Joe Comartin

[Tackling Violent Crime Act, November 27th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I rise to speak to Bill C-2, the omnibus crime bill.

I would like to start by expressing our grave concern over the delay in getting these parts of this bill passed through the whole process. The government has been blatantly partisan in its agenda with regard to this bill and its parts, using it not in the best interests of the country in advancing some of these bills as rapidly as possible, but actually slowing down the process so that the government could be critical, particularly of the Liberal Party, both in the House and Senate, and so it could attempt to portray the Liberals and I guess all opposition parties and anybody who does not adopt its right-wing radical agenda on crime as being soft on crime.

More than 60% of the bill was in the Senate. There were three different bills in the Senate when we broke for the summer recess. Based on past practice, I would argue that at least one and probably two of those bills would now have cleared the Senate or certainly would have by the time we break at year-end. Probably all three of them would have cleared.

The government's decision both to prorogue and to then bring back all these five bills into the omnibus bill has now delayed the passage of at least those three bills by several months. Also, of course, with a minority government we always sit on that edge as to whether we will have a snap election because of lack of confidence in the government, and there are good reasons to have lack of confidence in the Conservatives.

That could happen at any time. If that happens, we have to start the whole process all over again after the next election when we get back. We could be looking at delays of another year or two years. The government purposely caused that delay in order to play partisan politics with these bills.

Let us look at the bills we had before the Senate. We had the mandatory minimums bill there, which is a big part of the government's agenda. I should say in regard to mandatory minimums that the opposition parties, led by mine, were able to get the mandatory minimum sentences reduced to bring them generally in line with the sentencing policies of our courts across the country, our superior courts in particular, and with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, so that this would not be struck down at some point in the future.

That bill is still sitting there. Of the five bills that make up the omnibus bill, it was the first one to get to the Senate. It is still sitting here and again it is going to be literally months before it gets through.

Again, there is absolutely no reason for that other than partisan politics on the part of the Conservative Party and the Conservative government. It is shameful, quite frankly.

In that case, the reason we supported this bill is that we need specific guidelines given to our judiciary with regard to specific violent crimes. That bill did so. Quite frankly, the bill was one we had championed in the last election. Once we brought the bill into line with the charter, we were quite pleased to support it.

Let us look at the other bill that was in the Senate, the age of consent bill. We have fought for a large number of years over the issue of raising the age of consent from 14 to 16. I would say the issue has been before the House at least a half a dozen times over the last 10 years in the form of private members' bills. We attempted to get the issue before the House in a government bill during the Liberal administration in 2005 and were unsuccessful, but there is strong support in the country to raise the age of consent from 14 to 16.

As we see in the opinion polls and as a number of experts tell us, it is running at 70% to 75% support for this to be brought into law, to be brought into the modern age, really, and to bring us into line with a number of other jurisdictions. I will not deny that a number of people are opposed to this, but in fact the vast majority of Canadians want it. Again, we are at serious risk of not seeing this happen should we have a snap election because of the conduct of the government.

Similarly, there was a fairly small bill that dealt with alleged violent crime and people seeking bail who were accused of violent crimes where handguns or guns were used. It got broad support from all of the opposition parties, as well as the government, obviously. It was sitting in the Senate. Now it is at risk of perhaps never becoming law until after the next election.

I want the Canadian public to understand the kinds of politics that the government is prepared to play with on what are very crucial issues. In some cases, they are life and death issues.

In order for the Conservatives to make their agenda work for them, to be tough on crime and to beat their chests, the whole macho thing, they need to be able to attack the Liberals in particular for being soft on crime and for delaying. That is not accurate. None of the opposition parties has delayed these bills at all.

The omnibus bill is made up of five former bills, as I have already mentioned. The three I have mentioned involve mandatory minimums for serious violent crime, the age of consent, and the provision with regard to bail. The other two components deal with impaired driving as the result of drug consumption, for both licit and illicit drugs, as well as a provision in that particular part of the bill for doing away, reasonably and I expect effectively, with what is more commonly known as the two-beer defence.

