Jack Harris

[National Defence, May 1st, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, will he confirm that they have reversed the proposed cuts and that the air cadet glider program will continue to be delivered by the Canadian Forces as before?

[National Defence, May 1st, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, as opposition continued to build on the Conservatives' planned cuts to the cadet glider program, a gag order was sent ordering cadet corps members not to share opinions or facts on the glider program. We are not talking national security here. It is a budget cut to a program for kids. A clear decision to end CF delivery of the air cadet glider program was communicated to the cadet organization.

Now, in light of the minister's statement issued today, will he confirm that the Conservatives have reversed the proposed cuts and that the air cadet glider program will continue? Will they confirm that they have reversed the proposed cuts—

[Search and Rescue, May 1st, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, it is no wonder the Conservatives are in hot water. The Auditor General said in his report that when it comes to search and rescue, the Conservatives just do not have a plan. That is why we are seeing irresponsible closures in Quebec City and St. John's. That is why helicopters and availability are inadequate, and planes are not being replaced. That is why staff had to resort to Google maps to manage the search process.

As the Auditor General said, this is a question of life and death. Who is going to take responsibility for this?

[Strengthening Military Justice in the Defence of Canada Act, April 30th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the member for Edmonton—Strathcona for her question. I could not agree with her more.

This has been an extremely slow process. The kind of review that Justice LeSage did, for example, was available to the government members a year ago, in June, I think. It was finally tabled in December, when they said it was too late to deal with it. If they had dealt with it when they received it, we could have had amendments to this act in keeping with his recommendations.

We have asked the government to commit to bringing forth legislation within the year. I hope it will do so. We want to go further than that and follow Justice Létourneau's recommendation that there be a fundamental wall-to-wall review of the National Defence Act conducted outside of the control of the Department of National Defence to give Parliament a legislative proposal addressing not only the military leadership's wishes, but also those of our civil society.

Other nations similar to ours, whether it be Australia or the U.K., have modernized the system. They have made it far more related to the civilian process. We are not that unique in Canada that we cannot do that, but we need to do it with the proper wall-to-wall review that Justice Létourneau has suggested.

How long will we have to wait? It does not seem that the government is prepared to do it. Maybe we will have to wait until 2015 in the hopes that the review can and will be done.

[Strengthening Military Justice in the Defence of Canada Act, April 30th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, I thought vertigo had to do with the head. I am not sure, but it is something between the ears, I believe.

In any event, I think the hon. member is confusing support for the legislation with support for the government. I made it very clear that I did not support the government. In fact, the reason we had the mini-filibuster in committee was that the members opposite decided, without any warning or any politeness or any consultation, that instead of coming back the next day to finish the committee hearings, they wanted to go forever. I said that if they wanted to go forever, then we were prepared to go forever.

I know the member declined to enjoy the conversation and continue with the rest of the legislation, but we went ahead and did so in his absence. We did work hard on the bill, and we laid the groundwork, I think, for what will be significant future progress in this area.

I do not know why the member is saying he does not see the improvements in the bill. I will remind him that we now have the circumstance where some 93% of the summary trial procedures that go forward for our men and women in uniform will not result in a criminal conviction. For that, I am grateful. I am sure the men and women in uniform are as well.

[Strengthening Military Justice in the Defence of Canada Act, April 30th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, first, let me say that the comments that my friend referred to at committee by Mr. Justice LeSage, Justice Dickson and Justice Lamer about the general acceptability of a differing system of military justice from the civilian system and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, I think, were cast in general terms. I do not believe that kind of analysis would be applied to the individual specific aspects of the system, as Clayton Ruby and Mr. Justice Létourneau pointed out. They were not passing judgment as they would in a court when presented with a certain fact and situation and circumstance, which is the only way these types of decisions are made by a court. I think that was clarified by the testimony of Mr. Clayton Ruby, retired Colonel Michel Drapeau and Mr. Justice Létourneau.

As for the Liberals, I think they are going to have to speak for themselves.

[Strengthening Military Justice in the Defence of Canada Act, April 30th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, just before question period and members' statements I was outlining why we have seen fit to indicate our support for this bill at third reading despite the fact that we voted against it at second reading, second reading being approval in principle.

