Joe Comartin

[RCMP, December 11th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, while last week's resignation of Commissioner Zaccardelli helped to remove some of the tarnish on the RCMP's image, it did little to put the matter of the Arar affair to rest and little to address the concerns of the other three Canadians falsely deported and tortured.

On the eve of the release of Justice O'Connor's second report, will the new government act to address this issue?

I earlier asked the commissioner to conduct investigations into the leaks but that they be done by independent persons. He refused to do that. We call once again on the government to initiate those independent investigations to get to the bottom of the leaks that so damaged Mr. Arar.

The government must act to create a parliamentary committee to oversee our security intelligence activities. We continue to hear of anecdotal evidence of people being detained improperly based on false accusations, some of which are coming from our intelligence agencies. We must ensure that what happened to Messrs. Arar, Almalki, El Maati and Nureddin does not happen to other Canadians.

The new government should do what the previous Liberal government failed to do, issue an apology to Mr. Arar and--

[Human Trafficking, December 8th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I will focus on the motion itself and restrain myself on other points.

We have been attempting to deal with the matter of human trafficking since the previous Parliament. In the last Parliament, Bill C-49 went through this place very quickly with all party support. It did not get any time in committee. The bill went through rapidly and is now law. The previous Parliament took on that responsibility in response to international commitments we had made.

This motion should not be necessary. I applaud the author of the motion for having brought it to the House because it highlights the inaction on this issue since we passed Bill C-49 in the last Parliament. In the work that I do within the public security committee and justice committee I have not seen any substantial increase in the resources, in particular for our police forces to deal with human trafficking.

I want to make a couple of points that have not yet been made. The motion itself does not address the other part of human trafficking, although I know other members have referred to it. Close to half of the human trafficking that goes on is not related to the sexual abuse of the victims but is related to victims who are used for work purposes. This occurs mostly in the United States in the garment trade and the agricultural field. Very little of that has ever been identified in Canada, but it is a major worldwide problem. There are children being used as soldiers. That is part of the human trafficking problem that we are confronting internationally.

We have heard estimates of the numbers of people that have been trafficked. The numbers that we have heard today are actually higher. The United Nations estimates that the number of humans trafficked is 700,000. UNICEF, which has done a great deal of work on this, estimates that 1.2 million children are trafficked annually. The International Labour Organization, and this brings me back to the point I was making earlier about the number of people who are trafficked for straight commercial purposes, that is, for labour, estimates that the figure is actually 2.45 million. That was a couple of years ago and there is no reason to believe that the numbers have gone down; if anything, they have probably increased in the last two years. Realistically, the figure for all sorts of human trafficking is probably about 2.5 million.

The motion itself is limited in its assessment to the problem of women and children specifically for the purposes of sexual abuse and exploitation. With regard to the exploitation of women and children for sexual purposes, there is no one in this country, with the exception of the traffickers perhaps, who would argue that we should not be doing more. As a base value within our society the forced use of human beings for sexual purposes is contrary to everything we believe in.

The Conservative government needs to be moving more dramatically to have a fixed plan in place, which is what the previous Liberal government should have done. The plan has to be multi-level. It has to be regional, national and international.

What is interesting, particularly when I was listening to the speaker from the Bloc, is that we also have to get back to the root causes of why women in particular are able to be exploited so efficiently. That means going back to root causes, such as poverty, cultural mores and the acceptance, for instance, of violence in sexual relations. Those are the vast majority of the root causes in other countries.

The vast majority of women and children are being trafficked out of other countries into Canada and in some cases being used here. From the preliminary information we have from our security forces both at the border and internally, the vast majority of them are being trafficked through Canada from other countries. We have to deal with it locally and we have to be prepared to deal with it internationally.

One of the frustrations of dealing with it internationally is that when we go to any number of countries in the world at the international level and say they are a major source of human beings being trafficked into Canada and North America, we get a very blasé response and no action. There is work that has to be done at the international level.

There is work that needs to be done in terms of additional legislation at the international level and, most importantly, enforcement. There are very few countries in the world, if any, that I am aware of, where what is going is not illegal.