Quite frankly, in my opinion, it is somewhat of a scandal that this was ever allowed to develop as a defence. Basically, it significantly undermines the use of the breathalyzer and that technology. I believe we have the right wording now to do away with that defence when it is inappropriate and still allow, in those extreme cases where for whatever reason the breathalyzer technology has broken down or has not been applied properly, that people would be able to defend under those circumstances and prove that in fact they were not impaired by the consumption of alcohol.

The final bill and the one, quite frankly, that gave us the greatest problem is the bill that dealt with the dangerous offender provisions. Before I go to that, I want to raise the whole issue. As we saw yesterday in the vote at report stage, the NDP in fact, with one exception, supported the bill. We believe that in spite of the dangerous offender provisions, and I am going to come back to that in a minute, the balance of the bill had provisions in it that either we had ourselves brought forward in the last election in our political platform or were prepared to support the government on because we felt that it was in the best interests of Canada. It actually either protected people or met the requirement of having to make amendments to the Criminal Code where it was long past needing those amendments.

It is interesting that just yesterday in the Ottawa Citizen there was a summary of a report that came out of the United States. It is called, in part, “Unlocking America”. The report was done by a number of well-known criminologists and sociologists. It is a very extensive report. It is consistent with a large number of other bodies of evidence in the United States on the imbalance that has been created by successive governments in the United States, primarily at the state level, in terms of the states' incarceration and criminal law practices.

Always the issue when we are looking at the criminal justice system, at civil liberties and human rights in light of the criminal justice system, and at protecting society, which of course is the absolute first criteria, is that there is this balance. How do we best protect society?

To do so, obviously, we use the criminal justice system. We have crimes and we have punishments, but equally important, and one perhaps could argue much more important, is the whole question of how society prevents crimes from ever happening. It is generally accepted, I think, that there are two ways of doing that.

One is to have preventative programs particularly directed at youth so they never enter into a lifestyle that leads them to committing crimes, both petty and serious, and, second, it is also to have a society that has reasonably strong enforcement to guarantee that the laws are in fact there and are enforced to protect society.

Every time there is a conviction, I like to think that it is in effect is a failure on the part of society for not having proper prevention and enforcement infrastructure in our society. Maybe it is not utopian to believe that we will ever get to that point, but it is utopian to believe that at this time we would be able to prevent all crime, so ultimately we need that system in place whereby incarceration or other penalties can be invoked.

Obviously the ideal to strive for, the perfection that we should all strive for as legislators, is to prevent a crime from ever occurring in the first place so that we do not have victims and also so we fulfill our responsibility of protecting all of our citizens, all of our residents of Canada, to the absolute maximum.

The “Unlocking America” report shows what the Americans have done in a large number of states, although not all of them by any means, because they did some comparisons. They have struck the role for government to play, a role very much on the incarceration and punitive side. The report, which is consistent with any number of other reports that have come out of the U.S., shows the ineffectiveness of that. It is ineffective and very expensive.

It is interesting to see the comparison between some of the states that have followed more closely the Canadian model up to this point over the last 20 or 30 years. The model showed that those states had lower incarceration rates, but with a couple of exceptions the states with the lower incarceration rates also had lower crime rates, and vice versa, so that those states that had particularly high incarceration rates had the highest crime rates.

A good comparison is that between the state of New York and the state of California. The state of California, as we all know, did the three strikes and out policy and all sorts of other very heavy-handed incarceration and sentencing policies. Its crime rate was consistently higher over the last two decades than that of the state of New York, which took many more steps with regard to prevention and enforcement and was much more effective at bringing its crime rates down.

There are a couple of statistics I want to mention. One is that the report looked back more than 30 years ago to what the crime rate was in the United States, to what it went to and to where it is now, and also at what the incarceration rate was at that point and what it is now. The incarceration rate increased eightfold over that period in the United States. Obviously the population during that period would have increased by probably about 30%. The incarceration rate went up 800% and the population growth was perhaps about 35%.

