Joe Comartin

[Civil Marriage Act, June 28th, 2005]

Madam Speaker, I would like to think all parties in this Parliament and in the country are defenders of the charter. It is pretty fundamental law in our country, as fundamental as we can get. I would like to think the Conservatives, the Bloc, the Liberals and we all support it, as do other small parties who are not even represented here.

To deal with the issue of religious freedom, I have read a lot of decisions over my career. I practised law for 27 years before I was elected. I read a lot of decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada. I can say without equivocation that the decision on the same sex marriage issue as rendered by the Supreme Court of Canada was as clear, as forceful and as strong as any decision it has ever written with regard to religious freedom. The judges made it absolutely clear that religious freedom would not be abrogated in any way or in any fashion.

I want to be more specific about this. The judges had never done this before in any case that I read. They went through it and asked about the this situation. Courts do not write decisions that way, particularly the Supreme Court of Canada. The judges painstakingly went out of their way to say to our churches that the legislation would in no way interfere with their rights as religious institutions. I can say that without equivocation.

I am just barely aware of the case to which the member refers. I do not see it so much as an issue with regard to charter rights as it is an issue with regard to employment and the loyalty of the individual to his employer. That may be beyond the questioner's ability to comprehend. It is a very technical area of law, but it is not a fundamental right issue or charter issue.

[Criminal Code, June 28th, 2005]

It is not nonsense. Again, it is typical that we hear that from the Conservatives. They did not even look at it. That is the law of the land.

On top of that, we have this situation in every province in this country. It is the constitutional right of every province in this country where one can go into court and if the young woman in the relationship is pregnant, one can apply to the court and have a marriage take place under the authority of the court, the parents or guardians. That exists in just about every province. I do not think I checked Quebec, but all the other provinces have that provision.

So again, we could have this anomaly where at the federal jurisdiction we fix the age of consent at 16. I think this one is really quite interesting that we have not dealt with and we are going to have to if we ever get this methodology into play. We are going to have judges who are going to be one day authorizing the marriage and the next day being faced by the prosecutor and the police bringing the same couple before him, one of them, whoever is the older, and charging him or her because of the age not being there as a proper defence.

So there are problems with this. It is not anywhere near as simplistic as we always hear from the Conservatives when it deals with a law and order matter. It is more complex than that because the human scene in this country of course is more complex.

Bill C-313 does not cut it. If the Conservatives went back and maybe spoke to their member for Provencher maybe they could get some amendments at some point. However, as long as they go on a motion, we are not going to get this problem resolved.

[Criminal Code, June 28th, 2005]

Madam Speaker, I feel like a broken record because, as the member for Wild Rose has already mentioned, the Conservative Party has spoken to this issue repeatedly and as recently as yesterday. I spoke against the private member's motion yesterday and I am speaking against Bill C-313 for basically the same reasons.

The first thing I want to say to the Conservative Party is that if it perhaps got its act together maybe we could deal with the age of consent. When it does this holus-bolus, scattergun approach it just does not work and it will not get the support of the rest of the members of the House.

I want to acknowledge the work that its member for Provencher did with regard to Bill C-2. He did some significant work on dealing with the age of consent and introducing amendments that I was prepared to support as a member of the justice committee for my party and in fact did support the amendments. The Liberals and the Bloc chose not to support them and to go on with this methodology that they have used.

I want to touch on this. I do not think the Conservatives get it. They have to get their act together. They can respond with emotion, yell in the House and try to shame the rest of us into doing it, but if they practically dealt with the problem maybe we could reach a resolution.

We really are talking about social engineering. Until the late 1800s, the age of consent in Canada was 12 years of age. We raised that in the early 1900s and have not touched it since then, except playing with it in a few areas with regard to specific offences.

What began happening in the late 1960s through to the late 1970s was that successive governments, mostly Liberal but, quite frankly, some Conservative, at the federal level began to tinker with it. The option they went for was the exploitative dependency relationship.

In the course of the witnesses and evidence we heard on Bill C-2, we heard from a number of police officers and, more important , from a number of prosecutors who dealt with the sections that were based on the relationship being of an exploitative nature.

