Joe Comartin

[Serious Time for the Most Serious Crime Act, January 31st, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, as I was listening to the minister in his opening speech this afternoon, I could not help but think of my many years in court and that if this issue were ever put before a court in this land, any court, whether a criminal court or a civil court, it would get dismissed on a preliminary motion for want of any factual basis. It would not make it past a preliminary motion because there is no evidence, none whatsoever, to justify doing away with the faint hope clause.

We have to look at this issue historically and where it came about, to look at the point where this legislature decided that it would do away with the death penalty. We recognized that we had to deal with the issue of sentencing with regard to murder, first degree and second degree and manslaughter, and we did that.

It is interesting to go back and read some of the evidence that was put before the justice committee at that time. It is clear that the committee knew at that time that across western democracies, the ones with societies similar to Canada's, people convicted of first or second degree murder were being incarcerated for between 10 and 15 years on average before they were eligible for parole. That was the situation back in the 1970s when we decided to do away with the death penalty.

There was great pressure at that time from various elements of society that that was not acceptable. Therefore, the compromise was that we would fix it at 25 years for first degree murder before eligibility for parole, but that we would allow for those exceptional cases to apply after 15 years. That is where the current 15 years in the Criminal Code comes from, allowing people who are convicted of first degree murder and, in some cases, second degree murder, and sentenced to 25 years, or more than 15 years, to be able to apply at 15 years.

In addition to the compromise that was reached at that time, we also fixed very rigid terms as to how a person could become eligible to apply for parole. It would not be automatic. A person would actually have to go through two steps, and that is still the situation today, but it will be done away with by this bill. First, the person has to convince a judge in the area where the murder was committed that he or she at least has a reasonable case for release. If the judge says yes, then the case goes on to a judge and jury, where the jury decides whether the person is going to be allowed to apply for parole. The parole board still has to deal with it.

Those hearings are always held in the same communities where the murders were committed. And at that time, we gave juries in those communities the right to have all the evidence of the facts around the murder and all the evidence with regard to how the convicted murderer had functioned in the prison system after being convicted and sentenced and incarcerated.

At that time, we gave juries the authority not only to grant the application for early parole but also the right to turn the application down, which they do on a regular basis. We also gave them the authority to tell the person that he or she cannot apply again for up to 25 years. Juries do that occasionally as well, Clifford Olson being one example.

Hence, what we are doing here with Bill S-6 is in effect saying to those juries that we do not trust them to do this right, even though they have in fact done an excellent job in dealing with these cases, and that we no longer trust the judges to do it either. We are going to fix the time here absolutely at 25 years: no one is going to allowed to apply for parole, no matter how well the person may have in fact rehabilitated themself while in custody for that 15-year period.

When we look at this system, there is no other methodology that we have used in our corrections system that has been more successful than this one in terms of avoiding recidivism. This one has absolutely been the most successful. Of all the people who have been released, and they are not a large number, only two have committed violent crimes. In only one of those two cases were there actual physical injuries to the victim.

There have been other cases where parole has been revoked, which again I think clearly demonstrates that system works. We heard from the people who work in the system and actually know it that the vast majority of those cases in which there has been a revocation of the parole, it has usually been because of alcohol or drug abuse, or non-compliance in other ways with the conditions that were imposed upon them by the parole board, things like their required place of residence and oftentimes a requirement not to associate with certain other individuals. The person breaches those, usually repeatedly, so their parole is revoked. It has worked because other than those two cases, there have been no violent crimes.

Since this clause came into effect, there have been somewhere in the range of about 4,000 individuals, although the figures are not completely accurate, who could have applied under the faint hope clause. In fact, only 181 of those who applied were ever granted it in the first round. Of those, 35 were denied by the jury and, interestingly, another 35, even after the jury recommended they could proceed, were turned down by the parole board. We have had only a little over 100, about 115 or 116, who have actually got out under this. We have only had two cases where anybody applied more than once, although there is a suggestion there was a preliminary hearing for two other ones.

