Joe Comartin

[Petitions, February 17th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, the third petition has several hundred signatures. It calls on Parliament to protect our children from child pornography.

[Petitions, February 17th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, the second petition is with regard to child labour. It is seeking support from the House to recognize the problem of child labour around the globe and to demand assistance in that regard, in particular to provide education to children to allow them to avoid the exploitation that occurs as a result of not having those types of resources.

[Petitions, February 17th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I have a number of petitions to present today.

The first is a petition calling on the House to recognize the discrimination that is going on in that rural route mail couriers are not able to organize and develop collective bargaining rights. That is prohibited specifically under subsection 13(5) of the Canada Post Corporation Act.

[The Environment, February 13th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Natural Resources.

I understand that next week the Minister of Finance will be looking for money to build his budget. I can give the House some indication as to where he could find $3.2 billion. He just has to take the tax incentives away from the fossil fuel and nuclear industries.

Will the government announce that it will do that next week and begin by replacing it with a package that provides remuneration for energy efficiency and conservation and tax incentives for the renewable energy industry?

[Supply, February 13th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, that is right, I am not a minister and I certainly would not want to be a minister in that government.

To deal seriously with the question, the member is correct in that the government does have a role. However, prevention is the responsibility of the people issuing that credit. That is not anything the government can effectively do anything with.

Sure the government has a responsibility. Consumer fraud is a crime. Under the Criminal Code there is a responsibility to make it a crime and to enforce it in our courts.

The point I was making is that the issue of prevention of consumer fraud is not one that should be the government's responsibility. It should be the responsibility of the company that is issuing the credit to those individuals.

[Supply, February 13th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, it will not work. The Americans will not recognize that. If someone has a criminal record and is pardoned in this country, they will not recognize that. They have already decided they will not do that.

The other reality is that the card does not protect someone from informal racial profiling.

I rose in the House on a number of occasions and challenged the Minister of Foreign Affairs to deal with this issue, to complain to the Americans, to protest, because of the humiliation and the abuse that was occurring at the border, particularly to people of Arab and Muslim backgrounds. I was brushed off most of the time by the minister.

The reality finally got through to the U.S. and it has backed off in the formal programs, but informal discrimination and racial profiling is going on.

One of my constituents, a very fair featured woman with black hair, a citizen of Canada for 12 years and a resident for about 16 years, was constantly being stopped at the border as she went back and forth every day to work in the United States. She could not figure out why. Finally she realized it was because she still had a Middle Eastern accent. That is how they were identifying her. One day she happened to be wearing a crucifix, because she is Christian not Muslim, and she was not stopped that day. From then on she wore a crucifix when she went across the border.

Is that what we will have to do? That is the alternative to the card if we are to really try and deal with it. That is what is happening at the border and the card will not change that one iota.

[Supply, February 13th, 2003]

It is so, but given the knowledge on the other side of the Chamber, Mr. Speaker, I should ignore them.

There is one more point that Mr. Manning made, and I want to go back and acknowledge the work he has done, which I think is very helpful to this discussion. He did look around the globe. He looked at some other countries that have looked at this in their court systems. Specifically, although he said they were not the only ones, he drew to our attention both the Philippines and Hungary, which have taken the issue of a national identity card all the way up to their supreme courts, their courts of final decision making. In both of those cases they were found to be unconstitutional. My question was why not, and this, I believe, will not survive a challenge under the charter. We cannot impose this on our system.

My final point is that both England and the United States have given consideration to this. England is currently looking at it and, as Canada is so far, is getting very negative reactions to the concept. The U.S., as we heard in one of the earlier commentaries, has in fact rejected it. It attempted a few years ago to expand its driver's licence system into a national identity card. It was shot down overwhelmingly in that country. The countries that we are most close to in terms of our jurisprudence and our legislation have rejected it or are about to do so.

[Supply, February 13th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with my colleague from Winnipeg Centre, who I am sure will have many brilliant comments to make on this subject.

I must admit that I rise today with mixed emotions. The Minister of Citizenship and Immigration has asked the country to engage in this debate on national identity cards. The unfortunate part of it, which we have heard in the debate so far, is that there is just so much speculation as to what form this card would take. Would it be voluntary? Would it be mandatory? Would the public have to pay for it or would the government assume that cost? How much would it cost? Would it be a card based on just a picture, or would it have fingerprints on it, or would we try to do something more technologically advanced? The list of questions goes on.

