Joe Comartin

[Automotive Industry, May 15th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, earlier this week families in my community were greeted with the all too familiar news of more job layoffs.

When GM informed its employees that the Windsor transmission facility will be closed, it was yet another piece of bad news in what has been a string of dreadful announcements from the auto industry.

We have lost 140,000 manufacturing jobs in Ontario in the last four years. In my community of Windsor, thousands of auto sector jobs have simply disappeared. These statistics, while staggering, fail to adequately illustrate the countless individual stories behind each job loss.

The government casually, indifferently, talks about significant restructuring or sectoral adjustment. That is not what it is about. It is about a very negative personal impact on the lives of thousands of men, women and children in my community. It is the families in my community and other communities throughout Ontario and Canada who have to cope with these negative consequences.

Once again I urge the government to implement an industrial strategy to address the problems facing the automotive sector, and in so doing, help make a positive difference in the lives which are now being simply restructured.

[Family Homes on Reserves and Matrimonial Interests or Rights Act, May 15th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I rise to perhaps pursue the same line and themes that we heard from the member for Mississauga South and some of the questions and comments from my colleague from Winnipeg.

Although Bill C-47 has, as its essence, an idealistic approach, by the same token it is probably fairly naive, but, more important, it does not, as much as my colleague from Kitchener—Waterloo would like me to think. He is missing the point and the bill misses the point in that regard that the alleged consultation process really never occurred.

It does not matter whether I say that the consultation process occurred or whether the member from Mississauga or any other member in the House says that the consultation process occurred. It is whether the first nations, the aboriginal communities in Canada, feel that it was a meaningful consultation process.

As we talked to representatives of the first nations, it was obvious that they did not accept that the process leading up to the drafting and filing of the bill in the House met any kind of meaningful consultation process. They have repeatedly raised specific concerns both with regard to their comments falling on deaf ears, which was stated, I believe, by the president of the AFN, and that they were not involved. They raised a number of other concerns that they believed needed to be addressed before this type of legislation was introduced.

I want to go back to the motivation behind this, which, I would suggest, everyone in the chamber from all parties agrees to. We recognize that the present process for dealing with marital relationship breakdown on the reserves ends with women, in particular, being treated unfairly. We can look at statements from the AFN and from the women's groups within the aboriginal and Métis community that would say the same thing.

However, that is not good enough to then justify this legislation. The legislation has some fundamental flaws, which were pointed out to us by the first nations on the reserves. They told us that the legislation did not address a number of other problems that are attendant in that overall relationship between people living together on the reserve and then the relationship breaking down. They know that much more work needs to be done with regard to interspousal violence and interfamily violence. The bill does nothing to effectively address that.

It is sometimes said that we are speaking on behalf of the male component of the first nations community. I want to be very clear that that is not the case. I am looking at a press release that summarizes the position of the Native Women's Association of Canada. It makes a number of points and I want to go over them, but I want to deal specifically with the problems that it sees and that it feels the bill does not address.

It talks about the problems, and one obviously being the issue of matrimonial real property and who has rights to it on breakup. It goes on to say that the bill does not address at all the intergenerational impacts of colonization, which is a major problem, violence against women and a limited access to justice.

One of the further points the association makes in that regard is that there is nothing in the proposed legislation dealing with the assistance needed to build capacity on the reserves and to deal with those issues. However, I recognize that it is not the nature of this proposed legislation to do that.

This is work that has to be done before we move to legislation. Programming has to be put into place and financial capacity has to be put into place to deal with these.

Let me raise one issue. On the larger reserves in particular, should we be establishing a separate judicial infrastructure, not to deal just with criminal matters as we have done on some of the reserves, but to deal with matrimonial matters? Is that one of the things we should be building? This legislation does not address it at all. It is perhaps necessary that we have that, especially in the larger reserves.