When we hear the justification for this by the government, it is all about protecting victims. However, when we look at the facts, we have to ask, where are the victims who are being victimized by this process?

The Conservative Party and conservative elements in this country, including a number of media personalities, have gone across the country, fearmongering that every first degree murderer and second degree murderer who has more than 15 years is going to apply for the faint hope clause, when the evidence is overwhelmingly to the opposite. That information is not given out. We have to ask, if we are really worried about the families of the victims being afraid of what might come, why would we not do something as simple as educating them and advising them that this is the way the system has worked for over 20 years. Why wouldn't they be told? Rather than stirring up the fear of what might happen, tell them in fact what does happen. The government and that political party have never done that--never.

Instead, we have the justice minister and the Minister of Public Safety leading the charge, and the Prime Minister assisting them in it, stirring the pot and raising the fear when the reality is just the opposite.

When we look at those facts, we have to ask, as my colleague from the Bloc just did, why the Conservatives do it. They do it because politically they have been able to make it work for themselves. By raising the fear level in this country among the families of murder victims they have been able to garner political support. That is reprehensible. If we are going to protect the victims, let us be serious about doing it. Let us not use them as photo ops, as the Conservatives repeatedly do.

I challenged the minister when he was here earlier this afternoon that this issue was before the committee the first time, before the Conservatives prorogued Parliament, and let it die. Conservatives on the committee brought forth two witnesses. Everyone was expecting them to get on the stand, under oath in some cases, and say, “We absolutely support the government in doing away with the faint hope clause”. The Conservatives were shocked. The grandmother of one of the murder victims was very forceful about being opposed to the continued use of the faint hope clause.

The other gentleman, interestingly, about a month before he testified before the justice committee, had the opportunity to be on a panel. He was an advocate for victims' rights, and he had done a fair amount of work. His daughter had been killed, and he had spent a good deal of his time advocating for greater assistance to victims of crime and the families of victims of crime. Because of the work he was doing, he was asked to sit on a panel to talk about these issues. Also on the panel was another individual who was a convicted murderer and had been released under the faint hope clause. In the course of the debate, the father of the victim came away convinced that there were occasions, because he saw this other individual who appeared to have been rehabilitated and was doing good work in the community, when the faint hope clause made sense. That is why we put it in in the first place, because there are occasions when people rehabilitate, even convicted murderers. Interesting enough, he thought about it after that panel discussion, and when he came before us, he was quite honest to tell us that story and to say why he, in effect, had changed his position.

I cannot help but think, and I say this from my professional experience as a lawyer for a long time and the number of clients I had who had suffered the loss of loved ones as a result of murder, that when people can step over the need that we all have as a human element in our makeup for vengeance and punishment and look at it as a whole, what happened to that gentleman is usually what happens to the families of victims.

Again, we all use Clifford Olson and Paul Bernardo as examples, or Mr. Pickton. There are those examples where we know we cannot do anything to retrieve that individual. They will stay in custody for the rest of their lives. There are others like that. They are not the only three.

We also know there are times with the treatment that people are given in the course of incarceration that some of them are eligible to be treated as having been rehabilitated and treated as being eligible to return to society as a whole. That reality was why we brought in the faint hope clause. That reality is why we still need the faint hope clause.

I have to say to my colleagues in the Liberal Party and I do not want to use too strong a term, I really am sorry and I feel sad that they are not prepared to stand up to that bullying that is coming from the government side. It was one of their governments that brought this in originally with the support of the NDP at the time, clearly. It has worked. Again, back to my opening comment, there is no reason to believe that in a courtroom we would have no ability to convince a judge that it would not continue to work.

We look at what the consequences would be and we heard it from the Liberal spokesperson earlier this afternoon. We are going to have more people who have been convicted of lesser crimes who will have less access to needed services for rehabilitation coming out of prison, not necessarily the convicted murderers, although even some of them, who do not get treatment until they are nearing the end of their sentence as we heard from the ombudsman for Corrections Services. Prisoners do not get services, particularly mental health services, until near the end of the time of their incarceration.