The crime rate is almost identical in the United States today to what it was in 1973. That was the year of comparison used. It is almost identical. It went up and it went down, dramatically in some states, New York state being a good example, but the incarceration rate had absolutely no impact on the crime rate in the United States even though it went up 800%.

The other thing that stood out through that whole period of time, so it had no effect on the crime rate, is that it is now costing the United States $60 billion a year for all the people it has incarcerated. The United States has an incarceration rate that is highest in the world. It is even higher than China's. China has roughly three to four times the population of the United States. The United States has 2.2 million people incarcerated at the present time and China has 1.5 million.

The incarceration rate in the United States compared to Canada is about 7:1. Our crime rate is about one-quarter of what it is in the United States.

The point I am trying to make by bringing forth these facts is that we need to be very careful in Canada as to how we deal with crime. As I have said, the greater majority of this bill is a bill that we looked at and said that, yes, these are good provisions, these are provisions that make sense in terms of building a fair, equitable justice system that protects our society.

We need to be very careful that we do not go down the route of the United States in terms of this excessive use of incarceration and punitive process that produces no effective reduction in the crime rate and, at the same time, is hugely expensive for the taxpayer.

That brings me to the final part of Bill C-2 that gave us the greatest concern. We believe that the part in this bill that deals with the dangerous offender section of the Criminal Code is already in the code and the amendments that the government was making, in particular, the reverse onus that it was bringing in, was offensive to the charter. We had crossed the line. We had not struck that proper balance. We were going the U.S. side. We were going to incarcerate, for the rest of their lives in the vast majority of cases, everybody who was designated a dangerous offender, which would increase our prison population to some significant degree.

The ultimate conclusion is whether we support the entire bill when we have this provision that is so offensive to the charter or, quite frankly, is so offensive to just common sense that it will not work. It is a useless tool because it will be struck down by the courts at some point in the future.

At the same time, if we oppose that, we give up the rest of the bill that has the age of consent. Even the mandatory minimums that are in there and some of the provisions around impaired driving are badly needed in our society.

Faced with that decision, and after much debate in our caucus, we ultimately had to support it and, unfortunately, abdicate our responsibility as legislators to pass proper legislation and expect that at some point down the road the courts will strike down that part of the dangerous offender/reverse onus part that is so offensive. We are not comfortable, quite frankly, with that but we are here to make decisions and that is the decision that our caucus has made.

I want to make one final point with respect to a question I raised with the Bloc. It is a question of how the government has approached this. Some parts of the bill will be delayed even after it gets through the Senate because the provinces, which need to administer parts of this, the impaired driving in particular, are not ready for it. I think that is a mistake on the part of the government. It should have been ready with the provinces to implement that. It is a section of the code that needs to be amended and needs to be implemented as rapidly as possible and we have had no explanation as to why it delayed on that.

[Tackling Violent Crime Act, November 27th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I have a quick comment. I did not object to the member having the extra five minutes, but I did want to put a condition on it that he continue as he had through most of his speech with his back to the rest of the chamber in speaking just to his caucus, because, of course, his back is the best side of him.

I would like to ask the member a question about the delay we see from the government, first in prorogation and then in bringing all of this bill together. In particular, could the member mention the information we received at committee that there are parts of this bill, in particular driving while impaired by drugs, that the provinces are not ready for?

Therefore, even when this bill goes through the whole process in the Senate and is ready for royal assent, parts of this omnibus bill will in fact not be ready to be administered by the provinces and will be sitting on the shelves for a while. The danger is that other parts of the bill may sit on the shelf for an extended period of time for the same reason.

[Youth Criminal Justice Act, November 26th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I want to apologize to the member for Edmonton—Sherwood Park for that misinformation. It was done in all honesty. I understood he had moved the motion.

I have been in those kinds of institutions as well. I sat on the boards of a number of institutions that dealt with individuals. I have also dealt with the victims of youth crime. The bottom line is that simplistic solutions are not the answer and there are parts of this bill that are introducing simplistic solutions that will not move this forward at all.