With regard to other social programming infrastructure that is necessary to deal with some of these issues in the situation of marital breakdown, again, there is no addressing of that. When we speak to the representatives of the first nations, we hear that that type of negotiation is not even going on to build that capacity to deal with this kind of a structure.

I want to be very clear that with respect to the women's groups and the national association, there are parts of this legislation that they could see as being usable even though, as my colleague from Winnipeg mentioned, it is very much Eurocentric in terms of its historical background. There are parts of it that they think may very well be usable within their structure, their tradition and their culture, but not all of it will. They know that. When they are given this holus-bolus and are told, “This is the regime we expect you to follow because that is what we follow in the rest of Canadian society”, they immediately say, “We cannot do that. It is not possible to do that”. Again, we need to analyze this legislation in much more detail from their perspective. That is what they said.

Even before we get to that, they expect that we will as a society be in a position to ask what they require in the way of building an infrastructure to support their existing culture but to deal with these problems as they have identified them; what can we do to help in that regard? I have to say it was the same problem with another piece of legislation around governance of first nations that we had in late 2003-04 under the previous Liberal administration. The government did not have the necessary consultation and coupled with that, the government came up with solutions that were clearly not acceptable within their culture, within their tradition. We are repeating that same error. Fortunately the filibuster, and I again acknowledge my colleague from Winnipeg, that he helped lead, along with a member from the Bloc, eventually got that legislation withdrawn and we are still working on a proper governance model.

Going at it as we are here with the matrimonial property legislation is so piecemeal to almost amount to being ridiculous.

Again, we understand the motivation. I am not in any way demeaning the reasoning behind this, but the methodology is just totally unacceptable. It should be unacceptable to us if we are going to have any meaningful, respectful relationship with our first nations people. However, it clearly is unacceptable to that sector of our community who come out of the first nations.

Our position as a party is that we have to have this consultation; we have to have programming put into place to build that capacity before we move to this stage.

Let me make one final point. That is with regard to the regime itself. The regime itself accepts the concept of private ownership. Again, in the press release I mentioned earlier from the Native Women's Association of Canada, it specifically addressed that point. That concept of private ownership of band property is alien to them. Their concept is based on collective ownership, which again is alien to the European experience. It is not alien to most of Asia or to most of Africa. It is very much a European concept, if we go back in the history of it. It takes time to adjust.

The first nations have to ask themselves if they are going to move more into the private ownership concept, or do they stay within the collective concept but still deal with the issues of who has possession of the matrimonial home in the situation of a marital break.

Those are the kinds of issues that need to be addressed. They are not addressed in this legislation. They have not been addressed clearly in the consultation, limited as it was, in the run-up to the legislation being brought before the House. For that and a number of other reasons, we have serious reservations that this legislation should proceed. The work that is going to go on in committee, because obviously the bill is going to go to committee, is very much going to have to take that into account if we have any chance of dealing in a respectful, meaningful way with the first nations.

[Family Homes on Reserves and Matrimonial Interests or Rights Act, May 13th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, one of the major criticisms that the first nations have, and the women's groups in particular, has been that there is no provision in the legislation for funding for the transition that will be required. I wonder if my colleague could comment on that and whether his party would be prepared to oppose the bill until we see that kind of relationship established.

[Points of Order, May 8th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, my point of order today relates to Bill C-377, which is on the notice paper and which was reported back to the House within the last week, I believe on April 29. It will come forward on Monday for your rulings in selecting what amendments would be in order.

The provision for making that determination is in accordance with the Standing Orders, and specifically with Standing Order 76.1(5). I will only read the first sentence because the rest of it is not particularly germane. It states:

The Speaker shall have power to select or combine amendments or clauses to be proposed at the report stage and may, if he or she thinks fit, call upon any Member who has given notice of an amendment to give such explanation of the subject of the amendment as may enable the Speaker to form a judgment upon it.