That will spill over into all of the other people we have incarcerated. There is no indication from the government that it is going to spend any money on anything other than bricks and mortar to build more prisons to incarcerate more people. It is not talking about any programming dollars coming into play. The scarce dollars that are there now, which are grossly inadequate, are going to remain at the same level and more people will need them. That is one of the consequences.

It is interesting to look at the government's punitive approach. Ideologically this is all about looking at punishing people, not rehabilitating people.

I understand the Liberals taking this position, but in this case it is not valid. I understand that constant need of our responsibility as elected officials at the federal level, being responsible for the Criminal Code and for dealing with crime in the country. We constantly have to balance the need for society as a whole to respect the system and to support it, to believe that it is a just one and the need to actually treat antisocial behaviour in the form of criminality.

It is a constant balancing. With some basic public education, it would be easy to convince the Canadian public that this is a system that works. It is a just system that recognizes the loss of their loved one that the families have suffered.

Another fact that we should be telling the public with regard to how the system works is that of those people who apply for this faint hope clause, the vast majority do not apply until around year 19. That is the mean average. It is not at year 15, when they first could. Again I would remind people that somewhere around 87%, which I think was the last figure, of people convicted of first degree murder, never apply. They serve out the 25 years and on average spend 28.4 years in custody. Around 87% never apply.

This fear that we hear from the Conservatives that at the 15-year mark, the 17-year mark, the 19-year mark, the 21-year mark, the 23-year mark the family of the victim, their loved one, will be faced with this application is absolutely false. The average person convicted of first degree murder applies at year 19.

The system takes so long going through those three steps: the judge alone, the judge and jury, and then the parole board, that it takes more than two years.

We saw some statistics on the last five years, up to 2009. In those five years, of the 13% who applied and again a number of those did not get very far in the process, who did get released, were incarcerated from 21 years to 23 years. In fact, in 2009, the person released actually served 25 years. They had applied and got out at the 25-year mark.

We have all of these facts with absolutely no evidence supporting the bill, but both the government and the official opposition are supporting the bill. It is a really sad day for justice in this country.

[Serious Time for the Most Serious Crime Act, January 31st, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, I must admit I am perplexed by the position of the Liberals. This law was brought in by them as a result of us, as a society, doing away with the death penalty.

At committee, the member for Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine made it quite clear that her position was that although they would support the bill to get rid of the faint hope close, when “they got back into government”, they would bring it back. At a subsequent meeting of the committee, she backed off that position, making it clear that was her position and not necessarily that of the Liberal Party.

Is it the Liberals' position that at some point, should they or some other progressive government get back into power, they would support reinstating the faint hope clause?

[Serious Time for the Most Serious Crime Act, January 31st, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, my question is specifically with respect to the victims in the process.

As a result of the government proroguing and the delays it has caused with respect to this bill, we have gone through it twice. The first time Conservative members on committee called for grandparents in one case and a parent in another case, family members of a person who had been murdered. They did not do it the second time because on the first occasion one of the two witnesses called by the Conservative Party was honest enough to say that after a recent experience with dealing with somebody who had been released on early parole under the faint hope clause was convinced there are times when the clause is useful. Interestingly, that person was not called when the hearings were going on a second time.

Could the minister tell me why that person was not called? Did the minister speak to that victim when he heard that evidence on the first occasion? Did he change his mind and realize that the faint hope clause is a useful tool on occasion?

[Serious Time for the Most Serious Crime Act, January 31st, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, I was not going to ask a question. However, after the hyperbole coming from the minister, I could not resist.

The reality is that the victimization of the family members of people who have been murdered in this country is primarily at the feet of the Conservative Party and the ultra-right wing of that party. The Conservatives have gone around the country and have told family members of murder victims that they are going to have to appear repeatedly in order to see that this person does not get out. Their position is that if they do not want this person to get out at the 15-year mark, they have to appear repeatedly.

