Jim Maloway

[Business of Supply, February 10th, 2011]

Madam Speaker, this is more of a point of order to correct something the previous member said. He suggested it was the NDP that was involved in expropriating land for the Hecla Provincial Park. The fact of the matter is when Ed Schreyer became the premier in 1969, that government inherited the Walter Weir Conservative government's two-year old plan to turn Hecla into a provincial park. The process was well under way when Ed Schreyer became the premier. I know the member would not want to put misinformation on the record, so I wanted to correct that for him.

[Business of Supply, February 10th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, I congratulate the member for his motion today and I certainly indicate that the NDP caucus is strongly supportive of it.

The motion calls on the House of Commons to issue the apology. Why does the motion not indicate that the government should issue the apology?

I would also like to know what the Liberal government did regarding this situation, because it was in power for 27 years from the time the park was established. Were the Liberals asked to do anything over those 27 years?

[Petitions, February 10th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, I have a petition signed by dozens of Canadians that calls for an end to Canada's military involvement in Afghanistan.

In May 2008, this Parliament passed a resolution to withdraw Canadian Forces by July 2011. The Prime Minister, with the agreement of the Liberal Party, broke his oft-repeated promise to honour the parliamentary motion and, furthermore, refuses to put it to a parliamentary vote in the House.

Committing 1,000 soldiers to a training mission still presents a danger to our troops and an unnecessary expense when our country is faced with a $56 billion deficit. The military mission has cost Canadians more than $18 billion so far, money that could have been used to improve health care and seniors pensions right here in Canada. In fact, polls show that a clear majority of Canadians do not want Canada's military presence to continue after the scheduled removal date of July 2011.

Therefore, the petitioners call upon the Prime Minister to honour the will of Parliament and bring the troops home now.

[Criminal Code, February 9th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to speak to Bill C-576 this evening. I want to compliment the member for Red Deer for his bill and all his hard work on the bill. I know this is the second hour of debate on the bill. It will go to committee, and I know that our caucus members, by and large, support the bill.

The member for Windsor—Tecumseh, who will be speaking for our party, has indicated that he plans to introduce an amendment to the bill. I understand that the amendment will be favourably received by the member for Red Deer in this instance. So, it looks like the bill has a lot of potential to actually make it into law in reasonably short order, provided that the House does not dissolve into an election situation in the new few weeks.

The bill was brought about primarily because the member had a personal experience with someone in his constituency who was taken advantage of by someone who was impersonating a police officer by using flashing lights and wearing a police uniform. These were used as weapons to abduct a 16 year-old girl who had just earned her driver's licence and was driving alone. She was held captive for 46 hours and brutally assaulted before she managed to escape from her attacker.

The reality is that when we look for other examples of this type of activity, we see more activity like this than less. I am not sure whether it has to do with people watching too many movies on television or in the theatres, but the fact of the matter is that there are increasing numbers of instances where people are impersonating peace officers.

The bill would make impersonating a peace officer in the commission of another offence an aggravating circumstance to be considered for sentencing purposes. It would add one clause to the Criminal Code following section 130. Basically, it reads:

The Criminal Code is amended by adding the following after section 130:

If a person is convicted of an offence under section 130, the court imposing the sentence on the person shall consider as an aggravating circumstance the fact that the accused personated a peace officer for the purpose of facilitating the commission of another offence.

The bill directs the sentencing court to consider this as one factor when dealing with someone convicted of personating a peace officer. The sentencing would still basically be up to a judge, so there is no prescription here for minimum sentences or anything like that. On that basis, we are well disposed to the bill.

In terms of some of the other situations that are similar to this, impersonating a police officer is not something that is recent. We see this in history. People will remember the St. Valentine's Day massacre. Its anniversary will be coming up very shortly. It happened in the days of Al Capone when he had two of his shooters dressed as Chicago police officers. I think everybody knows and understands what happened in the St. Valentine's Day massacre. They managed to kill, I believe it was seven people of an opposing gang.

In addition to that massacre, there have been other famous situations, including one involving John Dillinger.

John Dillinger had someone impersonate a police officer in order to get out of jail. Someone impersonated an Indiana state police officer claiming to come to extradite Dillinger to Indiana. He escaped from prison that way. This is not unheard of in history. Those are two famous examples and I have others in Mexico that I could get into.

In more recent times we have seen a number of examples of people engaging in activity like this because the equipment is easy to find. People search out sirens, equipment and handcuffs on the Internet. They are available in security supply outlets and stores. People have been able to obtain these types of disguises and equipment in order to commandeer people.

There is a case where a woman pretending to be a police officer stopped a motorist on an Ontario roadway and extorted money from him on the basis that he was speeding. It is only fair that the government starts to take a tougher approach to situations like this because this is an expanding sort of phenomenon. Over the next few years we may see more and more of this unless we take some proactive action against it now.

