Joe Comartin

[Criminal Code, January 29th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, in addition to the provisions of the bill, which I think are generally accepted and recognized by all parties in the House as being required, there have been other areas where we have sought government intervention, in particular in the control of databases that contain personal identification and greater regulation of the security around databases in the private sector, as well as the public sector, because there have been losses not only in this country but in any number of other countries of large databases that contain extensive personal identification.

The secondary area was the requirement, if a theft or loss occurs in some other fashion, of what the private or public sectors would be required to do to notify individuals who had been impacted. I wonder if the minister could comment as to whether the government has any intention of dealing with those two areas.

[Judges Act, January 28th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, quickly on the points about the government not dealing with crime with a holistic viewpoint and with regard to its judicial appointments, one of the things that is of concern to a lot of trial lawyers in the country, in particular those on the prosecution side, is that we are going to get hit with another Askov type of decision by a superior court.

The backlog in the criminal area is increasing dramatically. A number of cases have been dismissed. The fear is that at some point there is going to be an overwhelming decision by one of our superior courts or appeal courts that is going to strike down a large number of criminal cases. It is not going to be an issue of dealing with them at all; they are just going to be out of the court system. When it happened in Ontario back in the early 1990s, it included a number of serious criminal cases that were dismissed at that point because they had not been dealt with in a proper fashion.

To deal with the issue of the government's attitude toward our judiciary and in particular its trying to interfere with the independence of the judiciary, probably the classic example of this is the former justice minister, not the present one, who sat with us on our review of judicial appointments. The position that he consistently took was that of wanting to create a less partisan appointment process, which was the case under the Liberals in a number of cases, one where the person being appointed is the absolute best choice in the country or in that region, without caring about his or her political affiliation one way or the other, not as a positive or a negative. It would be that we simply went on merit and took the very best candidate.

I remember how hard he pushed for that when he was the justice critic for the Conservatives. Now that they are in power we see what they are in fact doing, which again is to very much move away from the complete independence of the judiciary, as our Constitution requires, and toward a very clear, focused attempt to ideologically affect the appointment process, which would then ideologically affect the judiciary at all levels all the way up to the Supreme Court of Canada.

[Judges Act, January 28th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague from Winnipeg makes the point that it may actually slow the process down. Maybe a different process would have been more useful. I think there is some merit to that.

However, beyond that there is nothing in the bill that would expand access by our first nations to our courts.

Getting back to the appointment process, maybe we should concentrate on getting more lawyers who come out of first nations and aboriginal communities onto the bench. In that regard, a little over two years ago an aboriginal lawyers' group that appeared before committee were quite proud of the fact that for the first time 100 lawyers had come out of first nations and Métis communities. That was a very negative comment with regard to recruitment from our law schools. In Ontario alone we have something like 30,000 lawyers and of those 30,000 only about 30 or 40 of them have come out of first nations.

Another thing concerns me about the bill. Two first nations communities in Yukon have approached me about expanding their methodology of dispensing justice. This is something we have not pursued. The prior Liberal government did not do it and the present Conservative government seems to be paying no attention to it whatsoever.

[Judges Act, January 28th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I wish I had thought of addressing my colleague's question in my opening remarks because he makes a valid point. I suppose the government could say that six of the twenty new judicial appointments will go to the specific claims tribunal which will, hopefully, dramatically increase the speed at which land claims are dealt with in Canada. That would be a very positive result for our first nations.

[Judges Act, January 28th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, we saw the attitude of the government in the final week of the 2006 election when the now Prime Minister but then leader of the official opposition made the point that the judiciary from his perspective was an adversary to where he and his party stood ideologically; the positions that they had taken on a number of issues confronting the country. They did not see them as part of the structure so much as being an impediment to the structure of government, which is, quite frankly, frightful in a democracy.

The Conservatives have made allegations over patronage appointments, which have some validity. An analysis was done on the appointments made by the former Liberal government and it was found that a number of people had direct involvement with the Liberal Party prior to their appointment as a judge.

What that analysis always misses is that no matter which party appoints them and no matter what their affiliation may or may not have been, the vast majority of judges, because of the legal training and their experience in our courts and in our law schools, they take an independent stance once appointed. That is something that did not seem to fit into the vision that our current Prime Minister has of the judiciary.