Back to my basic point, the government needs to be spending more money if we are going to deal with the spike in youth crime in this country.

[Youth Criminal Justice Act, November 26th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I will start by saying that I recognize my friend in particular because of his Irish ancestry is much more eloquent than I am and may have better pronunciation. The principle is denunciation. It is denouncing certain conduct, so he is correct from that perspective.

More seriously, with regard to the question of the constitutionality, both courts of appeal were dealing with the legislation as it is worded now, which does not permit for there to be adult sentencing principles incorporated into the legislation. Both courts of appeal were very clear and, quite frankly, very forceful in the language they used that lower courts could not incorporate those concepts into the legislation.

If this bill were to get through, and certainly the opposition parties are all feeling that it should not as it is worded with these sentencing principles in it, this bill would be challenged under the charter from a couple of perspectives, at least the issue of proportionality, that youth have to be treated differently and the seriousness that we apportion to those crimes. That will come up.

Overall, the right of a country to expect that youth are going to be treated differently from adults would be very much part of that challenge. As opposed to those two court of appeal decisions which did not deal with the charter issues, we will see that--

[Youth Criminal Justice Act, November 26th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, what we have seen is the spike and we have seen it most noticeably in the last three or four years in our crime statistics. We have seen it particularly coming out of crimes committed by youth gangs.

If we go back and study the sociological data, a good number of individuals committing those crimes were in their early to late adolescence or early teens at the time when these financial cuts came about and when the impact of the cuts to those programs, whether it was the treatment programs, affordable housing or basic social assistance, were felt. We saw a 22% cut in social assistance in the province of Ontario in one budget.

Those cuts had a substantial impact on the ability of mostly single parents to provide even the basic necessities. We are seeing this analysis coming at this point, and I think it will be a few more years before we can say whether it is a valid analysis, but at the very least it should say to us that we need to be very careful about how we deal with youth crime. How do we treat it, handle it or reduce it?

A simplistic analysis that we see in the bill, and particularly in the second part of the bill, says that all we need to do is introduce some new sentencing principles, take them from the adult sentencing principles that we have now and say that we need to denunciate these crimes, deter these crimes and use those sentencing principles to do it.

There is overwhelming sociological evidence that deterrence works very little, as does denunciation even in adult crimes. There is even better evidence that it does not work at all in youth crimes.

It is good that we are continuing to have this debate because it allows us to hear more stories and information from other members of the House that this bill is not the way to go or tinker with the youth criminal justice system because it is not effective and, in fact, we may have unintended consequences.

We know that if we put people who are psychologically vulnerable into certain settings they come out more hardened, experienced and better criminals in the sense that they learn while they are in those custodial facilities from other more hardened criminals how to commit crime better. They oftentimes come out more bitter and more vicious. We know those things from all sorts of studies.

This simplistic analysis of simply saying that we need to denunciate, we need to deter and put those principles into our youth criminal justice system flies in the face of overwhelming factual evidence to the contrary.

We hear from the Conservative government that it is spending money on treatment programs. As I said earlier, the analysis we had from across the country was not $10 million or $20 million a year in additional funding. We have some makeup to do for all those programs that got cut, both federally and provincially, all those funds that stopped flowing to help build a better society, whether it is for recreational or treatment programs. We cut those funds and they have not been put back.

I think one of the speakers earlier this evening talked about $22 million going back in. The analysis we made, in assistance with the network of communities across the country that did the analysis, is that at a minimum we needed $100 million a year. If we could find all that money in the budget to give tax breaks to large corporations in the billions of dollars, could we not have found more money for these programs? Even though the government may be spending $22 million, it actually is not since it has not got around to spending it all. However, it could have spent another $80 million if it had not given those billions of dollars in tax breaks to large corporations that did not need them.

