Joe Comartin

[Anti-Terrorism Act, February 9th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, my answer to the police and to our intelligence agents is that we make the decisions. We hear their requests. We judge them. We assess them. It is the responsibility of the members of this House to make those decisions and I make those for all Canadians.

[Anti-Terrorism Act, February 9th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, let me make two comments. One is that I wish to again acknowledge the speech we heard from the member for Marc-Aurèle-Fortin with regard to the way this legislation could be used and, I have to say, at some time will be used, I would expect, to specifically target members of our community and communities as a whole. We can see the simple labelling of someone as a suspected terrorist, as we saw so clearly in the Arar case, and the kinds of consequences, unintended perhaps but maybe not, that flow from it.

To answer the basic question, there is no question about this. Whether one is part of the Muslim community in this country, which has been the primary target of this kind of legislation, and whether one is seen as the target by them, or whether someone is in the first nations, who have great fears of this legislation at some time being used against them, there is no question that when these sections go down, as I expect they will next week, there will be a big sigh of relief in those communities.

[Anti-Terrorism Act, February 9th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I heard someone say from the other side that there were none, and that is not being fair.

I also want to say to the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada that I am sorry I referred to him earlier as the parliamentary secretary for public safety. I think that was actually a compliment to him, but I will leave it at this point.

In terms of judicial review of both sections that are purported to be renewed and extended at this time, the parliamentary secretary raised a number of provisions that were safeguards. In that regard, I want to say again that it was part of the fight we in the NDP had to try to build in as many safeguards as possible at that time in 2001 when we were trying to minimize the draconian aspects. We pressed to have them included.

However, the bottom line is this. We live in a country where the rule of law applies, and we can only rely, and I say this to members of Parliament, on our judges to the degree that we give them discretion. If we give them discretion to impose, and I am going to use the preventive detention areas as an example, there are provisions in there that give sweeping powers to our judges as to what conditions they can impose on an individual after they conduct the initial investigation and the initial hearings.

Those initial hearings, by the way, are going to be very limited in terms of what the person is going to be able to do to defend themselves, because he or she is not going to be told a lot about what the evidence is against them. That is a provision in the anti-terrorism legislation. The person is entitled to representation. We see this with the way our security certificates function. We have authorized our judges to be able to review this in a system that is totally contrary to our criminal justice system in many respects, and which has been criticized by those same judges, but we are in effect forcing them to function. That is what this legislation does.

Up to this point it has not been used, but if it ever is, what we are really doing is switching from saying that we as a Parliament, as legislators for this country, are saying that these are the standards we have to meet. We are lowering those standards and then saying to the judges that it is within these scopes and these parameters that they operate. That is really what we are doing.

That is what we have done with the security certificates. That is why it is so necessary to get rid of them.

This is what we are doing. We are replicating the same system in this act, we really are. It says that we are going to shuffle this off to the judges, but we are going say to the judges that this is the authority they now have, which they did not have before because our Charter of Rights and Freedoms would not let them do that before. We are now empowering them to do that.

As members may know from the number of times I have criticized the current government for its attack on the judiciary, I am a great supporter of our judiciary. I believe we have the best judiciary in the world, but they are not perfect. We can go back historically and point to any number of times when they have transgressed and have not protected the rights and freedoms of people in this country.

[Anti-Terrorism Act, February 9th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I want to give credit to the member for Marc-Aurèle-Fortin because he came up with the argument initially. Obviously I supported him on it.

What we are really saying there is that we have existing provisions within the Criminal Code to deal with that kind of investigation, including if the police officer has a reasonable basis on which to arrest. All of those provisions are there and they have worked well. They have worked well whether we are dealing with minor insignificant crimes, although I always hate using that term, all the way up to very serious crimes.

Those provisions in terms of the investigative tools are in section 495 and other sections of the code. This already gives our police agencies, including our intelligence agencies, all the authority they need.

As a sidebar, it was interesting when the Commissioner of the RCMP was in front of us at one point and I pressed him on this. I asked him to tell me where he used it, because he had given a sort of offhand comment that the RCMP had used some of the sections of the anti-terrorism legislation. I asked how many times, because he said the RCMP had used it a number of times, and I think he gave me the figure of 12 or 16 times.

I pressed him on that and I can say that I pursued that right up until the very end. I have never been given a clear answer as to how many times and in what format this was done. I even have a letter from the office of the former minister for public security assuring me that when we finished I would get that. I do not have it and I do not believe I am ever going to get it, because I do not believe it ever existed, that we used this at all, ever, even in the investigation process.