Flowing out of that particular Standing Order, the procedure and House affairs committee some period back made a proposal to be brought forward in the form of a resolution. There was a note attached to that, Mr. Speaker, which you made some reference. However, the note, and I will quote the initial sentence of it, which is by way of explanation of how Standing Order 76.1(5) is to be interpreted, states:

The Speaker will not normally select for consideration by the House any motion previously ruled out of order in committee and will normally only select motions which were which were not or could not be presented in committee.

You made further rulings with regard to that, Mr. Speaker, in a ruling that affected, first, myself and then the member for Mississauga South. In response to the report from procedure and House affairs, you made these notes. I want to quote in terms of setting the criteria. First, in terms of what the considerations would be, you said, “past selection practices not affected by this latest directive will continue to apply”. We have a history of how we deal with amendments at report stage. You went on to say:

For example, motions and amendments that were presented in committee will not be selected, nor will motions ruled out of order in committee. Motions defeated in committee will only be selected if the Speaker judges them to be of exceptional significance.

Then you went on and referred members to pages of the House of Commons Procedure and Practice.

You further went on, Mr. Speaker, and said:

Second, regarding the new guidelines, I will apply the tests of repetition, frivolity, vexatiousness and unnecessary prolongation of report stage proceedings insofar as it is possible to do so in the particular circumstances...

I want to quickly add that the amendments being proposed by the member for Skeena—Bulkley Valley are not frivolous or vexatious and do not meet that test whatsoever.

In the two decisions you have rendered in this regard, Mr. Speaker, one, as I pointed out, affected myself when I was first here back in November 2001. It was a situation where I was unable, because of conflicts of being at two committees at the same time, to get my amendments put forward. You ruled at that time, acknowledging the difficulty on my part, that I did have difficulty in moving these amendments and the Chair, in those circumstances, would give me the benefit of the doubt and allow the amendments to move forward, and they in fact did.

Then there was a second ruling by yourself, Mr. Speaker, in January 2003, involving a request from the member for Mississauga South for amendments to be selected by you. At that time, you made two points, the second of which I think is more relevant to the circumstances we have today. The first one recognized that our parliamentary system was party driven and that the positions of parties were brought forward to committees through its officially designated member. The Chair also recognized that some members may want to act on their own. You then went on to say, Mr. Speaker:

Consequently, the Chair is of the opinion that certain motions by the hon. member for Mississauga could not be presented during the clause by clause study in committee and should therefore be studied at the report stage.

In combination, those two rationales, Mr. Speaker, were to the point that if motions could not have been presented at the time when we normally would in committee, then you would normally allow them to be selected at report stage.

I argue today that this is exactly what we are confronted with here. In that regard, the history of what has happened, and I will go to the two reports that have been issued from the environment committee, because that is where Bill C-377 was considered, is there was an initial report, the third report about two or three months ago, which indicated that there were significant difficulties in process at that committee, to the extent that it felt compelled to bring the report forward. I would refer you to the report, Mr. Speaker, when you make considerations as to my point of order.

The second report with regard to Bill C-377 and the environment committee was the sixth report from that committee, and there were several points. I refer you, Mr. Speaker, to the third paragraph of the report, indicating that in fact work had been done on Bill C-377 in committee, that certain clauses had been adopted, others were postponed because of, to use the term in the report, “a prolonged debate of over twenty hours on clause 10 which led the Committee to an impasse”. In effect, what was going on, in the terms that we more often use in the House, was a filibuster by the government. Therefore, the report was passed back here from the committee.

I also would refer you, Mr. Speaker, to emphasize the effect of what was going on there and the degree of the impasse, to the fifth paragraph of the report, which states, “Given the impasse, the Committee opted not to consider the remaining clauses and parts of the Bill and adopted the following motion”. Out of consideration of time, I will not read that, but in effect the motion reflected that certain sections were reviewed, some were amended, but there were outstanding amendments that were never considered, and the final paragraph sets out which ones those were.

The motion was adopted by the committee, that the bill be sent back at that stage. Therefore, some have been amended, others have not even been considered, and others had been considered, but with no opportunity for amendments to be made.

