Jim Maloway

[Sustaining Canada's Economic Recovery Act, October 7th, 2010]

Madam Speaker, we heard a lot from the government in terms of announcements of its vision for spending $9 billion expanding the prison system in this country, but we have heard very little from the government in terms of the green economy.

Government members should know that Germany is a very advanced country in terms of the green economy. Why does the Canadian government basically ignore best practices and new ideas from countries like Germany and instead concentrate on building prisons as its solution for the future?

[Sustaining Canada's Economic Recovery Act, October 7th, 2010]

Madam Speaker, the government's tough approach to white collar crime has not achieved much of a result over the last few years.

The United States has successfully prosecuted and imprisoned 1,200 white collar criminals, whereas in Canada I believe there were two convictions, both against the same person. Since the government is going to spend $9 billion developing new prisons, it seems like a bit of overkill for that one white collar criminal who has been put in jail.

Certainly, the whole government is dealing with a case of misplaced priorities on a massive scale. I would like to ask the member for his comments.

[Sustaining Canada's Economic Recovery Act, October 7th, 2010]

Madam Speaker, my question has more to do with the parliamentary secretary or the government than it does with this member's speech. This morning the parliamentary secretary talked about TFSA and the situation the government has found itself in with people making over-contributions. The government is stopping the over-contributions.

The question I have is, what is the government doing about tax havens? We recently discovered that last year 100 people were putting money in tax havens in Liechtenstein, and 1,800 were putting money in Swiss tax havens.

What effort is the government making to recover some of this money? Has it recovered any money at all?

I would also like to know the state of arrears in income tax and GST. Do businesses owe millions or billions of outstanding GST and taxes that are not being collected?

What is the amount of the overdue accounts that finance is dealing with, and what efforts are being made to collect from those accounts and from tax havens?

[Petitions, October 7th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, my petition calls upon the Canadian government to negotiate with the United States government to reduce the United States and Canadian passport fees. The petitioners are concerned that American tourists visiting Canada are at their lowest levels since 1972. American tourism has fallen by 5 million visits in the last seven years, from 16 million in 2002 to only 11 million in 2009.

Currently, one-half of Canadians have passports but only one-quarter of Americans have passports.

At the recent Midwestern Legislative Conference of the Council of State Governments, attended by myself and 500 other elected representatives from 11 border states and 3 provinces, the following resolution was passed unanimously. It reads, be it:

RESOLVED, that [the] Conference calls on President Barack Obama and [the Canadian] Prime Minister...to immediately examine a reduced fee for passports to facilitate cross-border tourism;

...we encourage the governments to examine the idea of a limited time two-for-one passport renewal or new application; and be it further

RESOLVED, that this resolution be submitted to appropriate federal, state and provincial officials.

To be a fair process, passport fees must be reduced on both sides of the border. Therefore, the petitioners call upon the government to work with the American government to examine the mutual reduction in passport fees to facilitate tourism and, finally, promote a limited time, two-for-one passport renewal or new application fee on a mutual basis with the United States.

[Tackling Auto Theft and Property Crime Act, October 6th, 2010]

Madam Speaker, I want to respond to an earlier question from the member for Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, because I did not have the exact numbers when I was answering. In fact, it is more extreme than I thought.

In Manitoba, the recovery rate of stolen cars is 80%. That means that eight out of ten cars are recovered within a day or two, which would indicate joyriding as the motivation. Only 20% then, it is assumed, would be expensive vehicles that are being sold through criminal organizations. However, in Montreal it is even worse, in the reverse. The recovery rate is only 30%. That means 70% of auto thefts in Montreal are more than likely professionally done by criminal organizations.

I want to point out something else as well. Manitoba had been a dumping ground for used cars, and when the government changed the rules a few years ago to stop odometer rollback, that solved the problem by making it impossible to register a vehicle without the mileage on the odometer. It stopped the problem. So having tough laws is good, but I agree with the member that there has to be enforcement as well.

[Tackling Auto Theft and Property Crime Act, October 6th, 2010]

Madam Speaker, the fact is there has to be a comprehensive approach to the problem and I see this legislation as designed toward the criminal gangs and organizations. Statistics show that criminal gangs largely operate out of the bigger centres, Toronto and Montreal, where they are entrenched and where they deal in high-end vehicles.