[Anti-Terrorism Act, February 9th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I am particularly pleased to speak to the motion because, it would appear, because of a significant shift that I think we are now seeing in the Liberal Party, the motion will be defeated.

In the interests of civil liberties and human rights in this country, I see that as a significant victory.

The motion before us takes us back to 9/11 and to the response of the House and the federal government as to how we were going to deal with our concerns over terrorism. The response of the Liberal government at that time, supported by the Conservative Party, was Bill C-36, what became known as the Anti-terrorism Act.

Bill C-36 was a huge bill, encompassing amendments to a large number of pieces of legislation, the Criminal Code, the Evidence Act and financial acts. It was a very complex bill and very extensive in its reach. It was rushed through in a little less than two months with little debate. We heard this repeatedly from those witnesses who did appear in front of our committee in the review that is still ongoing.

It is a classic, in terms of this legislation, that when we are faced with a crisis that we repeat so often the errors of history by overreacting and panicking in passing legislation that strikes at our fundamental values, our fundamental principles and our fundamental rights. That is what we did with Bill C-36.

I am proud to say that the NDP at that time, led by the current Deputy Speaker, led the opposition to the use of this kind of draconian legislation and we voted against it. We have maintained our opposition to it throughout this entire period of time. We continue to do that today.

I have to say that the sections that gave us the greatest concern, as well as all civil libertarians and people concerned about justice, were the two that we are faced with extending today. Those sections involve investigative hearings, which is almost an academic terminology. It is really the compulsory attendance and giving of evidence. It is a compulsory breach of our fundamental right to remain silent but we breach that with that section.

The second one is again euphemistically referred to as a recognizance section but it really is about preventative detention, as much as the advocates in favour of it would want us to believe otherwise.

In a panic and gross overreaction and in undermining some of our long-standing values, principles and rights, we passed that bill in late 2001 and it came into effect in the year 2002.

Even those members of Parliament at that time who were supportive of the bill recognized how fundamentally flawed and how risky and dangerous it was to our rights so they put in a sunset clause. This was after great pressure from my party, from civil libertarians across the country and from a number of specific communities. I think of the labour movement, the Muslim community, a number of ethnocultural communities and first nations who were very concerned about it.

In response to the very well defined and well articulated fears, the government of the day put in provisions that those two particular clauses--and they are quite extensive clauses and we are not talking a paragraph or two, we are talking pages and pages--would be sunsetted after five years unless there was a vote in both Houses of Parliament, in the House of Commons and in the Senate, supporting an extension.

However, the motion cannot be amended. Even if one of the opposition parties wanted to move an amendment to the motion before us today, it would not be allowed by statutory compulsion.

The legislation also provided for a mandatory five year review. That review was given over to the justice committee in the last Parliament and a subcommittee, on which I sat, was appointed to deal with it. We did not complete that work before the last election but we have started it again in front of the public safety and national security committee, a separate and permanent standing committee of the House. A subcommittee of that committee has been appointed.

We came forward with a majority and a minority report. I want to acknowledge the very fine work done by the previous speaker, the Bloc member for Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, who, along with myself, wrote a minority report expressing grave concerns about the continuation of these two sections and advocating for their swift removal from our laws.

On the other hand, all the Liberals and Conservatives on the subcommittee and the full committee supported an extension of the sunset clauses to five years at which time there would be another review requiring another vote.

After listening to the speakers from the Liberal Party, I am happy to say that they have now decided not to hold that position. I understand from their statements that they will be voting against the motion. With a great deal of optimism and relief for a number of our communities, I believe the motion will be voted down at the end of the day.

The one final technical point I need to make is that the vote must take place by next Thursday, since votes are not held in the House on Fridays, because the deadline is next Friday, February 16. If the two resolutions from the two Houses have not been voted on affirmatively by that time, the motion would fail automatically.

I believe it is important for Parliament to speak in opposition to these types of draconian measures and, when we do speak against them, we do that formally by way of a vote in this House. I hope we will have the vote next week and that these sections will be struck from our law.

It is important to recognize the work that went on in committee, both in the previous Parliament and in the current Parliament. When Parliament resumed after the 2005-06 election, it was determined, although I am not sure I agreed to it, that we would not have any additional witnesses. We decided we would rely on all of the witnesses we had heard in the previous Parliament. That review had been going on for almost a full year. I did not count the number of witnesses we heard but I know we heard many.

The witnesses we heard from the government side, and I do not mean that in terms of partisanship but in terms of the people who worked within the government structure, whether it was the RCMP, CSIS, the Department of Justice or any of the other intelligence agencies, all of them supported the continuation of the legislation. I do not think I have ever experienced that in any other committee work that I have done. They agreed that the legislation was basically perfect and that, other than some changes in commas and punctuation, it really did not need any changes.