I remember being in Russia in the spring of this year as part of the preparation for the G8 meeting with my counterpart in public security and a number of NGOs and my counterpart talked about the major problem in Russia. It is not only a source of women and children to be exploited, it is a consumer of it, and a country where a great number of human beings are trafficked through that country to other destinations. It is a major problem for Russia.

The point he was making was that this conduct is completely illegal in Russia under its laws and it is being almost completely unenforced. It is a reasonably developed community in society but there is very little enforcement of it in Russia. That problem is repeated. We know it is a problem throughout Asia, Africa and South America.

We have a lot of work to do at the international level. We have to get at the root causes to stop it and have countries enforce their laws to stop the flow. In Canada we need to be dedicating more resources. We constantly hear, particularly from the border people, that we have to be doing more work to intervene.

This government, as did the prior one, has to be looking at a change in policy, so that if women and children are trafficked into Canada, we have the ability to stop that trafficking. If we end it here in Canada, we have to be sure that we have a refuge and provide individuals with that security. We have to ensure that we just do not, as is the present situation, instantaneously send people back.

England took a look at this about a year ago and found that women who were sent back to their own countries repeatedly went back to England because when they went back to their own countries they were caught by the traffickers again and immediately sent back to England. Oftentimes they or their families in their home countries were under immediate threat of violence by the traffickers. We have to look at a change in our immigration policy and provide a special category for these victims if we are serious about dealing with this issue.

Again, I congratulate the author of the motion. This is one of the areas we need to work on. The government needs to work harder and Parliament has to be prepared to put into place policies that are meaningful and will be useful in terms of combating this scourge.

[Federal Accountability Act, December 8th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I am proud to rise in the House to address a few brief points on Bill C-2.

In particular, I would like to acknowledge the cooperative work that has been done by all parties. This bill is a complex bill with a very broad scope. It very clearly is a significant step forward. I believe the bill will have some significant impact on improving accountability across the whole of the federal government.

It is important to recognize that in a minority government situation all political parties have an added responsibility to be cooperative. We saw that cooperation to a significant degree as this bill worked its way through the House. I cannot say the same for the other place, but I will come back to that in a minute.

I particularly want to acknowledge the work that our member for Winnipeg Centre, his staff and several of his colleagues within our caucus have done on this legislation. Their contribution was quite significant. I also want to mention in this regard, in some of the underpinnings of this bill, some of the actual sections of this bill, Mr. Ed Broadbent, the member for Ottawa Centre in the last Parliament, who I believe contributed a great deal of thought to the issues of accountability. He made some very significant proposals that found their way into the bill.

I do not want to take up a lot of time, but I do want to speak negatively about the role of the other place. There was an extensive amount of delay by the Senate in getting this bill into its final form. At one point, the Senate sent back 150 amendments. In spite of its claim that these amendments were substantial, the vast majority of them were technical or of no particular meaning. The House sent back 50 amendments to the legislation, which the Senate accepted, and we are now down to this one amendment, which really is a mechanism on the part of the other place to protect itself.

I have serious doubts that this process is democratic, especially when an unelected body is forcing this kind of an ethics office. This is going to be very expensive as opposed to the alternative of sharing an ethics office. There is no real sense of the type of mandate the Senate's ethics commissioner will have. I have serious doubts as to whether its ethics office will be as effective or as efficient as it could be had we shared an ethics commissioner. This proposal, which the House is being forced to accept, is not to the Senate's credit at all.

As I think the House has heard from several of the other members who have spoken, this is not the end of what we have to do. This bill, as I said earlier, is certainly a significant step forward. It covers off a lot of issues that should have been addressed in the past. As the President of the Treasury Board mentioned in his speech, we have to remain vigilant. This is not the end.

My party has raised serious concerns, unsuccessfully so far, with regard to political financing. What we see is a travesty, a major loophole in political financing in this country that will allow individual leadership candidates to borrow large amounts of money with no particular assurances that the money will ever be repaid. They will be allowed to take on a debt, fully expecting it will probably be forgiven, being somehow of the opinion that it is not a political contribution. This stands out.

We believe there are some serious faults with this legislation around access to information. We also feel there should have been stronger whistleblower protection. We will continue to watch these areas. Other parties have expressed concerns that the bill does not encompass enough points. We will all be watching that.

