Joe Comartin

[Strengthening Military Justice in the Defence of Canada Act, June 19th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, there were a number of other bills that I have had to speak on in this Parliament. I am pleased to rise this evening to speak on this one, but I will speak strongly in opposition to the bill going through as presented.

It is quite clear that Bill C-15 includes some significant reforms that we can support and in fact encourage all members to support. However, on the question from the member for Winnipeg North about why we would not support the bill in principle, I want to be very clear that I am never going to vote for a bill that would treat our military people unfairly.

The second reason for opposing the bill at this stage is the lack of trust that we have in the government to make the necessary amendments to the bill at committee. The Conservatives have clearly shown bad faith regarding Bill C-15. They have shown bad faith regarding our military personnel.

We have heard from everybody who has spoken this evening on the bill in its previous incarnations about recognizing the necessity of having a criminal justice system within the military context that would have to take into account the military discipline system at the same time. There is no dispute about that. Everybody accepts that on all sides of this House. However, if we are going to respect our military personnel and all that they contribute to this country today and all that they have contributed to this country historically, that system has to be one that is administered with firmness but very clearly with fairness.

There are aspects of Bill C-15, the part regarding criminal records in particular, that are grossly unfair to our military personnel. We would be treating them as very distant second-hand citizens with regard to the rights that all the rest of us enjoy and that this bill is prepared to take away from them. Again, our party is not prepared to support the bill as it stands because of that particular section as well.

The other point I want to make, and it has come up in the last few speeches, is that we have gone through incarnations of the bill twice before: once as Bill C-7 in 2007 and once as Bill C-41 in 2008.

Bill C-41 did get to committee in a minority government situation and had a number of amendments applied to it. We have to set that in the context of the report from Mr. Justice Lamer in 2003, the work that was done on Bill C-7 initially and then all of the work that was done and the evidence taken for Bill C-41 in committee.

Amendments were presented. They were accepted. There was a lot of negotiation, and that is not just me speaking on the information that I have of how the defence committee functioned at that time; Mr. Justice LeSage, who did his report in 2011, made similar comments about the amount of work that was done dealing with, in some cases, fairly complex issues.

There were not a lot of amendments—probably 10 or 15, or something in that range, and some of them fairly innocuous—but If we go back and look at all of the amendments that were made, we see that every single one of them has been stripped out in Bill C-15.

One of the changes we made was on the title of the grievance board, which is what it is still called. The committee wanted to be clear about the culture of how we should be dealing with grievances. A recommendation was made, adopted at committee stage and sent back here to the House at report stage.

We changed the title to military grievances external review committee because that more clearly reflected the context in which grievances were being dealt with, the personnel who were dealing with the grievances and the culture in which grievances should be addressed.

The bill came back as Bill C-15 and the title had gone back to grievance board, for no reason whatsoever except the Conservatives are absolutely determined to do it their way and no other way. In spite of the fact that all those negotiations went on in committee when it was Bill C-41, changes were made. With regard to that particular title, Mr. Justice LeSage agreed when he did his report.

Let me spend a couple of more minutes on Mr. Justice LeSage's report. He was appointed by the government to review the military justice system. In his report he said he did not specifically look at Bill C-15 because he was not asked to do that. It was not within his mandate. He did look at Bill C-41. He looked at the history and at Mr. Justice Lamer's recommendations, and he came up with a number of his own recommendations.

That report was presented to the government in December 2011. The bill itself came before the House shortly before that. It had very little debate, one to two hours, and one speech by my colleague. The bill has sat there since that time.

The report also sat in the hands of the government. I am going to suggest that it sat in the hands of the government because there were so many recommendations in that report that copied the amendments we did on Bill C-41.

The government finally tabled the report in the House earlier this month, on June 8. It did that because it did not want somebody with the reputation and stature of Mr. Justice LeSage agreeing with all of the amendments done by the collective parties in the last Parliament on Bill C-41. The government kept it hidden and finally, under pressure from the official opposition, brought it to the House.

I now want to take members to the major concern we have with the bill, and that is with regard to the criminal records. Mr. Justice LeSage, on pages 28 and 29 of his report, goes into some detail, and I want to read part of it:

The Criminal Records Act provides that a person is ineligible to apply for a pardon for ten years for a service offence under the National Defence Act for which the offender received a fine of more than $2,000...