We raised quite a number of points concerning the deficiencies of the bill through speeches and debate at second reading. The deficiencies of the bill are also deficiencies of the status quo. In other words, the things that we were seeking to improve have been there for a long time.

We complained about the inadequacy of the summary trial procedure, because people did not have the full availability of all of the charter procedures. That was there in 1983, when the Charter of Rights and Freedoms came in. It was there in 1993, when the Liberals came to power, and it was there in 2006, when the Conservative government came into power. When Bill C-41 came about, I started talking considerably about this issue and about the need to bring about changes in the act.

In the last parliament, under Bill C-41, we brought about changes in committee similar to the amendment to clause 75 that was passed here in committee. Other measures that we brought forward went further in different areas, but did not achieve success. Nevertheless, the changes contained in Bill C-15 regarding military justice are, on the whole, positive, although they are not where we want to be.

As I said before question period, we are making a commitment that when we form a government in 2015, we are going to fix these things. We are going to fix the fact that the grievance board would not have a requirement for civilian as well as military members. We are going to fix the fact that grievances would not have to be heard and completed within one year. We are going to fix the fact that a change would be made in legislation to allow the Vice Chief of the Defence Staff to issue instructions on investigations that the Provost Marshal could undertake, for example.

There are a series of things that need to be done. We need to go further in reforming the law with respect to summary trials and the protections that need to be present. These are things that we are committed to doing.

However, we are also committed to the progress that has been made. I would like to put it on the record that we claim credit for that. We put it on the table and we made the arguments at second reading with those 50-some speeches and we got a commitment from the government to make an amendment to that provision. Because of that, 93% of summary conviction trials will now not result in a criminal record.

We brought in a number of amendments. I think it was 22. I do not recall any of them being warmly accepted by the government, but they were brought forward for a very important reason: they were brought forward to fix the deficiencies in the act. We are not satisfied with the result, but that does not mean we are going to throw out the progress that has been made.

We brought those amendments because we want to make it clear that we are not satisfied and we want it to be fixed. We want it to be improved. We want the changes that we brought forward to be made. We want to give the Chief of the Defence Staff, for example, the financial authority to compensate CF members as a result of the grievance process. We want to ensure that there is police independence and that any charges must be laid within a year. We want to expand the procedure for summary trials so that no one gets a criminal record without having the protections of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in terms of proper due process. These things are part of our commitment to the men and women in uniform, and we want to see them happen.

We brought before the committee people such eminent personages as Clayton Ruby, a renowned and probably pre-eminent Canadian lawyer. The member opposite said “infamous”; he may be infamous in some circles, but I tell the member that as a member of the legal profession, he is extremely highly regarded.

He was treasurer of the Law Society of Upper Canada, which means president. He has been honoured across the country for his work. He has the most comprehensive work on sentencing in Canada. His works are quoted by all courts in Canada, including the Supreme Court of Canada. He is an eminent personage who came and testified before our committee and talked about the need to ensure that members of our military have the same protections in law and the same rights as others.

We had former justice Gilles Létourneau of the Federal Court of Canada. He had also been chair and commissioner of the Somalia inquiry, which probably was what first brought to light to Canadians the deficiencies in our military justice and policing systems. That gave rise to reforms, although they took a long time to get here.

We can point fingers all ways to Sunday as to who is responsible. The government ultimately is responsible because it has control over legislation, except in the case of a minority government, which has less control. We are here now with significant reforms, if not all the ones that need to be brought in, and we should claim progress. Certainly we are claiming, on behalf of our party, some significant progress in addressing this particular concern that we brought to the table and that got us to the point where we are today.

Therefore, I want to encourage members to support the bill. For some reason the Liberals have decided not just to vote against it but to attack the New Democrats for supporting it. If the enemy is the government, I do not know why they would not attack the government. However, I am not in charge of their strategy, so I do not know.