The amendments proposed by our member are very clear. They are not frivolous.

I also want to make one final note. There were minority reports to the sixth report, and in that, the member for Skeena—Bulkley Valley made it very clear to the committee so there was no misunderstanding, and I was there at the committee and also made a similar statement, that we would be moving amendments at the report stage, subject to the determination by the Chair as to whether they should be selected or not. It is not like the committee did not understand that these amendments would come forward and that they would be pursued at report stage.

In summary, I believe it is one of those opportunities. We did not have the ability to move these amendments at committee. It is appropriate that you consider them, Mr. Speaker, and select them at this time.

[Petitions, May 8th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to present a petition from constituents in my riding calling on the government, specifically the Minister of Justice, to bring forth government legislation that would protect our animals from abuse and cruelty. They call on the government to have the legislation so that it is in keeping with Bill C-50, which was before the 38th Parliament, and to in fact institute a regime which would provide that safety for our animals.

[Committees of the House, May 6th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, as I was listening to my colleague, I could not help but think of an incident I had during the time of the last election of a young, recently married woman who was expecting a child. The marriage was delayed because of a problem with the husband's divorce. The authorities insisted on deporting her to a country where the health system was quite questionable in terms of its capacity to provide her with proper health coverage during the course of the pregnancy.

During the course of that election, I tried to get special permission from the minister to allow her to stay. What I said repeatedly at that time was that this was crazy because the woman would be allowed back into this country once her application was processed. I said that it was because of the delay over the divorce that it had not gone as far as it should have by now but that she would be allowed to come back.

A year later, after she had the baby by herself in another country, she is back living with her husband in a solid marriage. We put her through all that trauma.

Does either Immigration Canada or the Border Services Agency keep statistics on how many people in a spousal relation situation come back to Canada after being deported, which wastes all that time, effort and money for nothing?

[Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, April 15th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I do not know where the member gets his figures from. I am glad he raised it because I heard other members make the point.

There is only one figure that we really look at to be absolutely certain of what is happening with the violent crime rate in the country and that is the murder rate. For the last 20 years the murder rate in this country has gone down.

These are the figures of how we spend money on drug policy: 73% on enforcement, 14% on treatment, 7% on research, 2.6% on prevention, and 2.6% on harm reduction.

[Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, April 15th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, we need to put this in the context of what has happened. I heard one of the Conservatives talking. It was like was one of those speeches that we heard being given in our legislatures, and in the United States in particular, in the run-up to prohibition. The words being used were exactly the same: prohibit the use of alcohol and all of society's evils will be cured. There is the same attitude with regard to drugs.

As for incarcerating our youth, we are seeing in the Conservatives' attempt in the youth justice bill, which is waiting before the justice committee right now to be reviewed, this attitude that more penalties and harsher penalties will cure all of society's evils, contrary to all the evidence.

We know with regard to drug consumption in particular that the vast majority of users of illicit drugs have other emotional, psychiatric and psychological problems. We can look to all sorts of experiences in Europe, where the treatment model is to get the youth at an earlier stage, and which in fact does work to a significant degree.

I am not going to suggest for a second that it is perfect. It is not. We are human beings and the people who provide that treatment are human beings and it does not work in every case, but it is clear especially for youth that if a treatment modality is used, versus an incarceration modality, the treatment modality has a success rate that is four and five times that of the incarceration modality rate.

We have the knowledge. We have the ability, from a social science standpoint, to treat. We just do not have the resources. We are much more prepared to spend millions of dollars on the war on drugs, tens of millions and hundreds of millions, as opposed to spending similar or perhaps greater amounts on a meaningful modality that would work.

[Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, April 15th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the questions of my colleague from Yukon.

I did find that in my notes. I found the study. Maybe somehow the government missed it. It is called “Mandatory Minimum Penalties: Their Effects on Crime, Sentencing Disparities, and Justice System Expenditures”. It was done in 2002 by the justice department. It said, “MMS”, mandatory minimum sentences, “do not appear to influence drug consumption or drug-related crime in any measurable way”. That was the basic conclusion the study reached.