There is an automatic five year review in the bill, but I do not think we should be limited by that. If we see apparent faults in the legislation, this House should move rapidly to plug those holes.

Let me finish by thanking the other parties for their cooperation on this legislation but also recognizing that the law can only do so much. As individual members of Parliament, our personal integrity and ethics are ultimately what will guarantee that Canadians have representatives and a federal government that are truly accountable and do not breach the law or ethical standards that we are expected to meet. That falls on each member of Parliament. I urge all of us to take that into account.

[Marriage, December 6th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I wonder about the constitutional experts my colleague from Chatham was talking about. Does he not remember the letter that came from every single constitutional expert in this country to his leader, now the Prime Minister, saying that there was no other possible interpretation by our courts, that unless we invoked the Constitution to override, there was no way? I am wondering what constitutional experts he has been referring to because every single one in this country signed that letter saying that we cannot do it unless we override provisions in the Constitution.

[Marriage, December 6th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I wonder if the member, whose has many years of experience here, has had the same experience with regard to the Conservatives who come forward regularly with comments, either overheard or outright comments to me, that the promise by the Prime Minister of having this kind of vote tomorrow is wrong but that they will still vote for it because they feel pressure from that right wing group the member was speaking about.

[Marriage, December 6th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I was listening to part of this debate in the lobby and I felt compelled to come in and ask a question. I must first tell the member that I was somewhat offended by his comments.

I say that in this light. Tomorrow, when this vote occurs, it will lose by about a 2:1 ratio. Does the member believe that somewhere between 150 and 200 members of this House will not be voting their conscience tomorrow? Does he believe that many people are being forced by their leaders to vote that way or is it in fact the reality that those 150 to 200 people who vote tomorrow in this House against this motion are voting their conscience?

[Criminal Code, December 6th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I rise to speak to Bill S-211, which has come to us from the Senate under the authorship of Senator Lapointe and sponsored here by the member for Bourassa.

This bill is attempting, and I think to some degree successfully so, although I have some reservations, to look at a specific problem in the gaming industry. In particular, although it addresses the use of video lottery terminals and slot machines, the major problem we have is with the video lottery terminals, the VLTs. I have been involved in this issue for quite some time. Windsor, my home riding, had the first casino in Ontario. In fact I sat on the first provincial board in the province back in the early and mid 1990s.

During that period of time it became an issue as to whether the VLTs would be allowed into Ontario. Before I go on with that, I want to take a bit of an issue because I am not sure the major point has been addressed. What happened through the 1980s and into the early 1990s in Canada was that the federal government, by way of legislation in the House and agreements with the provinces, in effect permitted the provinces to move into the gaming industry.

Under the Criminal Code all the gaming in the country in effect is prohibited and is only allowed when there is legislation exempting the provinces or other operators from entering into the field. What has happened historically is the federal government has allowed that by way of exemptions from the Criminal Code, a law that goes back 400 or 500 years in common law and legislation, but the provinces do require those exemptions. Those exemptions have been granted.

Coming back to Ontario, as we received those exemptions, the Ontario government of whatever shade on various occasions had to make a determination as to what type of gaming would be allowed in the province. We have seen a similar pattern in a number of other provinces, I think all of the other provinces now.

What Ontario has done, and it will have no problem with the scheme that is established under this proposed legislation, is exactly what the legislation contemplates which is that it would limit the use of this gaming equipment to casinos. In Ontario it is both casinos that are run directly by the province and in some cases managed privately but owned and operated directly by the province, and then what we call charity casinos that are operated by charities in various locations around the province. In addition Ontario has allowed gaming equipment in the form of slot machines into a number of the race tracks.

It fits exactly into the pattern that is proposed in this legislation, with the exception that when we did the analysis under the NDP government in the early 1990s, we determined that the VLTs were so addictive, from experiences that we had studied in a number of other jurisdictions, that we never allowed them into Ontario. I believe that continues to the present time. They are not allowed in the casinos, they are not allowed at the race tracks and they certainly were never allowed in the bars, restaurants and other private establishments. That has always been a prohibition in Ontario.

