Madam Speaker, I am pleased to speak to Bill C-52 today and I am also pleased that the government has introduced the bill. The NDP caucus will be supporting the bill at second reading to get it to committee where we can perhaps make some improvements to the bill as it is written now.
The bill provides a mandatory minimum sentence of imprisonment for a term of two years for fraud with a value that exceeds $1 million. I questioned the government this morning about how it determined the $1 million because it seems to me that fraud is a serious issue no matter how big it is. In law it is certainly something that lawyers thrive on. I am sure that we will find lawyers trying to argue whether or not fraud was $1 million or whether it was under $1 million, and there will be huge arguments about that.
Perhaps the threshold should be a lot lower than $1 million. I am just not sure about that issue. I asked the government that question and I did not really get a good response. I know one of the government members asked that very question as well and I do not recall whether the member received a satisfactory answer either.
The bill provides additional aggravating factors for sentencing. It creates a discretionary prohibition order for offenders convicted of fraud to prevent them from having authority over the money or real property of others. It requires consideration of restitution for victims of fraud and it clarifies that the sentencing court may consider community impact statements from a community that has been harmed by the fraud.
I want to go back to the issue of restitution for victims of fraud. This is a provision of the bill which on the surface sounds good. I certainly hope that victims see some restitution as a result of this particular provision, but I would not want people to get their hopes up very high on this particular issue. Over the years my experience has been that there are probably very little restitution possibilities when dealing with these fraudsters.
The whole argument about schemes, frauds and Ponzi schemes really boils down to issues of people who are less than honest, bilking people of hard-earned savings and monies, and then in fact spiriting the money away into tax havens. While the economy is good, these schemes tend to thrive because if the stock market is going up and as the economy is expanding, it is easy for them to cover their tracks and hide the fact that they are engaging in a fraudulent activity.
It is when the economy goes down as it has right now that we see these schemes start to collapse because they cannot pay out the returns that they have promised people.
I would suspect there are many more of these beneath the surface. If the recession were to deepen, get worse or to last a longer period of time, we would see more of these schemes exposed. At the end of the day, after all the litigation and investigation, there is really going to be nothing there for the victims.
Therefore, why make these promises that victims are going to get their money back when we know that it is not going to happen. Having said that, I still think that it is a good provision in the bill. It is something that we should put in the bill just in case there is some money left over for restitution.
However, there are many difficulties with this whole area and I think the parliamentary secretary alluded to it in the last part of his speech in which he said that bringing in a bill such as this only provides for part of the problem.
This bill deals with the problem after it becomes a problem. What we want to do as a Parliament, as a government, as a society, is to deal with these issues before they become a problem. We want to be able to catch the Bernie Madoffs before they embark on their programs of bilking people out of money.
I want to use Bernie Madoff as an example, where Harry Markopolos was able to uncover Bernie Madoff 10 years ago. Ten years ago Harry Markopolos, who was working at the time for Rampart Investment Management in Boston, was asked if he could duplicate Madoff's strategy. It makes sense that if people are competing in a market and can offer 30% returns on 90-day certificates that they will have a lot of customers, but in addition to having a lot of customers, there are going to be a lot of people who want to duplicate their system and compete with them because they are obviously making a lot of money.
When Harry was asked to do that, he immediately became suspicious because Madoff never reported losing money in any month. In a country of 300 million people and a securities commission that is supposedly a watchdog, why was no one questioning the fact that Bernie Madoff had never reported losing money in any month?
He said that he knew it was a fraud in about five minutes. He took his information to the Securities and Exchange Commission. When he went to the Securities and Exchange Commission, he was rebuffed because Bernie Madoff had been a big, known figure at the time, had been involved in the industry, and had a good reputation. In fact, I believe one of Bernie Madoff's sons-in-law was actually working for the securities commission as an investigator. So we can see it is one little happy family down there at the securities commission.
When Harry Markopolos came forward and presented the entire case 10 years ago, 1999, to the securities commission, he was told to get lost, essentially. He went back several times, and in fact at a certain point he was concerned and was checking his car for bombs and so on. I think his comment was that Madoff had something like 65 billion reasons to wish him out of the way.
Once again, that is a great example of the system not working. So what did we learn from that? We learned that we have to have proper regulatory bodies that are not populated by people from the industry, that it should not be taking people from the mutual fund industry, the securities industry, out of a company that they have worked for, for 20, 30 years, and they know all the players, and pop them in, sort of like a retirement package, the securities commission that is watching the same company that they have been working for all these years.
It is just one happy little group that parties together, socializes together and who know each other. How can we possibly expect that they are going to be doing a proper due diligence and investigating one another? We need more police-type forces here. We need investigative forces.
That was the weakness of the securities exchange in the United States. Now some changes have been made. There are some tough people in there, effective in January, and hopefully they are going to right the ship.
