Joe Comartin

[Business of Supply, April 26th, 2007]

Not for our troops, Mr. Speaker, because our troops are not trained well enough as police officers. A constituent of mine, a person I have known for a long time, a member of the Windsor police force and also in the reserves, is in Afghanistan right now doing exactly that job. Yes, that is what we should be doing.

I think we have limited expertise within our military, unless we can draw on the kind of expertise that my friend brings. We should be doing it. RCMP officers and police officers should be there, as well as the judiciary and lawyers. We should be there with all the infrastructure that the Afghani people need.

However, that is not solely what is going on and it is not mostly what is going on. The vast majority of the money and the resources that we are putting into Afghanistan is going into a search and destroy mission. It is just completely mis-focused. If we are going to have troops there, they need to be there on a defensive basis not on an aggressive basis.

[Business of Supply, April 26th, 2007]

I do know the history, Mr. Speaker. I have read the history of Afghanistan repeatedly. I understand the motivation that is coming from it but I obviously do not agree with it .

Are we going to make one iota of difference there? This is not a peacekeeping mission. This is not even a policing mission. Our soldiers are on a search and destroy mission, a mission that was not decided by them but by the Conservative government.

[Business of Supply, April 26th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I am trying to avoid categorizing that question when I really would like to. If he believes that, then he is just grossly ignorant of the history of Afghanistan and the insurgencies that have gone on there.

Does the member really think, whether it is the Taliban or the entire country that fought against Russia, that out small force will make a difference?

[Business of Supply, April 26th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Parkdale—High Park.

Having a legal background myself, I would like to address some of the issues that have arisen, particularly in the last several months in terms of our responsibility as a country under the international law system for the planet and the risks with which we are faced because of our conduct in the treatment and the handling of prisoners in Afghanistan.

The law is quite clear, internationally, under the Geneva Convention, on how prisoners are to be treated. We are long past the day when it was accepted practice in warfare to simply kill opponents under any circumstances, including when they had been captured and were defenceless from any further battle undertaking. We are away beyond that, and the convention that we have worked on as a country and with our allies internationally is quite clear on what we are supposed to be doing. Equally clear is that we have not done that.

We see the ridiculous circumstance of what happened yesterday at committee with the Defence Minister making up policy literally at the end of the meeting on the run. For a country with Canada's history and reputation in the international community, that is just simply indefensible and an embarrassment.

Just a few weeks ago I was at Vimy for the commemoration of that battle which has significance to us as a country in the role that our military played. Going back 90 years, even then we should look at how we handled prisoners of war. We did not just turn them over knowingly.

Much as we hear denials from the government all the way up to the Prime Minister, the Defence Minister, and Minister of Public Safety that we they do not really know, that they are not sure what is going on, that is not true. It is as simple as that. We do know, even though we try to hide that from the Canadian public. We do know what is going on.

Again, I think back to the way our soldiers, our military, conducted themselves 90 years ago at Vimy and the way they treated prisoners. Then we see the government and our military leadership, I will include them in this, brazenly ignore international law. They ignore their responsibilities.

There is a historical imperative here for this country that is being ignored by the government. I hear the Minister of Public Safety try to justify our unwillingness, our incompetency, because the other side are bad guys. We should stop and think about the logic of what he is saying. He is saying that because they are bad guys, we should be bad guys too. The justification that the end justifies the means should never lie in the mouth of a Canadian politician and certainly not in the minister's mouth.

We have a responsibility, a historical responsibility, to always take the high road. We cannot allow, ever, our public policy, our foreign affairs policy, or our military policy to degenerate to the level of what we are fighting, never. We cannot allow ourselves to do that.

It is happening. We read some of the letters to the editors of our newspapers across this country and we hear the same argument that came out of the mouth of that minister. He says that they are bad guys, they kill men, women and children, so we should not treat them humanely. That is assuming of course that the people we have in custody are those same people, which of course is a false assumption, in all cases. We hear that we should not care that when we turn them over to some other force or state authority that they are going to be tortured and sometimes summarily executed. We should not worry about that. It is not our concern.

In fact, it is our concern. It is our responsibility. It is our legal responsibility under international law, conventions that we have signed onto going back decades and decades. There is nothing new here. This has always been our responsibility since we signed on and we are abrogating that responsibility.

I want to say in particular on this point how utterly angry I was at the Prime Minister when he stood in this House and repeatedly said, as have other ministers of the Crown, that by raising these points we are exposing our soldiers, our troops, to charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes.