[Youth Criminal Justice Act, November 26th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I rose initially to speak to what is in effect a motion before the House to close off debate, a motion moved by the member for Edmonton—Sherwood Park. I actually was rising with mixed feelings. On the one hand, because it is important that the debate on this bill continue for an extended period of time, I was going to be critical of my colleague for Edmonton--Sherwood Park. However, on the other hand, since I already spoke once to this matter, the motion now allows me to speak a second time and make additional points. Therefore, I actually want to thank the member for making the motion.

Hopefully, the motion will also give enough time to other members of this House who are bringing forward good points, as we just heard from my colleague from the Bloc and earlier from my colleague from Parkdale, about how we go about strengthening our youth criminal justice system without impairing the steps forward that we have made over the last 20 or 30 years.

I practised law during that entire period of time before I came to the House and a good deal of my early career was spent dealing with youth crime. It was different legislation at that time. It was much more punitive in nature. The law did not have much emphasis on rehabilitation. It recognized the difference between youth and adult crimes but was much more limited.

Over the years, our society, reflected in the legislation that Parliament passed, has moved forward. As that was going on, we saw a continuing reduction, until very recently, in crimes generally, both by adults and youth, and specifically with regard to youth crime, we saw some very substantial drops in the rates of youth crime. This decline corresponded with us reducing the times that youth spent in correctional facilities and emphasized the amount of time they would spend either in the community receiving treatment and counselling, et cetera, or in facilities that were of a psychiatric and psychological nature where very intensive treatment would be available for them.

What happened, and both the federal government and the provincial governments were at fault for this, is we saw in the middle nineties, in budgets that were passed by the former prime minister when he was finance minister, and we saw it in a number of the provinces, most notably in Ontario under the Mike Harris and Ernie Eves administration, substantial cuts to those treatment programs. We also saw cuts that affected the quality of life for those who are more vulnerable in our society.

There has been the commencement of an analysis by sociologists and criminologists to try to explain the spike in crimes that we have seen, the development, as we heard from some of the other speakers, in many more street gangs forming, noticeably over the last four or five years, but which started even earlier than that. It is interesting to go back and look at the increase in the crime rate, particularly among youth and the spike that we have seen in the last three or four years.

Mr. Speaker, I wonder if we could have some order in the House. It is really very distracting to speak when we have conversations going on.

[Canada-United States Tax Convention Act, November 26th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak to the bill. I have a couple of preliminary points on Bill S-2.

First, as I think most Canadians are aware, the New Democratic Party is opposed to the continued existence of the Senate. We are always concerned when a bill originates from that house when in fact it should originate in this House. The other place is simply not a democratically elected institution whatsoever. When we are dealing with a bill, and this bill is an important one, any bill of any import at all should originate in the House. We draw that to the attention of the government and insist that it consider any important bill always originating in this House.

The second point with regard to the bill is it has a scope that is generally acceptable to our party. We will be supporting it going through second reading and on to committee.

I am advised by our finance critic that some technical points give us some cause for concern but we expect those issues will be addressed, either amended if necessary or more likely explained to our satisfaction in committee. Then the bill can go ahead and come back to the House for third and final reading.

With regard to the bill itself, as we have already heard from some of the other members, it addresses a number of outstanding irritants between ourselves and the United States around tax matters.

I come from a community that has a very large population. For employment purposes, people move back and forth across from the Windsor-Essex County area into Michigan and even other parts of the United States on a daily basis. We also have a reasonable number of Americans who do the same in reverse and work on the Canadian side. Inevitably that produces some inequities in the taxation of the incomes derived by citizens living in one country but working and deriving all or most of their income from another country. The bill addresses a number of those issues.

Again, as I have indicated, with some slight concern on our part, we think it is a step forward. In particular, we are constantly being confronted, and I hear this from some of my constituents, with them being double taxed, being assessed a tax both in Canada and in the United States.

These individuals are Canadian citizens living in Canada, having a full time residence in Canada, but deriving their income from the U.S. side. They face the situation where there is double taxation on that revenue. It may be even a bit more complex, and I know the bill attempts to address this issue.

We have situations with a registered retirement savings plan on our side and the 401(k) on the U.S. side, which is the corresponding plan in the U.S., and not being able to get full credit for those types of deductions. These are pension savings for retirement purposes. The bill goes some distance to address that. Whether it goes far enough is a bit of a concern.