What we will have is that our military personnel who have been fined $2,001 will have to wait 10 years before being able to clear their record. If they were in detention for six months, they will have to wait 10 years. That is not the standard we have set for other people in our society who have committed criminal offences that are much more severe than these. They would not have to wait 10 years.

Similarly, for the very minor ones, with a fine of less than $500, military personnel will have to wait three years before their record is cleared. If they were in the general civilian population, that would not even be a consideration. It would not be a criminal record. It would be quasi-criminal, and they would not have a record under the Criminal Records Act.

Justice LeSage goes on to say that we have to change this. He makes specific recommendations, and he does make reference to Bill C-41. He says that this was looked at, that it was very complex, but specific recommendations and amendments were passed at committee.

Section 75 of the bill provides for section 249.27 of the National Defence Act. The government put in a new section that says a criminal record would not apply. It then said it would not apply to five sections of the National Defence Act. It would not apply for a fine of less than $500, but it would apply for anything over $500.

Bill C-41 came back to the House as amended at report stage, in March 2011, just before the government fell and we had an election.

The Conservatives did have time. If they had called that bill, with everybody who was in support of it at that point, we actually would have had it passed. There was time in late March and early April, before the election was called, for that bill to get through the House. If they were serious about it, we would have had the bill in place. It would be the law of the land at this point.

However, that is not what they did.

Much like this bill, which has sat on the order paper since late last fall, we are only finally getting back to it this week.

The amendment that was passed at that time at committee included a number of sections. I will not do the mathematics right now, but it was roughly 15 to 18 sections. If military personnel committed an offence under these sections they would not have a criminal record. They are small items. It is things like being intoxicated on duty. Again, it is minor stuff, which in civilian life people would not have a criminal record for, at all.

With a lot of work, the committee went through these 15 to 18 sections and said these should not invoke a criminal record.

As I said a few minutes ago, what we see in Bill C-15 is that all of those sections, except five of them, are stripped out. We have all sorts of offences now—and Mr. Justice LeSage again confirms this in his report—that would not be offences in civilian life, that would not invoke a criminal record, that will now have an impact on our military personnel. It is not fair. It is going to produce really negative consequences.

It was interesting to hear a couple of the members saying, “Well, no, you are wrong about this. There really is not a criminal record.” Mr. Justice LeSage, in his report, said he was not surprised the member said that. When he spoke with Canadian Forces members across the country, he was surprised that many people, including lawyers, were unaware of the very real potential to acquire the equivalent of a criminal record if convicted of a minor service offence. Even the lawyers who might be advising military personnel as to whether they should, in a summary trial situation, admit their offence and plead guilty to it, did not know they would acquire a criminal record.

I wonder if my colleague knows that he may in fact have a criminal record under the provision.

That was the level of the lack of knowledge the committee saw under Bill C-41, and that Mr. Justice LeSage identified as he went across the country and took evidence. He made it very clear of the absolute need for all those sections of the National Defence Act to be exempted from attracting a criminal record.

However, the Conservatives stripped it out and reduced it down to five offences that would not acquire a criminal record. Another 10 to 13 offences are going to acquire a criminal record.

We are going to have military personnel, after they leave the service, trying to get employment.

One of the points Mr. Justice LeSage makes in his report is getting across the border. I know, coming from my riding in Windsor, how difficult the Americans are being, how very rigid they are on enforcing denials to Canadians who have any kind of a criminal record. They are going to get caught. They are not going to be able to go into the United States. In effect that would have a major impact on their ability to earn.

There are a lot of people who live on the Canadian side of the border but work on the American side. They will not be able to pursue that employment if they have these kinds of criminal records from their military service.

We need the government to give its head a shake and look back at what they did in Bill C-41. It made sense.

Mr. Justice LeSage is a very well-recognized person. He has strong stature. He understands the military justice system. He is one of the experts in the country. He did not make these recommendations lightly. Neither did the committee make those amendments lightly when it was doing its work on Bill C-41. The committee studied it and said, “This is a much better solution than what the government proposed at that time. This is the way we should go.”

That is where we should go back to now.