In Manitoba, for example, in most auto thefts the cars are recovered. The indication there is that these are just joyriders if we find the cars. Thieves take them from point A to point B and drop them. Then they steal another car.

It is like in Holland years ago where thieves could pick up a bicycle whenever they needed one. A person would use the bicycle to get from point A to point B, drop it off and leave it for the next person. Then when a person needed another one, he or she simply picked it up. That seems to be the attitude.

We have less statistics as far as professional organized crime dealing in high-end vehicles. I have the statistics, but I do not have them at my fingertips. However, it is almost the reverse. In Manitoba it is more like 70% for joyriders and 30% for high-end vehicle theft versus Montreal and Toronto where it would be 70% for professional gangs and criminal organizations dealing in the theft of high-end vehicles for export perhaps and 30% for joyriders.

In Manitoba it is more of an urban issue than a rural issue. That is reflected in the insurance statistics that we have. Being a government-run insurance corporation, our statistics are kept separate. I know Quebec has a limited government program as well. However, when we look at the Insurance Bureau of Canada statistics, they do not reflect British Columbia, Saskatchewan or Manitoba because they are government-run schemes in those provinces.

[Tackling Auto Theft and Property Crime Act, October 6th, 2010]

Madam Speaker, the closure of the prison farms is something that confounds even Conservative voters. I am familiar with many Conservatives in Conservative areas of the country who shake their heads when they hear it. In fact, they find it hard to believe the government would close down all six prison farms that have been active for many years in Manitoba and Kingston, Ontario. Rather than closing these farms, we should be looking at expanding the prison farm system.

I hope the government has learned a lesson from the last time it prorogued the House. I have suggested many times that the Conservatives look back to the six years of the Lester B. Pearson minority government and do some study of that period to see the many programs that were brought in, such as the unification of the armed forces, the Canadian flag, medicare and many other substantial things that were done in a minority Parliament, and quit the divide and conquer wedge politics issues they seem to practice, so far reasonably unsuccessfully. This practice has not given them a majority. Nor has it increased their polling numbers, which go up a little and then drop.

Perhaps the brain trust over there is in transition. Perhaps the Conservatives are looking at a longer period between now and the next election. Maybe we will see a new attitude on their part to try to work with the opposition and get some bills through. If they show some leadership in that area, they will see co-operation on our side of the House. However, members on this side are very reluctant and resistant to a government that simply yanks our chain whenever it feels like it and brings in bills with all its great speeches about being tough on crime, for example. Then on a whim it prorogues the House and everything goes back to square one again.

There is a price to pay for a government that acts like that, and it is paying it. Perhaps it is planning to go in a new direction, but time will tell whether it does.

[Tackling Auto Theft and Property Crime Act, October 6th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to continue my presentation on Bill S-9, which was Bill C-26 last year. This is another bill that was killed when the House was prorogued. We will have to spend a lot of valuable parliamentary time going through the various stages to get it back to where it was when the government prorogued.

My files on all of these government bills are quite substantial now, as we have been going through these bills a second time and a third time in some cases.

I have in my files a press release issued on September 13, 2007 by the Manitoba government of the day with respect to Bill C-26 regarding its mission to Ottawa to press for tougher sentences with respect to auto theft. For the tough on crime Conservative government, it must come as a bit of a surprise to know that an NDP government was even tougher on crime and three years earlier.

On September 20, Premier Gary Doer, who has since been appointed ambassador to Washington, led the Manitoba mission to Ottawa to press for urgent national action on auto theft and tougher sentences for serious youth crimes. The Manitoba delegation included Attorney General Dave Chomiak, who has since been replaced by Attorney General Andrew Swan; Conservative opposition party leader Hugh McFadden, who is still the opposition leader; Jon Gerrard, the Liberal leader; and Winnipeg mayor Sam Katz who will be mayor for at least two more weeks. I am not familiar as to whether the rest of the members of the delegation are still in their respective positions. Nevertheless, this was a concerted effort on the part of a provincial government to lobby Ottawa politicians to do something about auto theft in this country.