If they want to oppose it, they could just get up and quietly vote against it, but instead they want to make some issue of the fact that we, who opposed it in second reading, got a substantial improvement in the committee in favour of individuals so that 93% of the people charged with summary conviction offences would get no criminal record. The Liberals think there is something wrong with that, and at the same time they approved the bill in principle at second reading, offered no amendments in committee and are now going to vote against it and oppose it here today. That is for them to explain.

I am here to explain to the House and to the men and women in uniform why we are supporting the advances that are being made and why we are making the commitment to bring about some significant changes, including what was proposed by Mr. Justice Létourneau in his testimony: a fundamental wall-to-wall review of the National Defence Act, conducted outside the control of National Defence, that would give Parliament truly independent advice on how to fix this situation.

[Search and Rescue, April 30th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, the minister either does not understand the Auditor General's report or is just being wilful.

The Auditor General's report clearly lays out the government's incompetence on search and rescue. There is still no national policy, there is a serious personnel shortage, the information system is “near the breaking point”, and the Conservatives' failure to replace the aging aircraft is dangerous.

Canadians need world-class search and rescue. Instead, Conservatives are offering world-class mismanagement.

Is anyone over there ready to apologize for the mishandling of this vital service?

[Strenghtening military justice in the defence of Canada Act, April 30th, 2013]

No. I have been here five. I was here one time before, way back in the 33rd Parliament. I was 16 years in another legislature. Second reading meant the same thing in both places, which is approval in principle, so when the Liberals voted for this legislation at second reading, they voted for approval in principle.

The principles that were there then are still there today. The Liberals offered no improvements, although there were a couple of substantial improvements, one of them about summary trials. Now that the bill has been improved, they do not like it and they are going to vote against it. I do not understand that. I will let the public and members of the military try to figure out why the Liberals have changed their minds on this bill.

There have been some improvements, although the system for grievances needs to be tightened up and we need to have more civilians on the board. We moved amendments to that effect. We are pleased that the act has been reviewed.

We also brought forward witnesses, probably some of the most eloquent witnesses that the committee has heard from, who talked about justice in general and military justice in particular. I am speaking of a retired justice of the Federal Court of Appeal who was the former commissioner of the Somalia commission. He has a great deal of knowledge about military justice in Canada and about the operation of the military. He had some very important things to say to the committee about what is really needed. He asked for a more comprehensive review of military justice, and we reiterated that in our request. That needs to be done.

I will read the suggestion from his evidence:

Hence, my first point is there is a need for a fundamental wall-to-wall review of the National Defence Act, a review that has to be conducted outside the control of the Department of National Defence so that Parliament can be provided with a legislative proposal that addresses not only the wishes of the military leadership but also, first and foremost, the expectations of our civil society, who demand that our soldiers who serve in uniform be afforded rights equal to those provided in the civilian penal system in Canada and other militaries abroad. This is currently not the case.

We knew that. We knew that going in. I suspect that if the Liberals had listened to our speeches during second reading, and God knows we made enough of them, they would have known it at second reading when they voted in favour of the legislation and when we voted against it.

We brought forward excellent, erudite, eloquent, experienced witnesses to bring home the point that there was a problem that needs to be solved. We did not expect all of the problems to be solved by amendments to the legislation; a number of the amendments we brought forward were ruled out of order, inadmissible, beyond the scope of the bill. We knew that. We brought them forward because they had to be brought forward. These were changes that had to be made.

We are committed to making changes to overhaul some of these problems when we form government, but that does not mean we are prepared to throw out the baby with the bath water when we have legislation before us that brings forward changes that we had a great deal of responsibility for in urging on the government back in 2010 when Bill C-41 was brought in. When those amendments were there, they were passed in committee; they did not get passed in the House because the bill was never called before the election took place.

I am here because I have devoted several years of work trying to get to where we are today. I am not going to turn my back on that progress and say to the men and women in uniform that although we got this far, we cannot support this legislation.

I talked about a backward step. I do not know how often it will be used, but we did not get convincing reasons for the Provost Marshal's investigations to be under the control of the VCDS. We are not satisfied with that. As I said, at the committee we had some very significant testimony from witnesses on the issue of making sure that our soldiers, sailors and airmen receive the same kind of standards of justice as exist elsewhere. This aspect has to be fixed and improved.