On Monday of this week, part of the citizenship and immigration committee met in Toronto. I had the opportunity to sit in on those hearings. One of the issues we were discussing, one of the topics, to take up the minister's suggestion, was the use of these cards and whether or not they make sense. We heard from several members of the public there, both as individuals and as representatives of groups. After they made their presentations, I asked all of them if any of them could give me a good reason for the card and if in fact we should proceed with it. All three representatives who were there answered no. They could not see a good reason for it and were definite that we should not proceed with it.

One of the members of a delegation was Morris Manning, a well known criminal lawyer practising in Toronto, but whose reputation I think covers the whole of the country given some of the work he has done over his many years of practising law. He gave us a thick lawyer's brief covering a great many of the issues and addressing some of the points. I want to give him credit because a number of the answers, suggestions and points I will be giving today come from some of the issues he raised.

We heard from the minister that one of the reasons for introducing this card is that it would in some fashion reduce racial profiling in the country. I do not understand that. I have had some very extensive background work done on this issue in my riding, because my riding is on the border and I regularly see the consequences of the racial profiling that has been instituted on the American side, first formally and now informally. Just so that I am clear on this, that racial profiling is particularly directed toward people who come from the Middle East, northern Africa, Pakistan and India.

A card of this kind will do absolutely nothing to deal with the issue of racial profiling. The discrimination that goes on, and the abuse and humiliation that people suffer, will continue unabated. If someone is an aboriginal member of society in Canada, nothing will be done to ameliorate their situation as far as racial profiling on reserves is concerned and the discrimination they suffer from. If someone is an Afro Canadian and in downtown Toronto, having this card will do absolutely nothing to reduce the racial profiling and the consequences that the Afro Canadian community suffers from.

The minister's position on this is in fact without merit. I will go further and say that the card will move that racial profiling off the streets, away from our airports. It will not just happen there or at the border. It will be happening in boardrooms, on paper and in our computers, because people will be identified by their name alone as being from some other group that we want to discriminate against. There is no merit at all in this position.

Already we have heard, just in the last few minutes, that somehow we should be using the card as a way of dealing with consumer fraud. There are two answers to that. It is not our responsibility as a government to be dealing with that problem. That is a problem that has to be dealt with by the people who are giving out the credit. It is their responsibility, not the government's. The second point is that it does not work. Every time an advance is made, the criminal element figures a way around it, so it is not going to be a solution. Also, when we look at what the potential negative consequences are of having that kind of card in circulation, there is no way we should be going down that road.

There has been what I can only call a ridiculous suggestion that somehow the card will be used as an alternative to or replacement for passports. We are involved in an international protocol and international treaties with the rest of the globe, I think without exception, for the passport system. It is an international system. The introduction of an identity card in Canada is not in any way going to provide an alternative to that system. If we hear that there is some suggestion that the whole globe is going to get together and introduce an international identity card as a replacement for passports, then maybe we could be looking at that system but that is not what we are talking about at all. The globe is not looking at that kind of a system, so that argument as to why we should have a national identity card also goes down the tubes.

Let me go to the other side. Why should we not have these types of cards? The essential and fundamental answer to that is in fact the fundamental rights and freedoms we have in our country. The right to move around is recognized in the charter, our mobility right, our right to move around in our society without being confronted by authority in whatever form, whether it be police officers or school authorities and so on, asking to see our documents. That is a system we see in police states, not in Canada.

Why should we not do it? Again we hear that the technology is so well advanced that we can make it foolproof. I made the point earlier that this in fact is not the case. More specifically, we hear about the iris scan or some other type of biometric methodology. People are watching too much TV and too much science fiction. We do not have those systems. They do not exist. There is no technology at this time that allows us to do this. Those cards do not exist. I repeat, that technology does not exist. It does not exist in this country and does not exist anyplace on the globe.

[Canada Elections Act, February 12th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, to my colleague across the floor for whom I have a great deal of respect, one of the criticisms of the legislation is that it does not make provisions for a new party that may be developing and coming on the scene.

I wonder if my friend, with all the years of experience that he has had, has any comments or suggestions on how the bill might be improved to deal with that type of a situation?

[Citizenship and Immigration, February 11th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Prime Minister.

The immigration minister recently asked Canadians to engage in a debate on the national identity cards which that minister supports. A number of the Liberal caucus members, including at least one cabinet minister, have indicated in response that they do not support them.

I wonder if the Prime Minister would take this opportunity to indicate to us and the Canadian people his position. Is he in favour of NIDs or not?