We have an excellent judiciary. I would argue that there is no judiciary in the world that is superior to ours, although there may be a few that are on a peer level. We have an excellent judiciary but we do not have enough of them.

The other point I would make concerns the government's constant attempt to undermine the discretion of our judiciary in criminal law and in other areas where we would think it would want to undermine the amount of discretion, in particular in the interpretation of our Constitution and our Charter of Rights. In a democracy that is frightful.

[Judges Act, January 28th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, Bill C-31 is one paragraph long and simply increases the number of judges, from 30 to 50, at the superior court level across the country.

We need to put this in context in terms of the number of judges who sit at that level. The figure is somewhere in the range of about 750 to 800. Then there are a number of others who sit at the appeals level, plus the those who sit in the Federal Court. This section of the Judges Act was designed to allow for an increase in the number of judges appointed in this special category based on requests from the provinces and territories.

Other than appreciating that number, it is important to put in context the current situation and the length of time since there has been any increase in the absolute number of superior court justices across the country.

The simple fact is the increase in number does not even keep up with the overall growth of the population in Canada. Of the 20 judges to be added, 6 would be designated to go to the specific claims tribunal and would not be in our regular courts. Therefore, we would only get 14 additional trial judges at the superior court level across the country. The population increase far outstrips on a percentage basis, a per capita basis, those additional numbers of judges.

Across the country, bar associations, law societies and judicial councils have called on the federal government to increase the number of judges and hasten the number of appointments when vacancies are available. In my home province of Ontario, administrative senior judges have been unusually public in criticizing the government for the slow pace of appointments it has made.

We have heard from some of the other opposition parties the concern about the new appointment process introduced by the government. I do not think anybody who is objective about the process sees it as anything other than a very clear attempt on the part of the government, and in particular the Prime Minister, to ideologically shift the bench in the way appointments would be made.

It is not that the former Liberal administration was not guilty of similar misconduct in the way it made appointments, particularly of a partisanship nature, but this attempt to ideologically shape the bench is regrettable in a democratic society.

Again, I want to put in context the difficulties our judiciary has with the increased workload with which it is faced. Legislatures across the country continue to pass laws that, in effect, promote additional litigation. I do not want to overemphasize it, but this is true in the criminal law area. However, when the government introduced the appointment process change about a year and a half ago, what came out in the hearings of the justice committee was the small number of cases, percentage-wise, that were of a criminal nature at this level of the courts. The vast majority of criminal trials and proceedings in the criminal justice system are at the provincial court level, a different level than where these judges are.

What happens at this level and what increases the workload, not the sheer number of cases, although those are going up, is the number of super trials. These are trials that will go on for months and months and, in some cases, years. These are cases under the Criminal Code, under our anti-drug legislation, and they take up the entire year of a judge's workload at times. We are seeing more of those cases coming, not just in the drug area but in some security crimes that end up in front of the judges.

Therefore, the sheer number of cases is not going up. What is up going up is the length of the trials and the number of hours judges have to commit to those very lengthy trials.

That is true as well in civil litigation. I think of the amount of additional judicial time that was taken up across the country as the reforms went through in our auto insurance legislation. In Ontario, at one period of time, I was dealing with four separate pieces of legislation that affected automobile accidents depending on when they had occurred. This imposed significant additional burdens on our courts because they had to interpret those statutes as the law changed, which took up additional hours. That is repeated by any number of other examples across the country.

The number of hours spent on the criminal cases is going up. Similarly, the number of hours on civil litigation cases of a general nature is going up. Those trials are also becoming longer.

I can remember hearing some of our more senior judges describe what it was like to do a trial 20, or 30 or 40 years ago compared to the amount of additional work and hours that now went into these cases, with more expert witnesses and more witnesses generally called. A trial that might have taken 3 to 5 days is now taking 20 to 30 days in just the standard automobile accident trial where there is any kind of severe injury.

In addition to that, and perhaps where the greatest additional burden in absolute hours has come from, has been in the matrimonial law area. It is taking two forms. The sheer number of trials has increased dramatically. The interim motions and interim work that go on prior to trial and the time superior court justices are in court to hear the motions has quadrupled, and in some cases even more, their basic workload. That has gone up quite dramatically. It has been compounded by the number of files where one of the two parties, in some cases both of the parties, are self-represented. The reason for that is the costs in the vast majority of cases.