In fact, that is not what happens. We have had four cases of people applying more than once. There have been four cases, out of thousands, of people applying more than once. The jury that hears the application the first time has the right to deny any further applications, and they do that on a fairly regular basis.

The reality is that the minister and Conservative Party members have run around the country and said, “Look, we are going to fearmonger you to death. That is what we are going to do.” We see victims constantly coming forward and saying that, when in fact the reality is just the opposite.

I cannot help but ask the minister why they keep doing that. He knows the facts. Why do they keep putting that fear into the family members of murder victims in this country, when the reality is not that at all?

[Standing up for Victims of White Collar Crime Act, December 14th, 2010]

Madam Speaker, there is no question that this is a very narrowly focused bill with the way the government is defining fraud.

We never got any satisfactory answer from the government. There were specific suggestions made to the Minister of Justice when he was in front of the committee about areas it was not covering. He admitted that, but gave no explanation as to why the government did not broaden it.

I have my own reasons. I think the government just wanted to run a bill through here as quickly as possible, drag out victims and say it has done something. A more complex bill would have taken longer to draft, although the government had two shots at it, so we would think it could have still done it in that period of time.

On the other point of the whole issue of restitution, the bill addresses the issue of restitution but it really does not expand in any way beyond what we already have.

The point that I made earlier in my speech about going after the people who have received benefit, who are not the perpetrators of the crime but received benefit from it, would be a very good area for getting additional dollars of restitution to all of the victims of the fraud scheme.

[Standing up for Victims of White Collar Crime Act, December 14th, 2010]

Madam Speaker, I did not say I was going to support passing the omnibus bill. I would do my job as the justice critic and expect other members of the committee to do the same. In a minority government situation, we would have chosen those parts of the omnibus bill that in fact had meaningful effective mechanisms to fight crime of whatever nature.

Other than that, we would have deleted parts of the omnibus bill that were meaningless and all for show. I am not saying we could have done this all in one bill. However, I have done some analysis of this. Of the 50 to 60 bills that we have had, some of which are before public safety and national security and some in front of justice, if we divided them up we probably could have done it in a total of about 5 or 6 omnibus bills.

Then when they were in front of the committee, we would have meaningful representation from witnesses, including victims, so that we had a very clear picture of what we were going to come out with. Then we would do our job as opposition members to take out those sections that were not of any use and to put in additional sections that make the laws more effective, which we have done with a number of bills, including one of the amendments that we did to this one.

What I am saying is that the omnibus bill process is actually shorter because, as opposed to calling the same type of witnesses and in some cases the same witness over and over again, when they appeared they would be able to speak to perhaps four or five parts of the omnibus bill as opposed to having to come back four or five times to deal with separate bills.

Therefore it actually would have sped up the process for the amendments that are necessary for the code to try to get the code into the 21st century. It is a much more meaningful and useful process in a minority government situation. It would have allowed the opposition parties in effect to have a meaningful and I think much more effective role to play.

[Standing up for Victims of White Collar Crime Act, December 14th, 2010]

Madam Speaker, I was really hoping that somebody from that side was going to ask me this question. I have two answers.

First, on the NDP's role in protecting victims, I always remember the session we had with Gord Mackintosh, who was the attorney general at that time for Manitoba. We were having a debate on how we deal with crime, and in particular the victims, and he said that there is not a political movement or political party in this country that has greater claim to protecting members of society, in all of the work that it has done, not just in crime areas but in all areas. That is our responsibility in the crime area, in the criminal justice system area, as it is in protecting people, to see that they have adequate housing, that our foreign affairs protect them, and we could just go down the list. That has been a guiding principle for me since I have had that discussion with him, because it is true. As a political movement and as a political party, as social democrats, our primary responsibility has always been to take care of people in our constituency base.

I want to answer the question about whether we want more debate on this by responding with a question. Did the member, did the Minister of Justice and the parliamentary secretaries for justice and public safety go to the Prime Minister and say to him, “How come you keep proroguing? How come you keep having elections when you promised to work at fixed dates?"