The Government of Manitoba was not sitting back resting on its laurels and demanding another government to solve the problem, as so often happens in the political world. The province, simultaneously with the request, had a program of its own. The province's approach to reducing auto theft and youth crime focused on four broad areas, one being prevention, which is an important part of all of this. It provided lighthouse programs, friendship centres and education pilot projects, as well as initiatives like vehicle immobilizer, which I have spoken a lot about that in the House over the last two years.

The second area was intervention. The government provided programs, such as the highly successful turnabout program which involved intense supervision for repeat offenders.

The third area was suppression, with more targeted funding for police officers, corrections officers and crown attorneys dealing specifically with auto theft. In fact, Manitoba set up a task force that identified the top 50 level 4 offenders, the most serious offenders, and singled them out for special attention. They were watched on an hourly basis. In addition, there were consequences. Repeat offenders faced a possible lifetime suspension of their driver's licence.

In addition to all of this, the Manitoba government adopted a program that has been reasonably successful in Nova Scotia. It involved monitoring car thieves and forcing them to wear ankle bracelets. This initially was a one year pilot project but I believe it has been extended so it must be reasonably successful.

The Government of Manitoba also tried the bait car program. One of the government members in this House spoke positively about the bait car program in British Columbia. For whatever reason, however, the Manitoba situation did not mandate the bait car program.

I am not certain what the reasons were for that but I would suggest that perhaps it was because of all those days where the weather in Manitoba is minus 40, as opposed to the nice temperatures and moderate climate out in Madame Speaker's province of British Columbia. The British Columbian government chose to pursue the bait car program, and I do not fault it for that. If it gets results, that is what we want to see. In Manitoba, we decided to go with the immobilizer program and the gang suppression unit and we were able to reduce our car thefts very substantially over a very short period of time.

The point here is to look at best practices. That is essentially our entire criticism of the government when it comes to crime. We hear it with the speakers from the Bloc, the speakers from the opposition and the speakers from the NDP constantly. There is a recognition, at least in the opposition, that governments should look for best practices. They should look for what works in other parts of the world, and not just blindly follow ideology and implement programs, for example, from the United States that have a 25 year track record of not having the desired effect, of not working.

That is all we are telling the government. We are prepared to support the government in positive approaches to the problem but we want to ensure that whatever money we are putting into the program is well spent.

What we have here is that three years have gone by and still the government has not done what the Manitoba government delegation was asking for, which was to provide stronger penalties for youth involved in serious crimes, especially those involving auto theft; allow first degree murder charges for gang-related homicides; eliminate the two-for-one remand credits; classify auto theft as an indictable violent offence; and make shooting at buildings and drive-by shootings indictable offences.

Three years later, the government is now starting to get around to implementing some of the requests of the Manitoba government. So much for its tough on crime approach and its suggestions that somehow the NDP is soft on crime.

I will now deal with some of the macro issues here that should have been identified 20-some years ago.

As I had indicated yesterday, when I look around I see a lot of grey hair in this Parliament. There are people here with a lot of experience. In former careers, they were provincial members, city councillors and mayors. There is a lot of collective experience here. The fact is that most of us remember that in the 1970s and early 1980s, it was still possible to leave our cars unlocked on the street and find them still there when we went to look for them. Auto theft was not really a problem in those days.

There are two types of auto theft that we are dealing with here. In the larger cities, like Toronto and Montreal, the issue with auto theft is more criminal activity. Criminal gangs are stealing high-end vehicles, changing the VINs on the vehicles and chop shops tearing these cars apart and selling them for parts or exporting them out of the country. That is the type of activity that perhaps is growing but, if we were to look back, I think we would find that it was still a problem many years ago and probably much easier to do in the 1970s and 1980s.

Our problem here with the big numbers is the joyriders, the young people who steal the cars for no other reason than to just simply take them out and go from point A to point B. Another group of people steal a car with the intention of committing burglaries. They just steal a car whenever they feel like it and go and break into houses. Some other joyriders have been in races with the police. They have killed people, sometimes deliberately running people over. They have had car accidents with police. They have even put bricks on the accelerators and sent the cars into buildings just for fun. These are the types of activities going on, which makes it very hard for the police to deal with the problem.

Had we been on our toes 20 to 25 years ago, governments would have seen those statistics coming up each year and would have mandated the car companies to factory install immobilizers.