I have no particular faith in the government. I see some of the other silly amendments that the Conservatives stripped out, and I mean silly in the sense of their willingness to take out what were fairly minor changes. They were important changes. I do not want to downplay those. But when they have stripped every single one of them out, including the title of the grievance board, we know we cannot trust the government to deal fairly with our military personnel. The Conservatives have to get that message. We will continue to oppose the bill as long as we possibly can, until we get those amendments.

I want to move on to a couple of other areas. One of the recommendations from Mr. Justice LeSage was about disclosure, both with regard to summary trials and court martials.

I want to make a comment. It is very clear that 96% of all military discipline cases are dealt with by summary trial, so the Conservatives are saying it is obvious they are satisfied with the system.

If one can imagine, an individual either has minimal counsel from somebody who is not a lawyer, or none at all. Their commanding officers, who will ultimately be their judge in a summary trial, say they could either have a court martial, which would probably take six months to two years, or a summary trial. It is obvious why individuals end up electing to go the summary trial route 96% of the time.

With regard to the point of disclosure, both with regard to summary trials and with court martial proceedings, we made the recommendation very clearly that we had to have full disclosure. This is not dealt with at all. It was not dealt with in Bill C-7. It was not dealt with in Bill C-41, and it is not dealt with in Bill C-15. In spite of the fact that the government has known of that recommendation for six months, it has not done anything to amend Bill C-15 to include the requirement that full disclosure be given.

The point that Mr. Justice LeSage made when he made that recommendation, and I suppose the advocacy he was putting forward with regard to it, was that especially in a court martial the evidence is not given to the person in advance. When they get the evidence shortly before the trial, or in some cases at the trial, it will end up in a delay, an adjournment. On the other hand, if it is given early, the evidence they have against the individual is quite clear. Oftentimes it ends up in a guilty plea and a quick resolution of the matter.

In terms of the good faith of the government in this regard, it has known about that since December 2011. It has had six months to propose the amendment from the opposition parties to that section of the National Defence Act. It has done nothing about it whatsoever.

I could go on. There are any number of other fairly small amendments. We heard them from other members of my party this evening.

Let me deal with one that would allow the acceptance of the grievance. Rather than have it go over to the Justice department, which is the way it works now, it would stop at the Chief of Defence Staff. This would be financial compensation. An individual might say, “I was on this duty. I am entitled to danger pay. I am in a high-risk situation. I am entitled to an extra $200 for this month of employment”. The person dealing with the grievance says, “Yes, you are”.

Right now after that decision is made, it then goes over to the Justice department. Its lawyers look at it for as long as six months to another year before it is dealt with. It is grossly ineffective. It is inefficient. Again, it is unfair to the military personnel who are entitled to that $200 or $400.

The recommendation is that it stay at the military level, that the Chief of Defence Staff makes the final decision and allows for the compensation. The Conservatives stripped that amendment out too.

We will continue to oppose the bill as long as we possibly can. We are calling on the government to agree to put back those amendments that were in Bill C-41. At that point we can get this over with and get that firmness but fairness that we would apply to our military personnel in good faith.

[Committees of the House, May 31st, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, I wanted to take the opportunity to respond to the report. My party, the NDP, has prepared a dissenting opinion with regard to the recommendations that came from the procedures and House affairs committee.

This is a very important issue with regard to the practice of the privileges of our members of Parliament. We have a long tradition of an absolute right to unimpeded access to the House. There have been a number of times that the committee in the past has looked at this in the way of a motion as a result of determinations by yourself, Mr. Speaker, and other speakers, your predecessors. We have consistently retained that right as an absolute. It was always expressed as an absolute.

What I am very concerned about in the report that came out through the majority of the committee members on the government side is that it made no finding of breach of privilege in this case. It is quite clear from the facts that at least several members have been improperly impeded on those occasions from accessing the House in order for them to do their parliamentary work.

We have recommended in the dissenting opinion that there be a finding that privileges were breached and then, as the main report does, made some recommendations. Unfortunately, the main report made a major concession, as we saw it.

There is always this issue of a balance between the historical absolute right of our members of Parliament to access the House and precinct unimpeded versus—and this is where we get into the balance argument—the question of security.