I want to be very clear to the Prime Minister and to his government. It is not our troops we are talking about here. It is his government that we are talking about. If we in fact have, as I believe we have, crossed over the line, then we have aided and abetted with torture. We know about it. We are aiding and abetting it. We have crossed the line. I believe that, but it is not our soldiers who are doing that. It is the government.

It did not put in place the proper agreements in the first place and when it found out, and it has known now for certainly months if not years, what in fact was going on in terms of the treatment of the prisoners, it did not move on that.

Therefore, it is complicit. The government is complicit not our soldiers. Our soldiers are doing their jobs as they are directed by their superiors. They are not responsible here. The government is.

Where does this come from? We are burying ourselves in this and so we end up in these kinds of quandaries. It goes back to the very basic nature of this mission.

It was interesting to hear one of the speakers from Calgary, in his questions and comments, saying that this is a new experience. We are hearing the same thing from the Bloc. It is not, really. Any number of other governments, other state authorities, have tried to fight state insurgency. They have tried it in this country repeatedly.

We can go back to Alexander the Great if we want to, certainly going back to the British in the 1860s and the Americans more recently. We can look at all the insurgencies that we have tried to fight, whether on an ideological basis or an economic basis, and they do not work.

The very essence of this mission is one that is doomed to failure. We can go from the second world war and look at every single one, I think with maybe one exception that I am aware of, and that was the one in Malaysia where the British used just horrendous tactics to put that down.

One might argue that one was ultimately successful, but barring that one, there has not been one, not one. The best example, of course, we can point to is Vietnam and that is what we are doing. We are repeating that. Or we can point to Iraq and we are repeating that.

When we do that, we bury ourselves and we get ourselves caught in this situation where we are breaking international law. This country's reputation for decades to come will suffer as a result.

[Trade, April 19th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, recently North American automakers came out against the proposed free trade deal with South Korea. This follows the Canadian Auto Workers Union that earlier voiced its opposition as well. In fact, a credible economic study predicts a deal with Korea will cost between 14,000 and 33,000 well paying jobs in this country.

The auto industry used to be a backbone of our economy. Successive Liberal and Conservative governments have allowed it to disintegrate.

The statistics are grave. In the last two years we have lost over 200,000 jobs in manufacturing in Ontario and Quebec. In my region of Windsor-Essex alone, more than 10,000 auto sector jobs have disappeared and for the first time in 18 years Canada has an auto trade deficit.

Despite these job losses and devastating implications of the trade deal, the government has signalled its intention to fast track negotiations without any public debate or impact studies.

If this Conservative government is unwilling to end free trade, it must bring that deal to the House for a vote.

[Petitions, March 30th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, pursuant to Standing Order 36 I am presenting a petition from approximately 100 of my constituents and other residents of the city of Windsor and the County of Essex.

The petitioners call upon the government to support the minimum wage bill that has been presented to the House as a private member's bill by the member for Parkdale—High Park, known as Bill C-375. They note in the petition that by raising the minimum wage, which was done away with by a former Liberal government, it would have the effect of moving at least an individual above the poverty line at that rate of pay.

I submit it on that basis and thank them for having presented it.

[Royal Canadian Mounted Police, March 30th, 2007]

I do not think the minister gets it, Mr. Speaker. The reputation of the RCMP has to be rehabilitated. It is not going to be when one institutes a process that will not allow one to subpoena witnesses. The process will not offer protection to the witnesses from civil suits or the Privacy Act. It is not going to be held in public and it will not report directly to Parliament. It will go through the hands of the minister.

The former Liberal government messed this one up really badly. Why is this government going down the same road?

[Royal Canadian Mounted Police, March 30th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Public Safety and national security. The rank and file officers of the RCMP deserve a full airing of problems at the top of the force and into the misuse of their hard-earned pension funds.

The least the government should do is call a full commission of inquiry under the Inquiries Act. Why has the minister chosen a closed door process with no parliamentary accountability? Why?

[Textile Industry, March 29th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup for introducing this motion, since it gives me the opportunity to speak about this issue.

It has been interesting to listen to the speakers on this motion from the Conservative Party and the Liberal Party. The motion basically says that we have to do something to save this industry, that the government has to step in and make sure it survives. I have absolutely no hope that either the current government or the Liberal Party if it were ever to get back into government are going to do anything to save this industry.

This industry had in excess of 100,000 jobs a little over two years ago and now it has less than 50,000. There has been a full 50% drop in a year and a half since the new rules came into play.