That is not the pattern elsewhere in the country. We know we have a particular problem in at least two of the maritime provinces and I believe one of the prairie provinces, where in fact the use of the VLTs has been permitted by the provincial governments in private enterprises, some in a number of those jurisdictions in corner stores, variety stores, bars and restaurants. We never allowed them in Ontario because of their addictive nature. They are much more addictive than the traditional slot machine, in ratios of 10:1 to 20:1 more addictive.

We have heard all sorts of horror stories. The Senate heard a number of horror stories about people with modest incomes becoming addicted and spending a hundred dollars to several hundreds of dollars a day until they ran out of money. They exhausted all their savings and assets and ultimately bankrupted themselves and other family members. That has been a real pattern with VLTs. This is primarily what Senator Lapointe is trying to address in this bill. It is a laudable experience.

By giving provinces this authority, we have allowed them to become dependent on the revenues that they generate from these machines. An article in October's Walrus magazine detailed how much revenue was derived by private enterprises and provincial governments. They are used to receiving this revenue. In a serious proportion of cases, it is ill-gotten revenue because of the fact that it comes from people who are addicted to these machines, and it should be stopped.

Because this is such an important issue, I will be supporting the bill going to the justice committee, although the last thing the justice committee needs is another bill thanks to the intemperate approach by the Conservative government of sending all kinds of crime bills in patches to it. As we heard from the member for the Bloc, we will look at making amendments to ensure that provincial jurisdiction is protected and that the provinces are on side.

If we take away the right of provinces to have video lottery terminals and slot machines in private enterprises, then at the very least we need to give them time to adjust to that loss of revenue because in some cases it is quite significant. They will need a timeline to move away from their dependency on this revenue. This will be one of the amendments.

Another concern of mine is we may get into a legal constitutional conflict between the federal government and the provinces based on the legislation we passed previously, allowing them to get into this industry. This will have to be addressed. I assume the Senate has addressed this to some degree, but I will be looking for a review on this to see if we are not crossing a constitutional boundary and going in a direction we should not be going.

I can safely say that this is a crisis, especially with regard to VLTs. It should be addressed. It may ultimately be more appropriate that it be addressed at the provincial level, so it may not be possible to support the legislation at third reading, but we have a responsibility to investigate this.

I will be supporting it. It will be a free vote in my party. Hopefully, with the support of the House, the bill will go to justice committee where we can conduct an investigation to determine whether amendments can be made that will bring it into line with the needs of the provinces.

[Criminal Code, December 6th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I am very much in support of the principles behind this bill. The one concern I have is that we may be infringing on the territoriality of the provinces by way of agreements that we have had with them starting back in maybe the late 1980s and the decision for the provinces to determine whether this type of gambling equipment would be usable in each of the provinces. I understand we have a series of agreements with the provinces and authority for that.

I am wondering if the member who sponsored the bill could express some opinion as to the legality of us passing this bill if it breaches those contracts, or if he has some other agenda as to how we might be able to deal with that particular problem.

[Statutes Repeal Act, December 5th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, this private member's bill addresses an issue which is of some significant concern to every legislator, or at least it should be. That is the constant debate we have, and I suppose it is the essence of democracy, as to whether we over-govern ourselves. Sometimes maybe we pass legislation in reaction to current incidents to deal with what is at that point a hot topic issue and then within months or certainly within years, the law is no longer necessary. The law has become irrelevant, but it sits on the books until there is a move either by the government of the day or through a private member's bill to repeal the legislation.

Bill S-202 provides a mechanism, although I have to say with some reservations that I am not sure it is the proper mechanism, that would deal with those laws that have become outdated, irrelevant or no longer necessary but are still sitting on the books.

Every so often we will see in the popular media an example of a law, sometimes it is a municipal bylaw, other times it is a formal piece of legislation at the federal or provincial levels, that is held up to ridicule because it is so out of date. The one I always think of is the provincial law that required someone to walk in front of a horseless carriage, as it was called at that time, after a certain hour of the day waving a lantern in order to protect domesticated animals from being struck by the vehicle. That was on Ontario's books until well into the 1960s, if not the 1970s.