I only have a minute before we go to statements by members, but I believe I will be able to come back for eight minutes afterward, when I will conclude. However, I wanted to explain, in brief at least, why we are supporting this legislation today and why we see some progress being made, and to make the commitment to our soldiers, sailors and airmen that when we form government, we will go the distance and do the full job.

[Strenghtening military justice in the defence of Canada Act, April 30th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to have an opportunity to speak to Bill C-15 at third reading.

It has been quite interesting listening to the debate. It seems to have taken a very interesting turn. However, I want to explain not only for members of the House—in particular the Liberal Party, which does not seem to understand the legislative process—but also for the men and women in our military, our soldiers, sailors and airmen, how the legislation is designed to improve the circumstances of not only their lot but of military justice in general.

It seems as if the Liberal caucus has just discovered the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which was brought into force, in my recollection, some time in 1983 while the Liberals were in power. Certainly they were in power from 1993 to 2006. They did not seem to have the concerns that they are raising here at third reading about the issue.

Let me explain why our party is supporting this legislation at third reading today.

My first involvement with Bill C-15 was with its predecessor, Bill C-41, in the last Parliament. In the last Parliament there was a terrific amount of effort made by our party, and this hon. member, when we were the same size as the Liberals are now. I took my place as one member on a committee of a dozen. We were in the majority on the opposition side of the House. It was a minority government.

One of the things that I made an important aspect of our cause in that committee was to try to seek improvements on the issue of summary trials. That was done not only through amendments in relation to that particular provision but also through a whole series of others. In fact, in our caucus I had probably the greatest number of amendments to the legislation at that time, several of which passed. Unfortunately, they were stripped out by the government in this iteration, Bill C-15.

One of the things I was particularly concerned about as someone who has practised law and criminal law for a number of years, since about 1980, was the fact that the summary trial provisions did not accord the kinds of protections that the civilian trial system does. People in the forces were getting criminal records for things that no one would ever get a record for in civilian society. Not only that, they were not afforded the protection of due process.

The member for Winnipeg North can read one of the 55 speeches that we gave at second reading, when we voted against the legislation as it was presented because we did not support it in principle. It had nothing to do with going to committee. Second stage reading is approval in principle; we did not approve it in principle because the amendments that had been made in the last Parliament were stripped out and the protections were minimal for those charged with offences. We were concerned about that, so we voted against it at second reading.

We submitted 22 amendments at committee to improve the bill. There were a lot of improvements in the bill already. It was a reformatory piece of legislation. It sought to advance a whole number of issues that needed to be taken seriously as a result of recommendations that had come by way of two important reports by former chief justices of Canada.

It was not perfect and it is not perfect now. However, if we have to wait for perfection, there would be no legislation passed in the House, so we have to deal with what we have on the table today.

What we have today is that the amendment passed in committee would now result in some 93% of all of the charges that would be laid under the code of military justice not resulting in a criminal record for the men and women in uniform. That is substantial progress.

It is not perfect. In fact, we have a whole series of other things that we would do in government, and in fact, there is one backward step in the bill, which I will get to. It has to do with instructions to be given to the Provost Marshal by the Vice Chief of the Defence Staff in terms of a particular investigation. We are here today to make a commitment to the men and women in uniform that when we get into power in 2015, we will fix that.

Not only will we fix that, but we will also do some of the other things that I am going to talk about shortly, some of the things that we proposed in committee to improve the grievance process.

We have a terrible situation in the military with regard to grievances. Individuals can have a grievance over something as mundane as whether they should get paid a certain amount of money—$500, or whatever—for moving expenses. Sometimes these people have to wait 12 or 18 months to get their grievance processed. That is wrong. People as prominent as a former chief justice of Canada were saying there should be a time limit of 12 months maximum, and that if it cannot be figured out in 12 months, the person should be able to go to the Federal Court and get the reason why. That seemed to me to be very simple and practical, and we actually moved that amendment.

We did not see any amendments from the Liberals in committee. They supported the bill at second reading, and by the way, second reading does not mean we vote for the bill to go to committee. I have been here for five years in two different pieces. I was in another legislature for 16 years.