It seems that all of these bodies tend to drift over time and until something happens everybody is reasonably happy. Then something blows up and we realize that, well, no, these were the wrong people running the ship.
Let us take a look at our own securities commission in Ontario. One of the big arguments we have had in the House, and I know my Bloc colleague understands it well, is the whole idea of the national securities regulator. Being from Manitoba I know that over the last few years we have been opposed to that. I see the arguments for having a national regulator. The other G7 countries have it and it is probably a good idea, but what the government is missing in its analysis is not what it is called, whether it is a national regulator or 10 provincial regulators, it is who do we have running the regulators? Who is running the national regulation system?
If we had a national securities regulator and filled it with people who worked in the industry, then we would not have any better results than we have right now with the Ontario Securities Commission. It has a very sorry track record, a terrible record of imprisoning almost no one. It may have been lucky to catch three or four people in the last 10 years and this is even when the whole case was given to it. Even when the whole thing was put right in front of it, it still could not somehow take action.
In the United States, however, we see more activity in that area, but it comes from the judicial system in the United States. Let us take Conrad Black as an example. He did his crimes in Canada, as a matter of fact, I believe it had to do with non-competes that he was signing with CanWest when it was buying all those newspapers and there were $40 million worth of non-compete agreements in each one of these deals that he got, and his shareholders went after him when they realized that he was taking the $40 million when it should have belonged to Hollinger.
Conrad was a Canadian. I know he became a British citizen at some point, but he was a Canadian. He operated here his whole life. He had his companies here and yet surprise, he is doing time in a Florida jail. By all accounts I gather he is having a great time down there. It does not seem like a very tough jail he is in and he seems like he is happy enough that he might want to stay there a little longer based on the last transmissions we heard from him. But, my point is that the public must have confidence in its government to protect it. When we see people like Conrad Black and Madoff literally just walking away and when they do get caught, they do not spend much in the way of jail time, it is a problem. It breeds cynicism within the public.
That is why I was intrigued by another part of the Bloc's argument today that the sentences should be longer than one-sixth of the sentence. Mr. Vincent Lacroix, who is just one example of many, received an eight year sentence, but because people can get out of jail after serving only one-sixth of their sentence, this man was back on the streets in only two and a half years. So once again the public questioned this. If his sentence was eight years, then what is he doing knocking on my door after only two and a half years? What kind of a system is this that allows that?
Perhaps it is the Bloc's intention to introduce an amendment at committee to rectify this situation or to deal with it in some sense, but if we are going to give Mr. Lacroix two and a half years, then that is what the penalty should be. Do not have a judge say that he is supposed to spend eight years and then after only one-sixth of his sentence, how does he get out of that? I would like to know how the government is planning to deal with that issue because once again, I thought that was a very good argument the Bloc had.
I have to say at the outset that I am so impressed with the lawyers in this Parliament. I have never seen so many lawyers in one place outside of a legal convention. There are some extremely smart lawyers here, and the Bloc caucus is just one example that has several lawyers. The Liberal caucus and the NDP caucus have some, and I am sure there are a few really smart lawyers on the government side too. I have been listening to them very closely. However, their whole approach to the legal side of things has sort of been more along the lines of how it appears from a political point of view. That is the argument, I suppose, and they do not take the view of the legal family represented in the other parties in opposition. They simply go along with the government line that somehow, if they could showcase the bill as being tough on crime as opposed to smart on crime, that will pay off in getting votes back home.
All we have to do is look at the minimum sentence laws in the United States. That is the subject of another bill which we will be getting to fairly soon. In the 1980s California had Ronald Reagan's three strikes and you are out regime. His solution was to build a lot of prisons, and of course his buddies were building private prisons, so he could reward his friends as well. They built wall-to-wall prisons and put people in prison. I do not have the stats handy, but the United States stands alone in terms of the number per hundred thousand people who are incarcerated. The crime rate in the states has not gone down one bit. It is probably even higher than it has ever been. Just recently, because of budgetary problems, Governor Schwarzenegger, who would hardly be soft on crime, and who is a Republican, though hardly a George Bush Republican, has had to release thousands of people from prison because it has been found that the minimum sentence laws do not work.
I am just pointing out to the member of the government that there are all sorts of evidence and examples of crime approaches that work, and there are examples of those that do not work. I gave examples before about car theft in Winnipeg, about how putting immobilizers in cars and having teams of police investigators going after the limited number of car thieves who steal the maximum number of cars has produced results. That is something that works. That is what the government should be doing. The government is mandated by the public to be here to find solutions that work, and not just stuff that knocks an MP's rating up five points in the polls overnight. That is what Conservative members have been doing.
The other argument that the Bloc has made, which I find really important, is with regard to the issue of tax havens. We had a Liberal government for years and years before that had ample opportunity to deal with the whole issue of tax havens. We even had a Prime Minister who had a bunch of his boats registered in some foreign country. It might have been Panama.