We hear of those kinds of examples. To some degree they hold the particular legislature up to ridicule that such an irrelevant and out of date piece of legislation would still be on the books.

I want to congratulate the member for Mississauga South who has brought this bill before the House for debate.

Having praised it to that extent, I have to express the reservation which is the risk we have of applying this bill, if it did become the law of the land, and legislation which is still relevant, necessary and useful could be struck down and made useless due to inattention by the government of the day. A law may have fallen into some lack of use, even for an extended period of time, but it may still be necessary given a change of circumstances in the country.

I am proposing how we should deal with this as opposed to it being an automatic absolute under the circumstances as set out in Bill S-202. A clause should be added that would provide some saving grace under certain circumstances. I am looking forward to the bill going to committee. Hopefully it will get through the House and will be addressed more extensively in committee so that that possibility could be addressed. The difficulty is that if the bill is approved in principle, that type of deviation from the principle may not be acceptable to the committee. It may not be acceptable under our rules and it may be ruled out of order. That causes me some concern. However, I think it is the way we need to go.

The number of statutes we know that are sitting on our books that should be repealed are fairly numerous from what I have been led to believe. I cannot say I have done a full study of that, but there are a number that are sitting on our books. It would be good to get them off our books.

It is back to the issue of overgovernance. Every so often when we have one of these pieces of legislation that is the law of the land that was intended for these specific purposes and was passed originally for these specific purposes, another issue arises and the law applies to that set of facts, but we end up with an unintended consequence, one that is negative and was never intended by the legislation. That is always the risk of having that old legislation sitting there.

Just on a side point, one of the tragedies of the government refusing to fund the Law Commission comes into play here. One of the roles the Law Commission could have had assigned to it is to review, either all of our legislation or at least segments of our legislation, already passed, already law, and identify those bills that were no longer necessary, had become irrelevant, were out of date, and where we could see no future use for them.

It would have been a very good task for the Law Commission to have performed. The members of the commission had the expertise and could very well have taken on that assignment. As I said earlier, it is badly needed to be done. With the Law Commission no longer being funded, it is not something we could assign to it.

It is quite clear that we do not have the ability, and I say that within the Department of Justice, nor do we have the resources in terms of personnel to do that overall review of all of our legislation. The Law Commission would have been very conveniently available to have that task assigned to it. It is no longer able to do it, and certainly the Department of Justice does not have the resources to do it.

I want to make one final point before I conclude. One of the other flaws that I see in the legislation, and I am sure it was not intended and it may not be possible to include it in the legislation, is that we have all sorts of pieces of legislation that still do function in part. They provide a role in terms of providing legislative infrastructure for activities in the country or, in some cases, prohibiting activities, but there are other parts of the same law, because they have become out of date, that are irrelevant.

The bill does nothing to assist us in reviewing those pieces of legislation or, more specifically, those parts of the legislation that are no longer relevant. We have no ability under the bill, if it were to become law, to place in the infrastructure of our legislative system an ability to review those laws that are still valid, but only in part.

Those are some of the flaws that I wish to point out to my colleague from Mississauga South. This of course will be a free vote when it comes to second reading. I do intend to support it, but I do have some reservations regarding the bill and I hope we can resolve those problems at committee.

[Judges Act, November 9th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, in some respects it may be difficult. I always get laughed at when I say this. If one is not a lawyer, he or she may not be able to appreciate this. Then I get all the boos about lawyers, but it is true to some extent. I am not being arrogant. We have to appreciate how important it is to have quality representation before the judge so the judge can make good decisions. It is about as simple as that.

This preceded me because I am not quite that old, but perhaps the best way to describe it is like this. Before we had legal aid in Canada, broadly based and broadly available, judges who practised and made judicial decisions in our criminal courts found it difficult to make good decisions when the accused was unrepresented. The Crown prosecutor would present the case for the state. No one was there to challenge the prosecutor, to put forth legal arguments, to present evidence in a better fashion than the untrained individual could.

It is the same thing when we get rid of the court challenges program. It is like cutting legal aid. We will not have qualified people in front of the judges to present good evidence and good legal arguments. It is just not going to happen.

It is a shame that this has happened. Hopefully, the government will be gone shortly and we will reinstate the program.