I commend the member for Red Deer for the bill. I can tell him that we in the NDP will be supporting it. We think it is one step closer to being more than just tough on crime but, in this case, smart on crime. This is one of the limited examples where we can say that the government has been both tough and smart on crime in bringing forward this bill.

[Strengthening Aviation Security Act, February 9th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, the parliamentary secretary simply ducked and escaped my question about what efforts the government made with the Americans to look for reciprocity.

The fact of the matter is, there are far more American flights flying over Canadian airspace. A sensible negotiating approach would have been to ask the Americans to provide us with the same information we are providing them. Clearly, if they have some security concerns about airplanes going over their airspace, surely we, who share the continent with them, would have similar concerns and would want to be able to process their information.

Had the government done this, we might have been looking at getting an exemption because of all the blowback the Americans would have received from their airlines and American passengers, because there are 2,000 flights flying over Canada versus only 100 over the United States. I just think that reciprocity would have been something the government would have asked for, if it were negotiating properly.

The parliamentary secretary says that we could not afford to process the information. How he knows this, I do not know, but it will cost the Americans half a billion dollars in computer systems to handle all of this information that we will be giving them. By extension, we could not afford the computer system to process their information because there would be so much of it. That was his answer.

In direct response to my question, he did not answer it at all. He simply attacked the air passenger bill of rights and misrepresented it. He could not even remember what was in that bill when misrepresenting that part of it and not answering the question.

Maybe the hon. member could fill in some of the missing answers the parliamentary secretary could not give.

[Strengthening Aviation Security Act, February 9th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, the government and the member simply rolled over for the Americans.

In any normal negotiation if the Americans were asking for us for information, it would be logical to say that reciprocity would be in order.

As the numbers indicate, there are 2,000 American flights over Canadian air space every day, but only 100 Canadian flights over the United States airspace every day. That would indicate the Americans have a lot to lose in this negotiation. I could see them backing off.

Imagine what the American airlines and public would do if they found out they had to provide that information to Canadian authorities in order to fly over Canadian airspace. It would have been dead in the water. The representatives of Congress in the United States would be getting calls from their constituents wanting to know exactly what our demands were and the exemption would have been given immediately. The government, as usual, rolled over for the Americans and said whatever they want, we will give it to them.

These are all secret agreements and we do not know exactly what is being required. We only know based on similar agreements with other jurisdictions, for example, the agreement between the European Union and the United States, there is a different set of requirements.

Clearly, if we are involved in transferring any information involving a PNR, it is information that goes beyond what we should be providing.

The Canadian requirements for use of the PNR in the Canada-E.U. agreement have specific time periods for the disposal of data, and it is not 40 years. It limits the use of the data, limits the individualization of the data and renders the information anonymous. Therefore, security services can do what they want. They can build the profiles they are looking for without attaching it to any one individual. That probably would be acceptable.

We have global standards for international treaties on PNR agreements and Canada is signatory to that. If the government is going to sign an agreement, those are the kinds of provisions to put in the agreement, but the government did not do that.

Why are the Conservatives so poor at negotiating on Canada's behalf?

[Petitions, February 9th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, my petition has been signed by many Canadians who are demanding an end to Canada's military involvement in Afghanistan.

In May 2008, Parliament passed a resolution to withdraw the forces by 2011. The Prime Minister, with the agreement of the Liberal Party, broke his oft-repeated promise to honour the parliamentary motion and, furthermore, refuses to bring it to a parliamentary vote in the House.

Committing 1,000 soldiers to a training mission still presents a danger to the troops and an unnecessary expense when our country is faced with a $56 billion deficit. The military mission has cost Canadians more than $18 billion so far, money that could have been used to improve health care and seniors pensions right here in Canada.

Polls show that a clear majority of Canadians do not want Canada's military presence to continue after the scheduled removal date of July 2011. Therefore, the petitioners call upon the Prime Minister to honour the will of Parliament and bring the troops home now.

[Seeds Regulation Act, February 8th, 2011]

Madam Speaker, I am very pleased to join a long list of NDP speakers who have spoken to Bill C-474. Anyone watching CPAC will know that this is a special rule. The House allowed for a six hour debate on the bill.

People watching, and anybody perusing Hansard tomorrow, will know that there has been a solid lineup of NDP speakers since the beginning. We have only seen two speakers from the government and two Liberal speakers the entire six hour debate. In fact, we will not even use up the full six hours so there will be a certain amount of time available in which other members from the government or from the opposition could certainly speak to this very important bill.

I want to compliment the member for British Columbia Southern Interior for his dedication and hard work on this bill. He has worked extremely hard travelling the country promoting the bill. In that effect he has a tremendous amount of very positive publicity coming from the census introduction to the bill.

For example, on May 1, 2010, Laura Rance, who is a long time writer for the Winnipeg Free Press in Manitoba, wrote an article and the headline was “Debate rages over effect of GM-seed bill”. She starts out by saying, “Bill C-474 is stirring up one heck of a hullaballoo for being a mere 42 words long”.