What they told us repeatedly from both their own experiences and that of other prosecutors across the land was that the methodology, if I can put it that way, in social engineering simply did not work. They could not get convictions. It was just too difficult to prove.

I was convinced at that time by the witnesses, I have to say, and not by the Conservatives on the committee, that in fact we should be looking at using a different methodology.

The basic problem we have of fixing rigid ages, and we heard it from the Liberal member who preceded me, is the risk of criminalizing a large number of our youth. I am going to throw some numbers out because it is something the Conservatives did not do.

We the following are some figures we asked for and received. There are roughly 800,000 youth in the country at any given time who are 14 and 15 years of age. Of them, close to 50%, are engaging in sexual relations. Of the ones who are engaging in sexual relations, roughly 41% of them are engaging in sexual relations with an older person. It does not matter whether it is male or female. This is something that changed from my generation because it tended to be and still is the stereotype we hear from the Conservatives that it is always the male who is the older person.

The reality is that it is almost exactly equal. Of the 50%, and we are talking now about 150,000 to 180,000 youth, 41% are engaged in a relationship where the age gap between them is more than two years but less than five. We have an additional group of almost 5% who are engaged in a relationship with an individual who is six years or older than they are.

This is where I want to acknowledge the work of the member for Provencher from the Conservative Party. He brought forth an amendment that said we are going to put into the Criminal Code the age of consent by fixing it at 16 from 14, which is where it is now, but we are going to allow a defence to the other youth engaged in the relationship if the age gap is five years or less.

When I saw that, I thought that was a reasoned approach on his part. However, I do not see that in Bill C-313 and I did not see any concept of that in the motion yesterday. Those members just did not do their work. They are quite prepared to criminalize as many as 100,000 youth for engaging in sexual contact. Those are our children. They are not the pimps in downtown Toronto. Those are kids who go to our schools. And they are going to criminalize them.

So when the member for Wild Rose gets up and says, “Shame on you”, I repeat that back to him and to his party. If they got their facts straight and they dealt with this, as they have tried to do, based entirely on emotion, it is never going to go any place. If they did it on facts, if they took a proper and reasoned approach to this, got away from the emotion and feeding their own egos, maybe we could get this problem resolved.

Our party supports the member for Provencher. We could not convince the Bloc or the Liberals to do it, and I blame the Conservatives for that. If they had over the years taken a more reasoned approach, we probably could have brought some of them on side and we could have got that bill, Bill C-2, back to this House with an age of consent and that age differential defence in it. We could have passed it.

That bill, by the way, is before the Senate right now. It may in fact have passed in the last day or two, I am not sure. So we could have actually had it in place. But because the opposition wanted to deal with emotion, we did not get it through.

One of the other things they did not consider was that we still have a problem even if we do fix the age at 16 and we put in the near age defence. We would have a constitutional problem between ourselves and the provinces. One of the territories still has the marrying age set at 15. We are going to have this anomaly if we fix the age of consent at 16. We are going to have people in the north who can get married at the age of 15, but be charged if they engage in a sexual relationship with their husband or wife.

[Civil Marriage Act, June 28th, 2005]

Madam Speaker, I rise today fully conscious of the historical significance of the vote that will take place later today. I do it with a great deal of pride because of the role that my party historically has played in advancing the rights of gays and lesbians in our country, but perhaps even more so, with a great deal of humility, recognizing that the work that has been done by other members of this House in the past probably far exceeds what we are doing today.

For me there are three buzzwords as to why we should support Bill C-38 and why we should pass it later today. One is the law, one is love and one is duty.

As a lawyer, I went through this process of watching the charter come into being and having it being applied, Back in the early eighties our country made a concrete, solid decision that henceforth we would have in place a Charter of Rights and Freedoms that would guarantee fundamental rights and that we would have a court system that would act as the arbitrator. It would apply the decisions in a just fashion and determine the rights when there was a conflict between the state, as there is here and has been, and a minority group in our country.

The Canadian public has accepted that method and we have now lived under it for more than 20 years. When the Supreme Court of Canada along with all the other lower courts made the decisions we have seen over the last few years, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was applied, and I believe applied appropriately, and they came to the right conclusion. For that reason, for the law of this land, all of us should be supporting Bill C-38.