When I first started practising in the early seventies, a family law trial including a divorce, property settlement and the issue of support, whether spousal or child, would normally take two to three days. Those trials are now taking a minimum of 10 days and it is not unusual for them to go 20 or 30 days.

We are not talking millions of dollars. In most cases we are talking of the average family in Canada with assets of maybe a couple of hundred thousand dollars and incomes in the mid-range. That is what trials cost at the present time. Therefore, many applicants and defendants before the courts cannot afford to be represented by legal counsel. This inevitably leads to much longer trials. From talking to judges, a great deal of frustration on their part is trying to ensure that the individual representing himself or herself gets a fair hearing and that the process is fair to both the represented party and the non-represented party.

The additional thing that happens, and it goes back to the shortage of judges, is this phenomenon in the matrimonial area in particular has resulted in additional costs. I think one of the Toronto papers through the holiday break did a lengthy article on the number of adjournments that had to be granted because there was not enough judges available in the province of Ontario. I know it is a problem in my hometown of Windsor and I understand it to be a problem across the province of Ontario. I also believe it is a problem right across the country.

When clients are represented by counsel, counsel goes to court with them on one of these interim motions, which usually takes an hour to two hours to argue. A lengthy list may have 10 or 20 files before the judge that day. If too many of them do not get resolved, that is if they are argued, obviously the judge runs out of time before the end of the day and the case gets adjourned.

However, the lawyer, who has prepared for the motion, sits all day in court waiting for it to be heard and, if it is adjourned, the lawyer charges the client for that time. The same thing happens again a week or a month later and it may be adjourned again. In Toronto, in particular, we are seeing repeated adjournments of that nature. This costs the clients more money and forces them, in a number of cases, after a period of time of being represented, to take on their own representation, which prolongs the amount of time that is being spent.

That is the context in which we are functioning. Again, the appointments of the additional 14 judges, while welcomed and needed, will not be adequate to deal with the problems.

I want to make a final point with regard to the criminal law cases. From a number of questions that I and other members of the justice committee have asked at the justice committee when legislation has come forward, I know the government has not been doing an analysis, as the amendments to the Criminal Code have come forward, on how much additional court time these cases would take.

I want to put this into context. When we increase penalties in particular or we create new crimes with severe penalties attached to them, we end up with fewer pleas of guilty, fewer negotiated plea bargains and many more trials. We have not seen that increase yet but that will be coming over the next while. Again, the sheer number of cases in front of our criminal courts is not likely to go up much but I believe the length of them will go up quite dramatically because most of these cases from where this new legislation is coming deal with more severe crimes. The government has not done an analysis of how much more judicial time will be needed to take care of that.

At the end of the day we are asking our judges to cope with a growing population and the number of cases that have been added to their trial lists as a result of that. In each one of the major areas that they must deal with, criminal law, matrimonial law and general civil litigation law, which includes commercial litigation, the amount of work they are doing per file is going up dramatically and, in some cases, the number of files is also going up.

The NDP members will be supporting the bill but we are urging the government today, and we will be doing the same at the justice committee when the bill gets there, to seriously consider augmenting this relatively modest number of additional judges and look at increasing the number more substantially in keeping with what we are hearing from the judicial councils, the bar associations and the law societies.

[Judges Act, January 28th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, there was a great deal of concern, particularly in my home province of Ontario over the last 18 months, about the number of appointments in Ontario to the Superior Court and the number of vacancies. I wonder if the parliamentary secretary could share with us what consultation process was held with bar associations and law societies across the province to determine by what appropriate number to increase these appointments.

[Budget and Economic Statement Implementation Act, 2007, December 11th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Acadie—Bathurst.

I will deal with this in reverse of the member's questions.

When he talks with great passion, as he always does, over concerns for working families, it makes me think of what has happened to my community, and a good deal of what I know he has gone through in his community, in terms of high unemployment rates. I want to make two points about that.

A study came out last week about the impact of long term and in most cases indefinite layoffs on individual worker's health. It was done in the United States. It was a wide-ranging one, a longitudinal one, which I think went on for 20 years. What it showed consistently throughout that period was when a corporation shut down a plant completely, as they followed those individual workers over the balance of their lives, on average they lost a year and a half of their life expectancy.