To answer the question more specifically about the miscommunication, I do not think there was any miscommunication. I know a number of people in the justice department. I am sure they showed this to the justice ministers. However, again, there are blinkers being worn by the government. The Conservatives are so driven by their ideology on this issue. They sincerely believe that if we punish people more, and more severely, we can change their habits.

They are absolutely refusing--I was going to say “reluctant” but that is too soft--to open their eyes to look at anything else. If the justice officials said to them that they had done all this research, here is the result, it shows no measurable difference, and there is no use at all in us doing this, they would just ignore that. I am quite sure that this is what happened.

With regard to the other issue about the availability of treatment when a person is incarcerated, if a person is incarcerated at the provincial level, there is hardly any available treatment. What is available is so backlogged that the vast majority of people who serve two years less a day will never get through the backlog. Those people will be out of custody before treatment is available.

The situation at the federal level is not much different. The vast majority of treatment programs, especially around drugs, are fairly scarce at the federal level. They are severely backlogged in terms of availability. Again, in the vast majority of cases, people may access those treatment programs, but if they actually serve four years, they may get into it by their third year, and then they are there for such a short period of time that it really does not work.

[Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, April 15th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I do not usually quote from newspaper editorials but at the end of last year I came across an editorial in the Ottawa Citizen, which accurately reflects, although it was the best editorial, the number of editorials on this issue in major newspapers across the country. The heading reads, “Drug-induced stupidity”, and it is in reference to Bill C-26. The editorial states:

More than half the people incarcerated in American federal prisons are there on drug charges, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, and about one-fifth of those in state prisons. This doesn't count people whose crimes were indirectly related to drugs, but it includes people jailed for life for possessing one marijuana joint. Nevertheless, the war on drugs rages on.

Canada's Conservative government is choosing to copy this strategy, which has been failing non-stop since Prohibition. The reason Canada has drug addicts on its streets is supposedly that dealers aren't going to prison for long enough, so Tory Justice Minister...has a bill to make the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act harsher. Judges have had the discretion to sentence drug criminals according to the evidence presented in their cases, but now [the Justice Minister] wants to change that by imposing mandatory minimum sentences.

For instance, anyone dealing in marijuana would go to jail for at least a year if he or she did so in support of “organized crime” (that is, in a moneymaking enterprise involving three or more people). That covers just about all marijuana dealers, who are by definition organized if they have one supplier and one customer. Most of the changes are like this.

Some drug users might be exempted from the minimums if they're diverted into special drug courts that focus on treating addicts. But an addict who deals to support his habit, who can't break the addiction despite treatment? Why, what he needs is more prison time, right?

Actually, wrong. This is bad law in pursuit of bad politics based on non-existent science. Parliament shouldn't go along.

We in the NDP will not go along with this. We made that quite clear, as opposed to the other opposition parties that have stood in the House and made speeches opposing mandatory minimums in this area but then will vote in principle in support of sending the bill to committee. That is, in particular, the Liberal Party and its eternal shame.

This bill would do absolutely nothing to reduce drug consumption in our society. All we need to do is look to our neighbours to the south, or to the north if one is from Windsor, and their experience of the last 35 years. It is uninterrupted. Over that period of time, the United States has actively engaged in its so-called war on drugs but what do we have today? The production of drugs in the United States and around the globe is up. The consumption of illegal drugs in the United States is up. Prison populations have more than doubled and, in some cases, tripled, in terms of the number of people incarcerated on drug charges. The cost of that war on drugs is up in the range of 10 to 20 times higher depending on the state in the United States.

In the last few years, the United States has finally recognized that its war on drugs was not working. Last year, in Detroit, Michigan, the neighbouring state across the river to my riding in Ontario, the state legislature, which controls the criminal law in the area of illegal drugs, began reducing the charges where if people are convicted on drug charges they would have a mandatory minimum.