The security issue, Mr. Speaker, as I am sure you are quite aware, only comes up as a significant concern when we have international visitors and the risk is raised significantly. For instance, when the President of the United States was here, there were problems. When the Prime Minister of Israel was here, there were problems, which is what this is about.

The government side is saying in the report, in effect, that security trumps. We are saying no, there are alternatives. We set those out in three very specific recommendations, that there are alternatives, that the absolute right should remain and that security can still be taken care of and all those concerns met. That is why we presented the dissenting report.

[Canada–Panama Economic Growth and Prosperity Act, May 28th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his question.

He is right. If we enter into these types of agreements with Panama, we are indicating to that country and to the rest of the world that Panama's practices are acceptable. We are saying that Panama can keep on doing what it is doing, that it can put its children to work because we know that it cannot change without help. We are giving permission, not just to Panama, but to other countries, to continue with such practices and to violate human rights. We are allowing it to believe that this is acceptable and permitted by Canada.

For us, the NDP, it is not acceptable.

[Canada–Panama Economic Growth and Prosperity Act, May 28th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, it is too simplistic to say that a growing economy helps everyone. It does not. Growing economies sometimes only benefit the very wealthy in the country.

Let us go to Brazil and look at the leadership role it has provided in South America. It does not want to sign an agreement of a free trade nature with Canada. It has been building its own trading arrangements, with the Mercosur arrangement, with other countries from Central America.

Brazil looked at the NAFTA agreement with Mexico and saw the way it damaged that economy so badly. It is not interested in talking to us if we are talking about that kind of agreement. What it has done there is in fact much as the European Union did. It entered into agreements with other smaller countries that actually provided a transfer of wealth, outright dollars to it that would assist the country in building some of that infrastructure so human rights, environmental standards and labour standards were protected.

Brazil has been the leading country in South America doing that. It is the kind of country we should be following as a model, not countries like Panama or Colombia.

[Canada–Panama Economic Growth and Prosperity Act, May 28th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, when I stand in the House on another so-called free trade treaty with a small developing country, the sense of déjà vu is interesting, the sense of repeating our history and repeating the gross errors we have made so many times in the past with these types of trade agreements. Those errors are not just errors that compound the economic problems this country has; they compound the problems in the country with which we are making these so-called free trade deals.

I think of when I spoke against the NAFTA agreement, in particular when I pointed out that in the first year after NAFTA came into effect in Mexico, the average wage went down by 20%. The cost of corn to the producers was reduced by almost 50%, the value of their corn product. Farmers were forced off the land and into the ghettos and barrios of a number of the major cities in Mexico. That is the kind of impact these deals have.

There are some good parts to these deals, if one is wealthy in the existing country, if one is a multinational corporation in the existing country, or if one is an authoritarian government that wants to maintain control of its population. Each one of those sectors of those countries benefits from these deals.

However, the average citizens do not. In a lot of cases, their conditions actually deteriorate. We can see that, consistently. I think there is a seminar being put on one day this week by a number of countries that are neighbours to Panama on the conditions that are going on there with regard to child labour, violence against women, violence against the aboriginal populations and the list goes on. There are great human rights abuses that a trade deal will do absolutely nothing to better. In fact, as I said earlier, in many cases it will actually make them worse.

I want to address one particular problem with this agreement, as I have very little time in 10 minutes to get all the points out. Panama is a major tax haven. In spite of attempts by the international community, in spite of demands from Canada, it has done very little at a legal level to correct the money laundering that occurs in huge numbers of dollars in that country.

There are 400,000 corporations registered in Panama, a country many times smaller than us. We do not have anywhere near that many corporations registered in Canada. We have about a quarter of that many, if that. They are there for one purpose only, and that is to launder money in the vast majority of cases. Very few of them are legitimate operations.

There is a huge number of dollars coming in from the Colombian drug trade. There is a huge number of dollars coming in from the Mexican drug trade. It is being laundered and being passed back so that it can be used legally in other countries.

We are signing on to that operation. Our banks and our financial institutions are going to be able to take part in that. They are going to be used by the operations down there to move that illicit money back into Canada and into the international markets through our banking system.

When we demanded of Panama that it begin to clean up, it paid lip service to it, but at the practical level it is growing. Money laundering is in fact growing in Panama and has been for at least the last decade.