Did those members on that side, who claim to be concerned about victims, say to the Prime Minister, “We have had Bill C-52. That was the predecessor to Bill C-21. It sat on the order paper. It got knocked off the order paper because you prorogued. How can you keep doing this? We have 15 or 16 crime bills, public safety bills”.

Did they go to the Prime Minister and say, “Stop doing this. If you are really concerned about victims of crime in this country, and we believe that these bills are going to make a difference, why do you keep putting them off?”

[Standing up for Victims of White Collar Crime Act, December 14th, 2010]

As my colleague from Manitoba suggested, they might seriously get tough on crime. It is worth starting down this path.

I want to spend more of my time on what we should be doing as opposed to what the bill would do.

The bill introduces a mandatory minimum sentence. However, the committee did some research on this and a mandatory minimum sentence would be under some circumstances. Fraud, for example, would have to be more than $1 million. There are also provisions for aggravating factors.

We had our researchers pull recent cases and it was found that the mandatory minimum sentence of two years has been, in the last three to five years, generally applied already, even though under the existing Criminal Code sections there is no mandatory minimum for this type of crime.

However, our judges have been imposing harsher sentences and, in most cases, sentences of more than two years. I acknowledge that there have been exceptions to that, and we will probably hear that from members on the other side, but if we do an analysis of the cases that have come down in the last three to five years, we would find that a significant majority of them have had sentences imposed of more than two years.

Members of the House know that I am far from being a supporter of mandatory minimums. They do work in very narrow cases and white collar crime is one of the areas where they do have some impact. To understand the reason that they have some impact, we would need to go back and analyze the nature of the crime.

I am losing my voice because I have spoken so much in the last 10 days on crime bills in order to meet the agenda that the Conservatives have set. I will use that as an excuse to move away from what I was going to say on this bill and argue that I would use my voice less and we would have less debate in this House if the Conservatives simply used omnibus bills rather than introducing a bill for every section of the Criminal Code.

I will now get back to the point of this bill. With regard to the mandatory minimums and the nature of white collar crime, it is not a spontaneous crime. It is planned, generally speaking, over a lengthy period of time. Much like the senior level of organized crime, the majority of individuals who commit these crimes do know the potential penalties. They know at this point that we do not have mandatory minimums with regard to fraud charges in this country, in the white collar area in particular. I am convinced that it is one of the few areas where it may have a beneficial impact on reducing white collar crime. I am not a big proponent of it but it is worth trying if it will have even a minor impact.

The other provisions in the bill that we support would provide some additional guidelines and authority for our judges to take into account aggravating factors. Those are important in terms of the judges' being able to exercise discretion in determining aggravating factors, and we actually list those for them. It is hard to say that most judges would not see them there but it now formally authorizes them, which is a worthwhile step in terms of giving the judges greater jurisdiction.

I must admit that I had mixed feelings about having introduced, for the first time in the Criminal Code, the concept of a community being able to come forward and say that, overall, as a community, it has been a victim of this particular white collar crime. Up until this point, the only provisions for victims' statements were those from individuals. That could be a corporation but an individual corporation.

This would allow a whole group of people to have a representative speak on their behalf. I do have some concerns about this section because it is the first time we have tried it. The provisions within the bill, in terms of how this will be conducted, for instance , will more than one representative be allowed to speak for the community that has been so negatively impacted by this type of crime, are not clear. That will be left to the judges to sort out. The bill does not define, in any way adequately, what a community of interest is, and I think that will pose some problems for our judges.

Having said that, I am still supportive of experimenting with this but I thought it would have been much better for the government to have come forward with clearer guidelines for our judiciary when they are allowing community statements to come forward. I cannot forecast whether this will be a worthwhile experiment and a successful one or whether it will not be used.