It is also good that the bill has an arbitration provision between the two countries so the two countries can rely on that rather than an individual having to challenge it or perhaps state to state having to challenge each other. If there are unforeseen problems with the arrangement we establish in the bill, it will give us a relatively efficient and hopefully quick mechanism to resolve those. Therefore, we would want to support that.

The largest concern we have with the legislation is what has happened historically with the protocols that have developed under these treaties with the United States. I believe this is either the fifth or sixth protocol starting back in the late eighties.

The one issue that has given us the greatest concern, and it has been a major issue in my riding, in Windsor-Essex county and, to a lesser degree, in a number of other communities across the country, involves the large number of people who have retired to Canada and are receiving social security benefits. Bill S-2 does not address this issue.

Protocol number four set out how these pension benefits would be treated for Canadians in our country and Americans in their country. They were to be taxed at a certain rate in Canada and the United States was to do the same with regard to the taxation of Canada pension benefits received by Americans who had obtained those benefits while working in Canada but who had retired to the United States. It was a sound approach to solving an irritant between the two countries. It made it clear how people who were receiving those respective pension benefits in those respective countries would be treated.

Although the United States has honoured its part of the treaty, both in spirit and in the letter of the law, Canada has not since 1997. This has been a gross injustice to a number of Canadians, a good number of whom live in my riding and in Windsor West and in the riding of Essex. A highly disproportionate number of people living in those three ridings suffer this injustice.

What first happened under the Liberals, but which has not been corrected under the current Conservative government, is that the level of tax has been substantially higher than what it was when these funds were being taxed on the U.S. side and substantially higher than they were supposed to be. The wording of the protocol was that the tax rates would continue as they had before the treaty came into effect but that the funds would be collected by the other country.

Canadian citizens residing in Windsor, who retired in the U.S. but were receiving social security benefits, were supposed to be taxed at the same rate had they retired in the United States and receiving those benefits. In fact, they are being taxed a full 35% higher than if they were residing in the U.S. and being taxed there. Despite comments made by an advocacy organization that has been before committees of both the House and the other chamber on a number of occasions, and in spite of the prior Liberal governments over several administrations, going back to 1996-97 when this became apparent, this continues to be the reality in spite of some very minor changes.

What I now find offensive is that we are now going into another protocol. What is to say that we will not run into the same situation, if the bill goes through, is ratified and the United States signs it, that we will not ignore or breach some of its provisions and our citizens will suffer? It always raises the question of whether the U.S. at some point will do the same thing. The U.S. may decide that since we did not honour one protocol it will not honour one of the new ones. This history is of great concern. I find it particularly offensive right now because there have been a number of private member's bills introduced on this point to correct this injustice.

I want to make this a little personal in terms of the injustice that has occurred here. I have met with a number of people in my riding and in the Windsor-Essex county area generally who have suffered significantly. I think of a couple who were members of our church. They both had worked on the U.S. side and came back to Canada to retire. They bought a house and had only finished the purchase about two months before they were notified that all of a sudden they would be taxed at a 35% increased rate on their pensions. It was a significant financial burden for them, compounded, quite horribly, by the fact that the husband came down with a terminal illness and passed away within about a year. His wife could no longer carry on the mortgage and had to sell the house.

Another instance is about an individual I heard about when I was canvassing in the 2000 election. The brother of this individual told me that his brother had been hit so hard with the increased tax that he had to give up his apartment and move in with him and his wife and never came out of his room. This man had become a total recluse. He usually only came out for meals and the rest of the time he basically stayed in his room. It totally destroyed his life.

This is not something that senior citizens who have contributed to both countries by their endeavours should ever have to face. I could give substantially more stories like that.

It is a situation where quite often people are living on relatively low fixed incomes and then they are hit with this severe tax penalty that they had no reason whatsoever to plan for. As those negotiations went on, as they are with this bill, it was clear that this was the way it would be handled, that it would not change the tax rate in Canada. Then they were hit with this increase after the fact. It significantly destroyed a number of lives and curtailed the ability of many people to enjoy their retirement years in many respects.