We sit here and we hear the Conservative government and its Liberal affiliates supporting this deal.

For this reason alone, the Minister of Foreign Affairs wants to support it. He knows better than most members sitting on that side of the room just how bad the situation is in Panama, but he will pay lip service to its ideology and support this deal. It will continue on down there, and in fact the money laundering process will grow. We will be aiding and abetting it by signing this deal.

Not one member in the House should stand and vote for it when the vote comes, as eventually it will at third reading. Members should vote against it. We should do it right now when it finally gets to a vote at second reading.

The billions of dollars that flow through that country is not just drug money. It is organized crime members using the money that they take from human trafficking and all of their other abuses, such as the gun trade, and it just goes on and on. That is what we are signing onto with that country.

Panama could clean it up. We as a country should tell it that we will not deal with it, that we not will we enter into a trade agreement with it until it does that. However, that is not what we are saying. We are looking the other way.

There are three lists of countries that the international community creates: the white, grey and black lists. Nobody is that bad to be on the black list, which makes us wonder how valid it is. The white list is made up of countries like Canada that have meaningful controls over their financial institutions and that combat money laundering and tax havens on a systematic and reasonably effective basis.

Panama is on the grey list and has been for a long time. I do not know why it is not on the black list. However, there is nobody on the black list, so I guess that explains that. A country gets onto the grey list when it makes noises about doing something like cleaning up its financial institutions, banking systems and its economic structure that allows for the tax havens and the money laundering.

Like the other countries that are on that list, once they get on it they stay on it indefinitely. Hardly anybody ever comes off of it and goes onto the white list. Nobody goes onto the white list. They just do not do anything except talk about it. We have done this at the international financial level, but it is meaningless. I would suggest there is no reason to believe that Panama will ever come off the grey list when we have countries like Canada with its current government, along with its Liberal affiliates, that will support that process by entering into these deals.

The other reason we should not enter into this trade deal is that in spite of the provisions in the agreement dealing with labour standards, practically that will not occur. Panama does not have the governmental infrastructure to enforce human rights and environmental and labour standards.

When asked what kind of a deal we would support, it is one wherein we would say to those countries that we want trade, but we will not do it if it is to the exclusive advantage of multinational corporations and the very wealthy in those countries. If it benefits Canada as well as their people, then we are interested and we will negotiate. However, until such time as we enter into those kinds of agreements, this party will continue to oppose them.

[Canada–Panama Economic Growth and Prosperity Act, May 28th, 2012]

You don't know your history, Kevin.

[Old Age Security, May 10th, 2012]

Madam Speaker, as I said, the NDP official opposition has already forced two votes on this motion in the House. My colleague who just finished his speech said that it was sad that we opposed this. I want to be very clear that on behalf of our party, we are very proud of the fact that we have fought against this change, that we will fight against this change and that, when we take government after the next federal election, we will reverse this decision by the federal government.

When I first heard that the Prime Minister had been in Davos with his rich buddies trying to satisfy the international monetary community with this kind of an endeavour, it reminded me of a battle we fought within the labour movement through the 1960s and 1970s to try to lower the age when people in the auto manufacturing centres would be able to receive pensions at an earlier age than 65. There was a caption for it, “30-and-out”. No matter what age they started, after 30 years of work they would have a pension that was quite substantive enough for individuals to finish raising their families and live in significant dignity.

The push for that was this fact. Up until that point, people had to be 65 before they received any pension benefits from the auto manufacturers. The analysis the economists for the labour movement had done at that time was that the average labourers retiring in the auto sector at age 65 received pension for just slightly more than 12 months before they died. That image struck me very hard when again I heard the Prime Minister, outside the country, announcing this decision. That is still a factor we have to consider in raising the age of retirement.

It is National Nursing Week. Nurses work very hard from a physical labour standpoint. Yet we are saying to them that they will to have to wait two more years to receive this benefit, one that they have contributed to very clearly by the tax dollars they paid all of their careers. We have to recognize the forestry worker, the farmer, the fisher and all those people who work very hard lives, very difficult, back-bending, back-breaking labour for a great deal of their lives.