The only thing that differentiated them from the rest of the population, and it showed this earlier demise, was the unemployment factor when they were working. It particularly hit men and women who were in their middle forties because it was so difficult for them to find employment. They were in a situation of still supporting families. It was a very stressful incident for them and it ended up costing them a year to a year and a half in what would have been their normal lifespan.

I also thought of the two suicides I had in my community in the springtime. They were two relatively young men, both in their late thirties. They left spouses and young children. Both had lost all hope as a result of indefinite layoffs. I also think of the constant parade of individuals who come into my constituency office and who I see when I am out and about in the riding. They are suffering and are having to deal with that kind of stress.

We have solutions. We could be saving the manufacturing sector, yet we see these kinds of policies that do absolutely nothing for it.

[Budget and Economic Statement Implementation Act, 2007, December 11th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, it is not cynical, it is only practical politics that we expect the Conservative government to be favourably disposed, in the extreme, to the oil and gas sector. Because so many of their members come from the province of Alberta, the government is beholding in many respects to the oil and gas industry. We understand that from a purely perhaps cynical political standpoint.

On the other hand, we also understand that the government has come late to the global warming and climate change realities confronting us. The Prime Minister is constantly quoted about saying that the Kyoto agreement was a socialistic money grab and words such as that.

It was not until the Conservatives came to power and the reality of what the world was facing and what we as a country were contributing to what was happening in the world around climate change did the government admit that. However, the Conservatives have not moved beyond that. They clearly feel no compulsion whatsoever to clean up the environment. They still feel very much favourably disposed to the oil and gas industry and quite willing, as we see in these large corporate tax breaks, to give huge amounts of tax breaks to an industry that has absolutely no need for them. In fact, by giving these tax breaks, it encourages the companies to follow practices that are very negative to the environment.

[Budget and Economic Statement Implementation Act, 2007, December 11th, 2007]

Yes, exactly, that is why I am here and why I was elected. They are my buds. I would say to the Conservatives, even playing that Conservative role for a minute, that I have an alternative for them.

We have a crisis in the manufacturing sector and it has taken the government, which has been the government for almost 20 months, a little better than 18 months to finally come to that realization, and maybe even a little longer. For the first time this past week and on the weekend, we heard from both the Prime Minister and the finance minister that they would finally do something.

However, they have said before that they knew there was a problem with the manufacturing sector but they said that their tax breaks would take care of it. Again, playing Conservative, I am saying that it is not working but that I still need to help my buddies in the big corporations so what am I going to do? At this point they do not know what they are going to do.

I am going to play Conservative again and play their role and I am going to tell them what they can do. However, before I do that, I want to emphasize that the policies they have put in place up to this point have not worked. They have really had two that were supposed to help the manufacturing sector. What will come as no surprise is that one of them was giving corporate tax breaks.

I will stand back now and not be a Conservative anymore. I will be critical of the Conservatives. So much of what they do is so simplistic that I will keep it simple for them because maybe they will then understand it.

The way the corporate world works is a company produces a product or service, it pays all its bills and whatever is left over is profit. The government comes in at that point and tells the company that if it made a certain amount of profit, then it must pay this percentage of it in tax. I think that is pretty simple and even the Conservatives could understand it.

What they do not seem to understand, so I will share this with them, is that the crisis in the manufacturing sector is so bad now that there are no profits. If companies do not make profits, the government does not come in and tell them that they must pay a certain share of it because there is nothing there. That is the situation we are in. Corporate tax breaks are of no use in those circumstances.

What is the second point that the Conservatives always make when we say that they are not doing anything? They say that they have sped up the write-offs for any investments the company makes in its company to produce a product. If a company invests in its corporation and in new equipment, the government will let the company write that expense off more rapidly against the company's income and revenue.

Again I will make this simple. If there is no net revenue coming in, no profit coming in, a company cannot write it off. More important, this is true right across the manufacturing sector which has been going down and has been in crisis for a long time now. This goes back, of course, to when the Liberals were in power, so I am not pointing my finger only at the Conservatives. I am pointing my finger at both of them because they both missed the boat on this one. The manufacturing sector has been going down for so long that any reserves it had have dwindled to the point where it cannot afford to invest in corporate equipment.