What happened later is that on two different occasions, one back in 1998 and again in 2001, the member from Calgary, the current Secretary of State (Multiculturalism and Canadian Identity), presented private members' bills to correct this. The wording in those bills was quite straightforward. It is one or two paragraphs in each case. All they simply said was “change this part of the Income Tax Act to say that the income received in the form of social security pensions will be taxed in this manner”.

We had those private members' bills but they never went to a vote. Two more were presented by the member for Essex, who is a member of the government, one bill in 2004 and another one in this Parliament in May 2006. The final one is still before a committee but I think it may be close to being completed.

However, the reality is that the bill will probably not survive the final vote because it needs a royal proclamation and it will not get it because the government, in spite of those two members from the government who have advocated on it, have not been able to deliver. That is the situation as of today.

We have gone a full 10 years since this injustice has been perpetrated on our retirees. The Liberal government would not do anything about it and now, after two years with the Conservative government, it has not done anything about it. It is not in this bill nor is it in any government legislation. It was not in either of the two budgets that the government brought forward. I have not heard anything that says it will be in the next budget, assuming the government survives that long. When we see something like this it should be corrected. It begs the question, when we come back to Bill S-2, of whether we will see the same type of thing happen because this protocol will not be fully honoured by our government.

It is a shameful set of circumstances. It is a gross injustice that has been perpetrated now for over 10 years. There have been numerous opportunities to correct this.

I will perhaps finish with the fact that we are not talking billions of dollars here. We are not talking about the $10 billion or $12 billion that the government put back into various sources. It is a very small amount of money because so many of these individuals have passed away in the last 10 years, oftentimes simply because of the financial crisis they were facing. We are talking about $20 million to $25 million a year range, a very small tax credit, if one wants to think of it in those terms, to people who are greatly deserving of it because of what they were led to expect would happen and then had the tables turned on them, with no ability to alter how they were to be treated.

The government must fix this problem. It knows it is very simple to do. It would be a one paragraph amendment to the Income Tax Act. It must ensure that it does not repeat the same kind of injustice, assuming that Bill S-2 becomes law at some point.

[Tackling Violent Crime Act, November 26th, 2007]

moved:

Motion No. 1

That Bill C-2, in Clause 40, be amended by replacing line 6 on page 37 with the following:

“vision ordered under subsection”

Motion No. 5

That Bill C-2, in Clause 56, be amended by replacing line 6 on page 50 with the following:

“vision ordered under subsection”

[Tackling Violent Crime Act, November 26th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I am having some difficulty. We posed this question to the member's party last week, but we did not get much of a satisfactory answer.

What is before us today is an amendment which the NDP moved to take out the most onerous provisions of the dangerous offender part of Bill C-2, which is the provision that has a reverse onus. It flies in the face of the historical way we have done criminal law in this country and in England for centuries and centuries. Yet the Bloc has signalled that it is going to vote against that amendment.

I wonder if the member could attempt once again to explain the rationale for his party's voting against what appears to be a very sensible amendment to the bill.

[Tackling Violent Crime Act, November 26th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I have just a quick question. I was not quite sure of the point the member was making with regard to the age of consent and the fact that other people had not brought forth the issue of the near age defence.

He is correct to some degree. The Conservatives repeatedly, and I do not know how many private members' bills they had, moved those private members' bills on the basis that there would just be a blanket increase in age with no near age defence.

It was a result of questions quite frankly that I put to the former Liberal justice minister and elicited from him a response that showed in writing the number of people who would be exposed to criminal charges, both young men and young women. It would be in the range of 100,000 to 150,000 people per year who would have been exposed to criminal charges as a result of that type of legislation. It was at that point that the issue of the near age defence was raised.

I wonder if the member could comment on whether he was aware of that fact. That issue came up during the bill on child pornography and luring over the Internet.