What is certain, and this goes back again to resources, is that it would make trials longer on the sentencing side. I do not think there is any doubt that would produce some additional hours, if not days, added on to these trials. If the individual is convicted, the sentencing process will be much more extensive. That is a worthwhile risk to take because, if it works, it would allow victims to have meaningful representation. I have heard this from my clients when I was practising and I have certainly heard it from victims' groups that game before committee at various times, that the criminal justice system is intimating to them as individuals.

If they can afford to hire their own counsel, and the vast majority of them cannot, especially since they have suffered large wealth losses in these cases, this process would make it easier for them to have a representative for both themselves and the rest of the group that has been affected. It would also allow the judge to hear better evidence of how extensive the fraud was and how damaging it was.

There would be better evidence going in than we get at the present time because individuals would do this or a prosecutor, who is way overburdened, would need to attempt to get that kind of evidence in front of a judge in order for the judge to understand just how severe the impact was of the white collar crime.

For those reasons, I think this is a very worthwhile step to take. Hopefully it will work and hopefully this government will see its way. As opposed to spending billions of dollars on prisons, it would put more money into the transfer of dollars from the federal government to the provinces so that the numbers of our prosecutors, police and judges could be expanded to deal with this problem. So we would not have the situations we do now.

In the majority of cases of white collar crime, there are significant complexities and charges are being dropped or plea bargaining done so that the penalties are either minimal or certainly not in keeping with the severity of the crime itself. Resources have to be put in place. Rather than spending an estimated $9 billion or $11 billion over the next few years for expanding our prisons, we need to be using a good deal of that money to transfer to the provinces to give them the opportunity to have more judges appointed, more prosecutors in place and certainly more investigators, so that these cases can be effectively prosecuted.

It is very clear that if we are going to combat any type of crime, the individuals who are contemplating committing those crimes will have second thoughts. We know this, and all of the evidence we have tells us this. It is almost a certainty that if they think they are going to get caught, they have second thoughts about committing the crime.

We need to show that we have a meaningful system in place to fight white collar crime: investigate, prosecute, convict and sentence. That message needs to be out there for the perpetrators, who are generally fairly sophisticated people. If they understand that system is in place, that they will be caught, prosecuted and receive harsh penalties for the crimes they have committed, the amount of white collar crime will be reduced. I firmly believe that. However, we do not have that system in place now, and this bill does not do anything to put it in place.

I would also like to raise some of the alternatives. As I have said repeatedly, this bill does not go far enough. Some of the evidence we got in committee, called by the opposition parties and not by the government, showed other legislative mechanisms that we could put in place. I will point to one that we heard on the final day of evidence before we went clause by clause on this bill.

We had two lawyers come before us. One was a former prosecutor for the Ontario Securities Commission and the other was a lawyer who, for almost his entire practice at a large Toronto firm, worked with victims of a variety of natures of white collar crime.

The prosecutor, who had spent a good deal of his professional career working for the Ontario Securities Commission, pointed to one of the things that was occurring in the United States that they had found to be fairly effective. This was on the stereotypical Ponzi scheme.

The way a Ponzi scheme works is that those people who first buy into it tend to get paid with money from the subsequent victims of the scheme. The initial so-called victims of the scheme, in a lot of cases, make a lot of money. The rates of return are not the 1% or 2% that we currently get at banks and financial institutions. They get returns of 40%, 50%, 100% to 200% in the first few years of the scheme. Of course, the people coming in at the end, before the Ponzi scheme is identified and the person is caught, so it stops, end up losing all of their money.

A number of states, New York being the leading one, have begun to lift the veil on all of those transactions. They go back to the initial “victims” who have, in many cases, made huge profits as part of the Ponzi scheme, even if they did not know it was a Ponzi scheme; or they might have known. They are required to put the money back into a central pool and whatever money is left is distributed throughout.

We need to put in place regulations that would allow us to do the same thing in Canada.

[Standing up for Victims of White Collar Crime Act, December 14th, 2010]

Madam Speaker, the bill is going to pass. It is going to have support from all parties.