After receiving between 50 and 100 presentations from academics, civil liberty groups, ethnocultural groups, international witnesses and others, what was so striking was that, with only a few exceptions, the overwhelming evidence was that it was not needed in the first place. Almost everyone agreed that we should get rid of it because the existing criminal had the provisions needed to deal with every problem the legislation was attempting to address.

This is one of those times when we need to learn from our history, such as the abuse by government action toward the Japanese Canadians during the second world war. I often ask a rhetorical question in that regard. If we had asked average Canadians before 1939 whether they could see their government ever attacking an entire community because of their racial background or country of origin, even if they had been here for generations and generations, to then confiscate all their lands and, in effect, imprison them for an entire period of the war, we would have had an overwhelming and, I would suggest, an absolute answer of no.

Similarly, before the October crisis of 1970, if we had asked average Canadians if they could imagine that because of the conduct of a dozen to fifteen people in the province of Quebec that the War Measures Act would have been invoked against the entire population of Quebec based on a totally false assumption of an apprehended insurrection, I believe the answer again would have been an overwhelming no, that they could never imagine seeing that happen.

Similarly, we could have asked people before 9/11 whether this type of legislation would ever be passed. If we were to study the history of what happened after the War Measures Act was invoked and then repealing it and then moving into emergency legislation that was much more appropriate in terms of our Charter of Rights and Freedoms, bringing into play in that period of time the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, average Canadians would have said that they did not need the legislation, that they would never pass that kind of legislation and that they would not have preventative detention in this country, but we did.

On all three of those occasions, we have the same dynamics: a crisis, real or imagined, and then an overreaction in a time of panic. However, we are beyond that. We have a responsibility to look at the role that terrorism plays, not only in our country but internationally, respond to it in a manner that says that we absolutely will protect our citizens to the nth degree as much as we possibly can but that we will not give in to terrorism, we will not breach our fundamental values and we will not break the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

If we deal with it from that vantage point, if we ask what it takes to protect our people, which is our fundamental responsibility as members of Parliament and the responsibility every government has to its citizens, and to ensure their safety to the nth degree, then it is a pyrrhic victory if we say that we do that by passing this kind of legislation or as, in this case, a vote that is required here as we continue.

What it really means is that we have given in, out of fear and panic, and as for those people who would use violence to achieve their ends, they won. That is really what happened in 2001-02 when we passed this legislation. The terrorists won because we gave in to those fears.

Canadians and all members of Parliament have to show courage. We have to say yes, there are methodologies that we need to employ and additional resources that we need to put in to fighting terrorism or people who use acts of violence to achieve their ends, whether that is organized crime or people doing it for a political or an ideological motivation. When we do that, that is when we respond most effectively: when we put into place additional resources as required.

One of the things we saw clearly, not only in Canada but across the globe, was that our intelligence services were not well enough coordinated. I would have to say, from all the experience I have had in the last several years of investigating, that this continues to be a problem. We have resolved it to a great degree in Canada, but it is not finished. There is additional work to be done.

We learned, for instance, that we did not have enough members of our intelligence services who were fluent in enough languages, so the gathering of information and intelligence was diminished. Our ability to do it and the effectiveness of it were diminished because of that. Those are the kinds of programs we have to look at putting into place. We looked at increasing technology, but the reality was, after looking at the American experience in particular, that it was not the best way to go. What we really needed was more people on the street doing traditional intelligence gathering.

Those are the kinds of methodologies that we have to look at. Those are the kinds of resources that we need to deploy, but using this kind of legislation, quite frankly, is useless. Again, let us go back to the comments of my friend from the Bloc, and we all recognize this, who said that these sections have not been used. Attempts were made to use them on one occasion, but they have not been used and that is a reflection of the need, or lack of need, for them.

It is also a reflection, and I think this is the most accurate assessment, of the fact that we already have the tools. If we need to do investigations and we need to lay charges and we need to move to try to convict, those tools are already all there.

We heard from the witnesses over and over again that we do not need to be doing this, that it is better to spend our time, effort and resources in other areas because our criminal justice system is already functioning effectively to the degree that we want it to function against this kind of conduct.

I am going to end at this point. Again, going back to our responsibility, there is not a member of this House, no matter which party he or she belongs to, who for one second would say that we are going to do anything less than the absolute in what we need to do to protect our citizens. It is really about how best we do that. This legislation is not the way to do it.

