforms to the pardon system.

However, the real problem we have right now is that marijuana is in this grey zone. It is illegal but there is not a ticketing option, and it clearly is not an enforcement priority. That is why so many people use it. On the one hand, there is no ticketing option, there is no alternative outside the laying of a charge, and on the other hand, clearly people should not be going to jail for mere possession offences. I think we can all agree on that. I think we can propose sensible reforms and alternatives that actually communicate the real dangers and risks.

We have a government that is trying to justify an election promise based on the fact that the Prime Minister has said that he has smoked marijuana while being a member of Parliament, and then talks about a public health approach. That clearly sets such a terrible example when parents, teachers, and others are trying to communicate with young people that there are real, dramatic, substantial dangers associated with marijuana.

A more sensible public health approach would be to calibrate our approach so that we can look at pardon reforms and things like emphasizing treatment and education, but we can also have the means of a ticketing option and a criminal charge so that the police can intervene. However, what the government's law says is that children between 12 and 17 years old can possess up to five grams of marijuana, and they can distribute it among themselves. They cannot sell it, but they can distribute it. It makes it a severe penalty for someone who is 18 to give marijuana to someone who is 17, yet someone who is 17 can give marijuana to someone who is 12 with absolutely no penalties. Therefore, there is a real demonstrable incoherence to the government's approach.

There is also not a coherent message among government members when it comes to the actual risks associated with marijuana use. We have multiple members who speak publicly and openly about the fact that they have used or use marijuana, and talk about it as if it is not a problem, when we know that marijuana use is associated with higher levels of mental health problems later in life, especially when it is used by young people, even at relatively moderate levels. Therefore, there is a problem here in terms of the government talking, on the one hand, about a public health approach, and on the other hand, not facing up, in a realistic way, to the public health problems that are associated with marijuana.

I have cited the studies. The information is clearly there. We are going to see an increase in use if marijuana is legalized. If the government proceeds with the legislation, I hope that, at the very least, it will be prepared to re-evaluate it, because it seems to not understand this point. Hopefully a year or so after the legislation is passed, it will be willing to re-evaluate the problems that it has put in place.

To summarize, there is a dramatic dissidence between what the government is claiming about this and the realities that are in place. The Liberals talk about keeping it out of the hands of children, but they will make it easier for children to access it. They will remove criminal penalties for very young children who carry marijuana with them. There will be no means for that kind of legal intervention. They will allow adults to carry very large amounts and distribute it among themselves, and children to give it to each other. They will allow parents with children in the house to grow marijuana in a place and in a context where very likely that marijuana may be accessible to children. The government is prepared to allow all of these things, yet it makes the outlandish claim in that context that somehow this will reduce the access children have to marijuana. It just does not make any sense.

Then the Liberals talk about the issue of organized crime, but the reality is that organized crime is a system that exists regardless of what is and is not illegal. Organized crime capitalizes on opportunities to work outside of the law, but it is not required that a thing be illegal for organized crime to be involved in that business. That is just a reality the government needs to understand.

Frankly, members of the government who have dealt with organized crime in the context of police work should know this, and I am sure they do, contrary to whatever the talking points say. Organized crime often grows out of distrust of authority, out of issues of social exclusion, and out of long-standing systems of authority that exist in place. It is not the result of just something being illegal. We know this from history.

With regard to the public health issue, the evidence is very clear with respect to marijuana that it is a dangerous substance. Not everybody who smokes a joint will experience those negative effects, but it is clearly associated with higher levels of mental health challenges. Another member has spoken at length about the carcinogenic effects associated with smoking marijuana, and a lot of this is new and emerging research with respect to the risks of marijuana.

We need to send a clear message as a legislature. I would just say to members as well that we need to set a clear example when it comes to the risk, because the Liberals say on the one hand that they will take a public health approach, that they will try to educate about the risks of this, but on the other hand, they are saying that there is not even clarity or agreement in terms of what those risks actually are.

It is very confusing in terms of the messages the Liberals are sending, which do not seem to acknowledge those risks and with different members saying different kinds of things. I would hope that through this debate at the very least, members would be willing to clearly say from all parties, whatever their position on the ultimate criminal question, that marijuana is dangerous and that the best medical science indicates clearly that the risks are in place. I hope members will join me in opposing the bill.

[Religious Freedom, June 7th, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, today we remember a terrible event that took place 33 years ago and marked a horrific escalation in tensions between Sikhs and the India government.

Apparently seeking to target militants, the Indian army launched Operation Blue Star in June of 1984, attacking the Harmandir Sahib complex or Golden Temple in Amritsar. This event precipitated the assassination of Indira Gandhi and subsequent coordinated massacres against the Sikh community.

The Golden Temple is the most sacred site to the Sikh faith. Innocent lives were lost, and the temple itself was damaged.

We cannot change the past, but it is important we learn its lessons and promote justice and reconciliation as we go forward.

Any attacks on holy sites obviously have a profound negative impact on community relations and have a searing effect on the psyche of the faithful. They of course leave thousands of innocents vulnerable. This particular attack clearly did all of those things.

People should be able to pray without fear of violence.

Throughout the world, Canada must make human rights, religious freedom, justice, and reconciliation central foreign policy priorities.