It was not until 1997 that the Ford Motor Company started to install immobilizers in its higher end vehicles. When I looked at the statistics a number of years later, at least in Manitoba, no vehicle with an immobilizer had been stolen. The proof is in the pudding. The more vehicles that have immobilizers the less cars are being stolen. Therefore, there is a lesser pool of cars for people to be stealing.

I need to correct myself. It was the Liberal government that announced the anti-theft immobilizer program in all new vehicles built after September 1, 2007 for sale in Canada in July 2003, but it was the current Conservative government that actually implemented that requirement. It is great that it did this but it should have been done years before and years before the Insurance Bureau of Canada indicated that the cost of requiring factory installed immobilizers was something like $30, $40 or $50 a car. Can we imagine the small cost that this would be given the huge cost that society has paid because this mushrooming problem?

Now it will take at least 10 years to get all these old cars off the road and the problem, of course, will solve itself. However, it will take another decade and it will take a lot more effort.

However, in Manitoba there is the exception. The Manitoba government initially offered an incentive for people to avail themselves of the optional immobilizer program but it changed the rules a couple of years ago to make the program mandatory. As of 2007, I believe, the registration of and insurance for all cars without immobilizers could not be renewed but the government paid for the immobilizer.

While we had a voluntary program, the uptake was very poor. As soon as the government mandated it, a few people complained about having to do it. Even though it was free, they still complained. However, as long as the government made it free, people could not renew the insurance or registration until an immobilizer was installed in the car. Starting with the highest theft vehicles, because we could identify them based on the type of car, we gradually mandated that all those be brought in. We worked group, by group, by group and now we find a smaller and smaller pool of cars on Manitoba roads.

Has that solved all of the problems? No, not exactly. It has certainly reduced the costs and the rate of car theft. The fact that we are using the gang suppression program to chase the level 4 offenders has also been very positive. We have had to fine-tune the program but most people agree that we are on the right track.

I do not know why more jurisdictions do not get on board with this idea. Simply waiting over the 10 year period to allow the old cars to be gradually phased out is not being proactive. It is just accepting the fact that we will have more carnage on the roads and more costs to society. The point is that all provinces should be moving equally to make immobilizers mandatory as quickly as possible.

[Petitions, October 6th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, my petition calls on the Canadian government to negotiate with the United States government to reduce the United States and Canadian passport fees.

American tourist visits to Canada are at their lowest level since 1972: they have fallen by 5 million in the last 7 years, from 16 million visitors in 2002 to only 11 million in 2009.

Passport fees for multiple-member families are a significant barrier to traditional cross-border family vacations, and the cost of passports for an American family of four can be over $500. In fact, half of Canadians have passports, but only one-quarter of United States citizens have passports.

At the recent Midwestern Legislative Conference of the Council of State Governments attended by me and 500 other elected representatives from 11 border states and 3 provinces, a resolution was passed unanimously that read:

RESOLVED, that [the] Conference calls on President Barack Obama and [the] Prime Minister...to immediately examine a reduced fee for passports to facilitate cross-border tourism;

...we encourage the governments to examine the idea of a limited time two-for-one passport renewal or new application; and be it further

RESOLVED, that this resolution be submitted to appropriate federal, state and provincial officials.

To be a fair process, passport fees must be reduced on both sides of the border. Therefore, the petitioners call on the government to work with the American government to examine the mutual reduction in passport facilities to facilitate tourism, and finally to promote a limited-time, two-for-one passport renewal or new application fee on a mutual basis with the United States.

[Lake of the Woods and Rainy River Basins, October 5th, 2010]

Madam Speaker, I, too, would like to congratulate the member for Kenora for his efforts on Motion No. 519. I would like to read it to the House. It states:

That, in the opinion of the House, in order to ensure the long-term ecological and economic vitality of the Lake of the Woods and Rainy River Basin, the governments of Canada and the United States should continue to foster trans-jurisdictional coordination and collaboration on science and management activities to enhance and restore water quality in the Lake of the Woods and Rainy River Basin, by referring the matter of Lake of the Woods water quality to the International Joint Commission for examination, reporting, and recommendations regarding the binational management of the international waters of the Lake of the Woods and Rainy River system and the International Joint Commission's potential role in this watershed, in line with the International Watersheds Initiative.