Then she goes to compliment the member for British Columbia Southern Interior saying he “ignited a storm of controversy after it received second reading by the House of Commons and was referred to the agriculture committee last month”.

The reason there is a storm is because of lobbyists, on behalf of Monsanto and the three other companies that produce the seeds, the herbicides and other products for agriculture, who have a great deal at stake. They have done their best to try to stamp out the bill before it can proceed any further past second reading.

One can only look at the voting record in the House. The three opposition parties got together, supported the bill on principle and sent it to committee. It was through that committee process that the industry leaned on the Liberal Party and, in effect, forced it to back down. In fact, there was very poor treatment of this bill and the member at the committee. It is not unusual for the Conservatives to invite witnesses to testify to a bill. However, the very morning the committee was to hear testimony on the subject they were turned away.

As I had indicated, this bill is only 42 words long. It requires the Governor-in-Council to:

—amend the Seeds Regulations to require that an analysis of potential harm to export markets be conducted before the sale of any new genetically engineered seed is permitted.

That just makes common sense.

There are five major producers of this type of seed in the world. One of them is Argentina. Argentina in fact follows best practices and does exactly what the member for British Columbia Southern Interior proposes in his bill. Before a company goes to the expense of developing a genetically modified seed, which is certainly an expensive and time consuming proposition, it wants to know that it will be able to export its product. If that seed will pose a problem to its export markets, then why in the world would it spend millions of dollars to develop it?

For example, Argentina is the world's third largest GE crop growing area after the United States and Brazil, India being number four and Canada in fact number five.

All countries assess the potential for negative harm on exports. In addition to the environmental biosafety assessment, a GM release also requires a favourable food safety assessment. There are some procedures in place. Argentina alone requires further assessment of any possible negative impact on exports. That is vital.

The industry is way too powerful in our country. It has had an unusual effect on the politicians. The Liberals really should have stood up to the industry. Why they would have backed down is beyond me. Perhaps we will have some answers from members of the Liberal Party over the next couple of days.

Neither of the speakers from the Liberal Party tonight indicated why they changed their position. The only reason I heard from the member for Yukon was that they did not get an opportunity to go to committee to propose their amendment. We do not know what the total breadth of the efforts on the part of the lobbyist was in this case.

I want to look at some of the facts and try to put this whole GM debate into some type of perspective.

Over 90% of arable land around the world is GM-free. Only four countries grow 85% of total GM crops and 167 out of 192 countries grow no GMO crops at all. This industry has only been around for a limited period of time. I am not certain of the time period here, but it has been 10 or 15 years.

We are only talking about four or five major countries, with four countries growing 85% of the total. The biggest part of the world does not involve itself in GMO at all. In fact, 99.5% of farmers around the world do not grow any GMO crops.

As I had indicated, it has been over 10 years on the market and only 4 crops are grown in any significant quantity: soy, maize, cotton and canola. Those are the four crops that we are dealing with under GMO so far. These four crops represent 99%. In fact, virtually 100% of the world acreage planted with commercial GM crops has one or both of just two traits, herbicide tolerance and insect resistance. It is curious because the companies that produce it are also the ones that produce the products like Roundup and so on.

In terms of the four countries that grow 85% of the GMOs worldwide, the U.S. has about 50%, Argentina 17%, Brazil 13% and Canada 6% of the market. It is a very large industry, but it is by no means worldwide. It needs to have some checks and balances put in place. They should have been put in place long before now. If we let it continue to grow at the rate it has grown, give it another 20 or 30 years, it will expand much further than this limited number of countries. We are essentially turning over a lot of sovereignty to these private companies.

There are four companies. Monsanto sells more than 90% of all the GM seeds worldwide. Dupont, Syngenta, and Bayer round out the final four. The governments should have paid some attention to this earlier on. As other members of our caucus have pointed out, we do not know the final effect of these crops on the population at the end of the day.

There are numerous examples of drugs like thalidomide over the years, and other types of drugs on which millions of dollars were spent by drug companies. The drugs were tested in the proper ways and then a couple of years later they had to be withdrawn from the market. How do we know that will not happen here?

[Business of Supply, February 8th, 2011]

They did that for two years in a row.

[Business of Supply, February 8th, 2011]

Madam Speaker, the Conservative member should really think about this a bit more. It would make a lot more sense in terms of job creation for the government to offer funds to corporations for new technology, expansion of R and D, training, energy conservation, and the development of green technologies. That would make a lot more sense than just offering across the board tax cuts when we are already more competitive than our major competitor, the United States. These tax cuts are totally unnecessary.

The Conservatives are really upset today because they have been hoodwinked by their long-time partners, the Liberals. The Liberals have been keeping them in power for a couple of years. The Conservatives have finally awakened to the fact that the Liberals have bailed on them because they know the corporate tax cuts are not going to be popular with Canadians and they may end up in an election in a couple of months--