In fact, in some respects, it is a false credibility that we give: that we have done everything. I think that was one of the reasons we reacted the way we did. We said that we had to do something, that we had to say to the electorate that we were doing something. The easiest way to do that is to pass legislation. Whether it works or not seems to be a secondary consideration, but it gives the electorate a false sense of confidence and a false sense of security.

If we really want to give that sense of security to them, to all of our citizens, to all the residents of Canada, then we do that by applying some of the methods I have talked about, not by passing useless pieces of legislation. I am going to be very proud when the NDP stands and votes against this motion next week because it is bad legislation. It strikes at the core of our values and it is time to get it off the books.

[Anti-terrorism Act, February 9th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I want to acknowledge the significant position the member has taken with regard to this motion and the reaffirmation of the need for Parliament to be respected, the committee process to be respected, but also to reinforce that balance we are constantly trying to strike between security and human rights and civil liberties in this country, a trade-off that I always argue should never be made, that it is not necessary to make that.

I want to address a very specific point. Does the member agree with me that the government by not accepting the majority report that recommended these sunset clauses be extended for five years by reducing it to three years is an admission on its part that in fact we do not need them?

[Anti-terrorism Act, February 9th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I rise to caution the parliamentary secretary. I was quite taken aback by his use of the example of the charges--and I repeat, charges, not convictions--in the incident in Toronto as an example of terrorism incidents in this country. Those 17 or 18 individuals have not been convicted of anything up to this point. As the parliamentary secretary to the minister responsible for public security, he should be very cognizant of the way he uses that incident to try to justify the continued usage of these two sections.

My question for him is this. Will he agree that neither one of these two sections that are about to be sunsetted, barring favourable passage of this motion, were used in that particular incident and have not been used at all in any incidents in this country since their passage?

[Criminal Code, February 6th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I will quickly repeat my answer. Perhaps the member did not hear my last comments. I lived through that in the courtroom when we used that methodology. It is exactly the same methodology in terms of evaluating the person's impairment, and at that time, because of alcohol.

What I am saying to the member is that rather than living in the ideological world that the Conservative Party so often lives in, I live in the real world. The real world tells me that the assessment methodology we used 30, 40 or 50 years ago was generally ineffective. I have no reason to believe that it will now be effective against impaired driving because of the consumption of drugs. It did not work on alcohol. I have no particular faith in it working with regard to drugs.

[Criminal Code, February 6th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I think my colleague from the Liberal Party has missed the commentary in my opening speech. The issue here is not one of the testing. It is the question that we have no standard.

We have no standard, so if we put that evidence, that testing, in front of a court, all it says is that this police officer believes the person was impaired. Maybe it is my years of experience in the courtroom, before the breathalyzer, that have shown this to me. We used to have those cases and they were regularly rejected by our courts. A person would be suspected of being impaired because of alcohol. He was asked to touch his nose, stand on one leg and see if he could balance himself. The police officer listened to his speech to see if he was slurred and looked at the person's eyes to see if they were bloodshot.

We had all of that. That is really what we are talking about here with regard to drugs. We know how ineffective that was in terms of dealing with impaired driving in this country.

I also want to say to the member that if there is anybody in this House who has done his research, it is this person. I have been through it already with the bill that the member's government, the former government, brought in. I do not think there is anyone in the House who has looked at this more closely than I have. I am telling the member that all of that research tells me that there are serious problems with whether this is going to be viable.

Again, if we look to the United States, a number of the states have used this and it has not changed the rate of impairment from drugs on our streets.

[Criminal Code, February 6th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I think the point my colleague is missing, which is not unusual for the Conservatives when it comes to crime bills, is based on the emotion that we all share; that impaired driving is terrible. One of my children was a victim of an impaired driver. He lost one of his arms. Therefore, I do not need to be dictated to by that government and that party about the emotional aspects of it.

My responsibility here, as is theirs, is to ensure that we put into effect laws that are effective. If we study what has gone on in the United States, where a number of states have used this, there is no evidence that these methodologies have had any practical impact on the numbers of impaired driving due to drug consumption.

Following up on one of the points my friend made, if the government were really serious about dealing with it, why is this bill in front of the House and the private member's bill, which will we will debate this evening, is not being supported by the government as a government bill. It would reduce the .08 to .05? That would have some real effect.

In European countries where they have reduced the .08 to .05, the number of impaired driving charges have been reduced. It gets that right at the prevention end. It stops people from driving because they know that even two beers will put them over the limit.

If the government members were really serious, as opposed to the demagoguery that we get from them so often, that is the bill we would be debating right now, not this evening as a private member's bill.