I hear this from the Jack Mintzes of the world and the economists. They have a picture of people perhaps like me. I have been a lawyer all my professional career and then a politician. I have not done that heavy labour work. However, that is the image the Conservative Party has, that it is not a big deal, that they can work a couple more years, and that is probably true. I think of me and most of the members of the House.

However, there are a lot of Canadians for whom that does not apply. Think of the waitress who spent her whole career working, slugging heavy trays. We can just go down the list of people. The majority of Canadians still work a physically demanding heavy workload and we are saying to them that they have to do it for two more years.

We can say they could have planned better and saved more, but we know that is not the reality of the Canadian economy.

We know that private pension plans have been a gross failure in terms of providing sufficient incomes for people to retire. If Canadians are to retire above the poverty line, they will need the OAS and a better CPP. We need massive reforms with respect to CPP. Again, my party has been the leader in pushing that issue in the country.

The previous speaker talked about how all these other countries have done it. If the government had done any kind of analysis, it would seen that in the vast majority of cases, those countries have also provided for alternative plans for people who cannot continue to work or who are at very marginal levels.

What is also interesting is that pension benefits in the vast majority of those other countries are substantially better than they are in Canada. The member was right when he said that we are 15 years behind, but not about raising the age; we are 15 years behind in providing pension benefits from public sources, not from private sources, that are adequate for the average Canadian to retire in dignity. We are way behind the rest of the developed world.

We are quite happy to support this kind of motion, even though it is coming from one of the other opposition parties. We are proud to continue this battle.

I see that I still have a couple more minutes. Let me go to the other reforms that we need to make.

We fought the government in advance of the last election. We had very concrete proposals as to how much we needed to increase the guaranteed income supplement. When the government implemented the measure, both before the election and subsequently, it did so at a level that was less than half of what was required to move people above the poverty line, or at least up to the poverty line. These were primarily elderly women, 65 years of age and older, who did not have any other pension benefits. In a lot of cases they did not qualify for the CPP. They only had the OAS and the GIS.

The government made this one increase, and of course the Conservatives tout it constantly all over the country and in the House, but the reality is that people who are only eligible for the OAS and GIS are living below the poverty line today in this country and will continue to do so as long as the figures remain at that level. There has to be a significant increase made by this country to honour our elderly citizens when they retire, to make sure that they can live above or at least at the poverty line.

Similarly, with respect to the proposal the Conservatives have coming with regard to this pooled pension fund, the RRSP has been a colossal failure in terms of providing personal private pensions to people who have adequate incomes. It simply has not worked. We can go through the figures of how few people have used it or used it to its maximum. Now they are talking about a collective one. The RRSP has failed in that regard, and a pooled pension plan will not do any better; in fact, it will probably do more poorly.

Reforms to our public pension plans are needed quite badly and are needed fairly soon. However, increasing the age of eligibility is simply a mechanism used by the government to continue to give tax breaks to the oil and gas industry, the big financial institutions and the very wealthy in this country. Increasing OAS non-payment by two years is taking money out of the hands and pockets of those who are really poor in this country and putting that burden on their backs.

[Old Age Security, May 10th, 2012]

Madam Speaker, this matter has been before the House, motions by the official opposition, on at least two other occasions since we had this announcement from the government, post-election announcement I would point out, that—

[Privilege, April 5th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, we just heard the argument from the member for Toronto Centre, so I would like to reserve our opportunity to come back after the break with a more fulsome comment.

I want to get this on the record now. It is clear that when we hear what the Auditor General has said, every one of us as members of Parliament has to think if our privileges have been breached. On a preliminary basis, our analysis is that it is still premature to determine that. I say that from the perspective of the Speaker having to make an ultimate ruling on this motion.

However, we are still analyzing all the information we have. As the leader of the third party mentioned, more information came out in a scrum this morning from the Auditor General. Therefore, we are doing that analysis. Both for the reason that we have heard the arguments for the first time and for the reality of the need to continue to do that analysis, I ask for the right to be able to respond after the break.

[Business of the House, April 5th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, as everyone knows, this is the last day before our constituency weeks and the break for the Easter weekend. I want to take this opportunity to thank all the staff here in the House and on the Hill generally for all the services they give us during the year. I want to acknowledge the fine work they do.

I ask the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons what his plans are for the week when we return, that is what legislation will be before the House.