However, this debate is important because of the usual manner in which the government, in a more partisan manner than the Conservative Party, is presenting this bill to the Canadian public. When we look at the bill, we can ask whether it accomplishes what the Conservatives would like the Canadian people to believe it accomplishes. The answer to that is an absolute no.

This is a very narrow bill in its ability to fight white collar crime because of the different natures of white collar crime. One might ask: If that is the case, why are the opposition parties supporting it? It is because it does a little. The more important question would be: Why are the Conservatives so reluctant to go after white collar criminals when they do not seem to have any problem going after criminals of any other nature?

We have heard this comparison. In one of my questions earlier today I mentioned the Ponzi scheme in Toronto, Ontario that occurred in the period of 2007-08. Just a few weeks ago, prosecutors in the justice ministry in Ontario decided not to proceed with the charges that they had laid. The amount of money taken in that Ponzi scheme was somewhere between $23 million and $27 million and they opted not to proceed.

At the same time, if we look at any number of other cases, such as a corner store being robbed or an elderly woman having her purse ripped off on the street, those charges would be proceeded with. In both cases, the amounts of money that would be taken would be minimal by comparison to the $23 million to $27 million. However, those charges would be proceeded with and, if either one of those involved violence or a weapon, the people who committed those crimes would certainly be incarcerated and, in some cases, especially if it were a repeat offence, for lengthy periods of time.

If we take that same elderly woman who had her purse stolen and lost $100 or $200 and she, instead, had been ripped off by a fraud artist for hundreds of thousands of dollars, all too often that person would get away with it. The charges that were withdrawn in that Ponzi scheme was not an isolated case.

This is part of the delay that the Conservatives accused the opposition of, but we heard evidence from lawyers who acted for those victims. In the situation where charges are not proceeded with, in some cases charges not even being laid, people will complain that they have just been ripped off for hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. Sometimes they are individuals and sometimes they are corporations. They will go to the police and talk to prosecutors and be told that is more of a civil case and that they will not even investigate. That is quite common, not just in Ontario but right across the country. The reason is that these cases are complex. They require a good deal of attention by investigators, the front-line police, who do this work and there are very lengthy trials in most cases, unless the individual pleads guilty.

That is the situation in the country and this bill would not address those problems at all. It would not make it easier, for instance, for the prosecutor to lay charges and get convictions. It would not make it at all easier for the investigators, the police, the forensic accountants and all the rest. There is no provision in this bill that would make their job easier.

Therefore, we have the same problem, in what is arguably the vast majority of cases, in white collar crime. If they are at all complex, we will continue to see this embarrassing process of victims not being cared for by our criminal justice system. They will be told that the crime will not be investigated or, if it is investigated, that charges may not be laid and that if charges are laid that they may be withdrawn because the prosecution cannot afford a one month, two month or three month trial.

The prosecutor estimated that the Ponzi scheme in Toronto, which I mentioned earlier, would take somewhere between three to six months. The prosecutor opted to spend the money on other crimes. This bill would do nothing about that. We are being dishonest with the Canadian people if we lead them to believe otherwise.

This goes back to begging the question: Why are we supporting the bill? This bill would do a couple of things that are worth moving forward on. Perhaps, if we start down this road, the Conservatives will see their way at some point to introducing more meaningful amendments to the code and to other legislation.

[Standing up for Victims of White Collar Crime Act, December 14th, 2010]

Madam Speaker, I asked the parliamentary secretary this but did not get an answer.

Although all parties are supporting the bill, and I will go into that in my speech as to why, I think there are concerns in terms of honesty and truthfulness. Would my colleague from the justice committee agree with me that the evidence we received at the committee was that the bill in its application would be applied in very narrow circumstances and that a great deal of the white collar crime we have identified will not be dealt with by this legislation? Would she agree that the portrayal of this legislation that it is the be all and end all, which is the role the Conservatives are trying to place on the bill, is not accurate, that the Canadian people are being misled if they were to understand the bill would do a lot to combat white collar crime when, in fact, it is not. I just ask if she agrees with that analysis.