The state legislature did it for two reasons. I could be somewhat cynical and say that it was only because of how much it was costing and the rate of incarceration that was occurring in that state, but it also did it because it finally recognized that it was not working. We can go through at least half a dozen to a dozen states just in the last few years that have begun to drop mandatory minimums with regard to drug offences.

In spite of those experiences in the United States and in spite of the Conservative government knowing about those experiences, it intends to copy that failed experiment.

Since the Conservative government has been in power, both of the justice ministers and the public safety ministers have appeared before the justice committee and the public safety committee. I and other members of the committees have repeatedly asked them about the basis on which they were making these decisions. Their answers have always been ideological. I want to say, and maybe its to their credit, that I have no hesitation in saying that they believe in that ideology. They believe that by mimicking the U.S. experience in fighting drug crime that they will change society and that it will work.

Unfortunately, when we hear them say those things, their tendency is to pursue it. However, there is absolutely no scientific basis or any study they can point to showing that mandatory minimums in the drug area work in reducing the consumption of drugs or reducing crime as a result of that consumption.

I and my party do not for a minute downplay the consequences of the crime rates that are going on around drug consumption. We know the level of crime rate in those specific areas and the consequential crimes that are committed in our society as a result of people breaking and entering, doing armed robberies or doing other violent acts because they no longer are in control or because they need financial resources to buy drugs.

We are very conscious in our communities. I live next door to the city of Detroit, a city that has one of the highest crime rates in a country that has one of the highest crime rates in the world. We hear on a daily basis about the crime that goes on there. My community is somewhat lucky that more of it has not spilled over but it does spill over to some degree.

Victims live in my community. It is to the eternal shame of the Conservative Party that it continues to mislead the Canadian public by saying that introducing these kind of amendments to the Criminal Code and to the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act will somehow reduce the level of victimization in this country. It will not happen. The government cannot point to one jurisdiction in the world where this has worked.

When the Conservatives stand in the House and repeatedly mislead Canadians, which I am not suggesting they do intentionally, they really believe this will work. When they refuse to face the facts, to look at the reports and to look at all of the research that has been done in this area, they are misleading the Canadian public because it will not work.

When my colleague from B.C. gave a speech a while ago, he gave the classic definition of insanity as being someone who repeats over and over again the same course of conduct and expects a different result. The United States has followed that policy with regard to its approach on its war on drugs and now the Conservative government is attempting to do the same thing. It will repeat the same errors over and over again and it will not get any different results. The consumption rate of drugs and the production of drugs will continue to climb and we will continue to be a market for them.

Every study that we have done shows that we need to get at the whole issue of treatment and getting people off drugs. Putting them into prisons is not the solution. It just simply does not work.

I want to spend a few more minutes on what always bothers me about the government when it passes these kinds of laws.

An analysis was done on the impact this bill would have on the incarceration rate. It would have the effect of increasing the population in our provincial jails, for which the government pays nothing, by significant percentages. We know that at least 700 to 900 additional people will go into our jails, which, quite frankly, is optimistic to think it will be that low, if this bill goes through as it is presently written.

I will put that into context. At the present time, roughly 10,000 to 11,000 people are incarcerated in our federal prisons. Depending on the level of security in which they are held, to the tune of about $110,000 at the top end to roughly $90,000 at the minimum security level, that number in federal prisons will probably increase by 1,000 in the first couple of years if this bill passes.

If this bill passes, we will have at least as many more at the provincial level because, in spite of the rhetoric that we hear from the justice minister, the bill will not go after organized crime. It will be used to go after the small pushers and the sentences as a result will be in the six month to two year range. At least half of the people incarcerated, if the bill goes through, will be incarcerated at the provincial level.

The average cost of incarceration across the country, which does vary fairly significantly from province to province, runs at about $75,000 to $78,000 a year, money that the provincial governments need to find. We know that especially the smaller provinces will not have the ability to cover those costs unless they take it from other parts of their budgets, which means that other programs will suffer and, in particular, some of the programs in the corrections area that are more effective at reducing illegal drug consumption.