As previous members have pointed out, this system is the only system so far not under the auspices of the IJC. Mr. Comuzzi is now the chair of the Canadian section of the IJC and I understand that things will move along to solve this problem.

Manitoba has a situation involving Devils Lake in North Dakota. We have been working for many years to try to get the IJC, under the boundary waters agreement treaty, to deal with the issue. Unfortunately, one side cannot refer the problem to the IJC. It has to be a joint recommendation.

It bodes well when both American and Canadian jurisdictions see things in the same light and recognize this as a long-term problem that will only get worse. The problem needs to be solved now.

I think back many years to when we spoke about what happened to the buffalo herd over the years and how indiscriminate hunting killed the herd off. We were able to solve the problem to the point where the herd was brought back.

If we work together with the Americans, in the this case of the IJC, and with the provinces, we can solve any problems and bring the environment back to where it was.

Many members will recall the 1960s when the government was forced to close down the fishery on the English-Wabigoon River system. Many tourist camps relied on American tourists and Japanese tourists, who came to that area regularly.

It was discovered that Minamata disease was caused mercury poisoning. Mercury was being dumped into the river by the pulp plant, I believe, in Dryden. This poisoned the fish as well as the people who ate the fish.

It does not take a genius to figure out the long-term effects of mercury poisoning. When I spoke to the member for Kenora, he told me that the river had been cleaned up and was now pristine. There is no mercury in the fish anymore. It is great that we solved the problem, but the fact is a large number of tourists, locals and native guides ate the fish.

This did not happen overnight. Did Minimata disease develop in the fish over a period of 5, 10, or 20 years? Did it develop from the time the pulp plant started dumping mercury into the water? We will have to do some studies in the next 20 or 30 years to see how many people have died prematurely of cancers and so on caused by Minimata disease.

At the end of the day, the pulp mill is out of business or has been converted to some other use. What did we gain through that whole exercise? We provided jobs for a number of people for a number of years in the pulp mill, but who paid for the costs of the cleanup? If we look at the environmental costs added together with the medical costs, the total cost will potentially overwhelm the economic benefits we received from the lifetime of that plant.

A member tells me today that mercury is no longer used in the process. It took Minamata disease and the recognition that dumping mercury into a river system could be a problem. Now science has figured out a way to still run its pulp plants without using mercury. I suppose the problem has been solved. The fact is mercury probably should not have been used in the first place.

If we move forward from the 1960s into our current environment, we have new problems. We have the same problems here as those that exist in Lake Winnipeg in Manitoba. We have the problem with algae and phosphorous to the point where this past summer Manitoba passed legislation that people were not allowed to use phosphorous and certain types of detergents, which cause the lakes to have all these algae blooms. That adversely harms the aquatic life, not to mention the fact of the property values of the cottagers and the people who use the lakes. We are polluting our own environment by allowing this to continue.

We have some big changes that are controversial in Manitoba. For example, the hog farmers and producers are not happy with some of the rules to keep the fertilizers and pesticides out of the rivers. They want to know where they will go. The pesticides get into the rivers and they end up going upstream into Lake Winnipeg.

I understand a lot of farmers are in the Rainy River district and their farming activities are contributing to the problems we are trying to deal with here.

We will have to look at a comprehensive approach to this, because this is not an isolated problem. We can see this problem mirrored and reflected all over the country. We have to look at a global approach, involving the federal, provincial and municipal governments, to rethink how we deal with our environment. I am very pleased to know that certain cities, and I believe Winnipeg is included, across Canada have in recent years passed rules dealing with pesticides.

We used to think nothing of dumping this stuff on our lawns to kill the dandelions. By the way, we used to make wine with the dandelions back in the 1960s. We got to the point where we tried to have lawns that were perfectly green. Just to prevent one dandelion from growing, people were pouring all these chemicals over the yards and thinking nothing of it.

The chickens have come home to roost. The recognition by mainstream population is that we should not do stuff like that. There are substitutes for these chemicals, which people can use to keep their lawns green.

I am optimistic overall that we will be able to solve these problems. I do not know why we have to let them develop for so long and why it takes so long to recognize the problem. If we look back, we see it is just common sense. Who would think that somehow we would not have a problem dumping mercury into a river year after year?