In addition to that, in spite of all that money the banks are making, they are not that interested in lending the money. Again, they are not profit-making corporations in a large number of cases. They are not good credit risks as far as the banks are concerned and they turn them down.

Therefore, regarding their two plans, corporate tax breaks do not work because there is no profit to tax, and more rapid write-offs on equipment cannot be used because there is no money to invest in the corporate field. We need another solution.

I will go back to playing Conservative. I am saying, okay, I have all this money coming in from the banks, the financial institutions and from the oil and gas, maybe what I should do is try to help out another one of my buddies in the corporate sector, in the auto manufacturing sector, textiles or any number of industries within the manufacturing sector that need help. That is what I am proposing they do.

That is not a radical thought. It is a very conservative approach, and I mean that in the pure sense of the word conservative. A fiscally conservative approach is that governments involve themselves in the marketplace when they are needed to be involved in the marketplace. Therefore, they are safe in their ideology.

In addition, there is no politically dramatic shift here because both the Governments of Ontario and Quebec have already done this. They have moved directly in and have told the manufacturing sector that they have made pools of funds available for companies to invest in what they need to make themselves more competitive, to expand their industry or to be able to export more. Those are all the good things that the Conservatives love to talk about.

I will go back to being an NDP member now and say that what I am most interested in is that if we do that we create jobs and put people back to work.

Let us talk about the employment situation in the manufacturing sector.

We had a very detailed debate about a year ago in this House on the textile industry and what was going on there. Between two to three years ago, Canada had roughly 100,000 people employed in the textile industry. When we were having that debate about a year ago, those numbers had dwindled to 50,000. What came out in the course of that debate was that by the end of another two to two and a half years, we would be down to 10,000 people in the textile industry. What has happened, both with the Liberal government and the Conservative government, is they have just stood back and let it happen.

What I am worried about is that the same thing will happen to the auto industry. I come from Windsor and Windsor-Essex county has the largest auto sector. In that two and a half year time period, we have lost 17,000 jobs in Windsor-Essex county and that is in a population of less than 400,000. All those jobs, without exception, were well-paying jobs, jobs that people could raise their families on, pay their mortgages and maybe even have a holiday. Across the country in the manufacturing sector, at least 250,000 jobs, if not closer to 300,000 jobs, were lost in the last two and a half to three years.

Much of what happened in the textile industry is happening elsewhere in the manufacturing sector. I see it primarily in the auto sector but it is happening in other areas.

The Province of Ontario and the Province of Quebec have said that it is time for the government to help. They have also told the federal government that it must do its share. The government loves to talk about partnerships and about working cooperatively. It is now time to pony up. It is time for the government to come forward and participate in saving the manufacturing sector in Canada.

I have said this repeatedly and I will now repeat it in this speech. I have done some research and I have not been able to identify, across the whole of the globe, and I have gone back over the last roughly 100 to 150 years, one national economy that functioned in a vibrant way without having a key manufacturing sector as a significant component of that economy. However, the present government and the previous Liberal government have repeatedly taken a hands off and will not help. They told the manufacturing section that it was on its own at the same time as they brought in trade policies and implemented those trade policies that allowed other governments, other economies to sack our manufacturing sector. Because they protected their manufacturing sector, we allowed them to come in, penetrate ours, purloin the best parts of it and we just stood back and let them do that while we were shut out from their economy.

Canada has repeated that over and over again. We saw it with the free trade agreement back in 1988-89. We saw it with the North American Free Trade Agreement. We saw it with policies and in a number of different trading arrangements. We are seeing it right now. The current minister, who is negotiating with South Korea, is willing to give away the fort once again, particularly in the auto sector.

There is a simple solution on an interim basis. We see that from the province of Quebec and the province of Ontario. The government should be joining with them, as a national government, and assisting the manufacturing sector.

The auto parts manufacturers have said that it needs, $400 million in a fund that they can borrow against. Overall within the manufacturing sector, the estimate is that we need a fund at the federal level of $1.5 billion. It is here in the corporate tax breaks. All the government has to do is forget the corporate tax breaks to the banks and the oil and gas companies and put it into this fund.