The old Liberal government had the opportunity to do something. We heard the last speaker say that the Liberals did all these things. They did all those things and we got absolutely nothing for it. This sector lost 50,000 jobs. That is how beneficial those programs were. The Liberals had the opportunity to do something.

There was a plan under the WTO that would have allowed them to prohibit the massive incursion of product into this country over the first three years as the rules under the WTO changed. Did the Liberals invoke that? No. They could have restricted that input for a full three years. Did our allies, our competitors in the United States and in other countries, invoke it? Yes, they did. Did they save the jobs in those countries? Yes, they did.

The Conservative government is no different. The Conservatives have the opportunity still to invoke that. We still have 18 months in which this plan could be used. Are they going to do it? Absolutely not.

They are so ideologically hooked into free trade, letting the market decide everything, globalization and all those terms that we hear. That of course ignores what happens when we go down that route, when the government does not play the role it should be playing to protect those jobs. Those jobs disappear.

I want to acknowledge the work of the member from the Bloc in bringing forward this motion. This is the second time he has brought it forward. He brought it forward in the last Parliament and he has brought it forward again this time and rightfully so. We should be doing something, because if we do not, the number of jobs will go from 50,000 to zero. The reason that will happen is the manufacturers themselves have seen the lay of the land. They are moving product in raw form offshore into third world countries primarily. They are exploiting the labour there under reprehensible work conditions. They are also exploiting the natural environment by not meeting any environmental standards whatsoever. Because of the way the trading rules work, that value added product can be brought back into Canada tariff free.

Those 50,000 jobs still exist but they are in China, India and other parts of the undeveloped third world. They are gone from Canada and the other 50,000 will disappear unless we take some positive action.

I find that particularly galling because what I see happening in the textile industry is being mimicked in the auto industry, the sector which is the backbone of the economy in my region. Exactly the same thing is going on. This obsessive adherence to ideological beliefs as opposed to what is practically happening in the marketplace both domestically and internationally is continuing. Again, it is with both political parties, the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party. It does not matter which party is sitting on the government side and which one is sitting on the opposition side, they would be following exactly the same policies and those policies would be leading to the devastation of industries. We are seeing it in the steel industry as well as in the auto industry. Pertinent to the debate today, we can see it in the textile industry and in a number of other ones.

Any industry where there is value added is not being protected. The end result in the manufacturing sector is that overall over the last four or five years we have seen the loss of 200,000 to 300,000 manufacturing jobs. These are well paying jobs. They are jobs and incomes that support the communities where those jobs lie, and those communities in addition to the individual workers are being devastated.

My area alone has lost almost 10,000 manufacturing jobs. Unless there is a quick turnaround in the attitude of government in terms of saying we are going to have an auto policy, we are going to have a policy that is going to protect the textile industry, those jobs are not coming back.

This is not just an economic downturn. This is the disappearance of whole sectors of our economy that we are sending offshore.

The NDP is very happy to support this motion 100%, but I have to say that there is no hope in my party that either the current government, or the Liberal Party, if it ever got back into government, would do anything to implement this motion.

[Criminal Code, March 28th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, like the other opposition parties, I rise to indicate, although a private member's bill, that I expect the NDP as a caucus to be supporting Bill C-277. It addresses an issue that is quite valid and needs attention with regard to putting some proportionality into the sentencing of the offence of luring a child by way of the Internet.

I was reading over my notes when I originally spoke to the bill at second reading. I had said to the member who presented the bill that it was a good endeavour on his part because of the proportionality issue he was addressing.

It would be helpful if we the current government, and quite frankly the previous government as well, could have done the same thing. There are all sorts of other sections within the Criminal Code where the issue of proportionality is not addressed properly.

We have offences that any objective observer would say this is the range of penalties that we should give our judges discretion to impose. In another context of the code, we have other crimes that are of a similar nature, but the ability of the court to give a wider range of sentences is not available. That permeates a number of sections of the Criminal Code.

Although the bill addresses the issue with regard to this charge, I take this opportunity not only to express my support for the bill but to encourage the government to look at the code overall. Hopefully at some point, as I have said to the point where I am even irritating myself in having to repeat this, we will have an omnibus bill that would correct these types of anomalies in the code.

Again, I congratulate the member who has moved this and pushed it through the committee. He was persuasive at the committee in convincing us it was an issue that needed to be addressed, and it has been addressed appropriately. I look forward to seeing it passed in the House, perhaps even unanimously.