We have heard nothing from the Minister of Justice, the Minister of Public Safety or the Minister of Finance to indicate that there will be additional funding for the correctional services at the provincial level to cover these costs, which will not be inconsequential. We are talking in the range of $75 million to $100 million-plus that will need to be found to cover these costs if the incarceration rate is as high as we expect it to be. The federal government has given no indication that it will help in that regard. It will simply dump that cost onto the provinces.

We can go on with the other costs that will be related to that increased incarceration. The length of trials will go up, as has been indicated by judges, prosecutors and defence lawyers. If one is faced with a mandatory minimum sentence, chances are there will be no plea bargain but there will be a longer trial, which is the usual consequence. We only need to go across the border to the United States to see repeatedly where the length and number of trials and the reduced number of guilty pleas for these charges were altered because of the mandatory minimums.

That puts an additional financial burden on the court system. It means that our police are spending more time testifying in trials. It means that our prosecutors are spending time in court on these charges for longer periods of time because the trials go on longer. It is the same for our judiciary.

As for all of these costs, the vast majority of these cases, I should point out, are not tried by our federal judges. They are tried by our provincial judges. All of these costs are being serviced and dumped, literally, on the provincial governments, with no indication of any compensation from the federal government to assist them with this. I have seen no assessment of how much it is going to be, but again, it is going to be at least in the tens of millions of additional dollars in those areas.

We will see provincial governments having to draw from other programs in any number of areas in order to cover these costs. They do not have a choice. That is one of the interesting things. They have no voice in this. Police officers have to lay those charges. Crown attorneys have to ask for mandatory minimums because they are mandatory. Judges have to send people to jail for those mandatory minimums because they are mandatory. There is no discretion at all in the system. Those costs just go on.

Let me move for a minute from the effect of this to alternatives. There are in fact alternatives. We see the government actively engaged currently in trying to shut down the safe needle program in the city of Vancouver downtown in spite of a report that came out as recently as yesterday. One has to appreciate that this report came from a body that was appointed by the current government. It did a complete analysis of the 24 reports that have been done on that centre. It concluded, as every single one of those reports did, that the site should remain open, that it should receive federal funding on an ongoing basis, and that the site reduces crime rates and literally saves the lives of drug users.

We can go through all the other positives of this program. Obviously it keeps drug users out of the court system to a much greater degree, allowing the police to do other work. In spite of this, I am sure that we are going to continue to hear the government attack that centre and look for some other way to pull the plug on it. It almost did so last September, but as a result of a huge outcry from the community it backed off and extended the funding until this June.

The fear in the community in Vancouver is very palpable that the government is going to figure out some way politically to justify doing this. Again, it will not be based on any facts, any science or any of the studies that have been done. That attitude, that ideological passion, and some may say fanaticism, that we get from the government in this area is reflected in this bill. There are no facts on which to base it. In fact, there were studies from the justice department in 2003-04 on the use of mandatory minimums specifically in the drug area.

Maybe I should diverge for a second here. My party in fact has supported the use of mandatory minimums in Parliament in areas where we think they can work. I do not know how many times I have given this speech in the House. It is a limited area. It has to be focused. We in the NDP have done so quite extensively where firearms are involved. We believe that can be justified by studies and scientific fact, but there is not one study that does not say that the use of mandatory minimums with regard to drugs is useless. There is not one.

In fact, a major study was done, I believe in 2003, by the Department of Justice. It canvassed all of the studies and prior reports that had been done and it showed this. We have to appreciate that most small drug pushers are users as well. That is who this bill is really going to end up targeting. The government says that is not the case, and that is not who it means, but that will be the result.

My time is up, but I would plead with the government and with the opposition party. This is the time, at second reading, to vote the bill down. In principle, the opposition party should not be supporting it.