The second buzzword is love. I am a Roman Catholic. I have been married to my wife for 36 years and we have three grown children. My Catholic community in the city of Windsor is a major support for me and has been for all my life. For the last number of years, my wife and I have taught the marriage preparation courses at our church. Having been elected in 2000, there were a number of things I had to set aside but that was one that I could not. It is a great benefit to our marriage, but it is also a great joy to see young couples entering into marriage. If we can do anything to help them do that, it is something that I am very proud to do.

One of my visions is that some day my church will allow those couples to not only be heterosexual but also to be homosexual. My vision says to me that some day this will happen. The Roman Catholic Church in this country and across the globe will follow the precedents that the United Church, the Quakers, the Metropolitan Church and any other number of Christian denominations have taken. This is about love; we will guarantee within our religious services that all couples will be treated equally.

My marriage is probably the most important thing to me, in terms of the relationship with my wife and my children. By allowing for gays and lesbians to marry, it will in no way detract from or minimize my marriage, just the opposite. When I do the marriage preparation courses with young couples, I want to share the relationship that we have been able to develop as a couple, as a family and as a community. Our marriage is very much supported by our community, and I want gay and lesbian couples to be able to share in those relationships.

Finally, the third buzzword is duty. I, like my leader, have known gay and lesbian couples who have suffered. If this legislation moves the celebration of their relationship just a little bit, it is worth passing. I had a friend involved in a mature gay relationship who took his life several years ago. I know what pain and suffering he went through. I know what rejection he suffered from some members of his family and I know the abuse he took in the workplace because he was openly gay.

Until we strike down all the barriers to full equality for our gay and lesbian community, until we do that, we are going to continue to have individuals such as my friend who are going to be pushed to the wall to the point that they take their lives. Bill C-38 is part of that work. I spent Saturday morning with the gay and lesbian community in Windsor. They were talking about the ongoing difficulties that the gay and lesbian youth of our country have in coming out and about the need for us to have services available to them. That is what the meeting was about.

If we put this bill into place, it is not going to be the be-all and end-all of the discrimination that this community has suffered, but it will advance the cause.

Therefore, my duty as an individual member of Parliament, as I pledged it when I spoke at my friend's funeral, is to support Bill C-38, to get it into play and then move on, again so that at some point in the future, like those young couples my wife and I helped prepare for marriage, we will be able to celebrate all marriages, whether they be gay, lesbian or heterosexual.

[Age of Consent, June 27th, 2005]

The member keeps prattling on about wanting a copy my speech. This is all being recorded and perhaps he should be made aware that in fact he can get a copy when I am finished.

The other point that needs to be raised here with regard to this motion is that there is also about 6% of the age group that are beyond the five year differential. We are also looking at potentially criminalizing those, but the determination was made, and rightfully so, that the age gap of five years was the appropriate one. It reflected the reality of what is occurring in terms of defending it, but at the same time it is saying that once a person moves beyond that five year age gap it becomes a statutory prohibition and will be subject to criminal penalty as a result.

I want to make one additional point that came up repeatedly in the debate in the justice committee around the age of consent. We have already heard from the member from Mississauga that the government's position, supported by the Bloc, was that the exploitive dependency relationship is the one we have to prohibit. I analyzed that from the perspective of asking what in fact is happening now, because various Criminal Code sections now use the same type of analysis and Criminal Code framework to prohibit this type of relationship.

However, we heard repeatedly from crown prosecutors, some of whom prosecute only criminal offences involving sexual activity, and from a number of the police forces that this methodology, this infrastructure of the Criminal Code, in fact does not work. It simply is not a methodology that can be used with any type of reasonable success in our criminal justice system.

As I say, we heard that repeatedly. As a result of that evidence from the prosecutors and police forces at various levels in the country, it seemed obvious that the government had to shift its position. Unfortunately, it was not prepared to do that at the justice committee. Those amendments failed because of the positions of the government and the Bloc in opposing them.

I believe that debate has to continue. Bill C-2 is now waiting for royal assent, I believe. It went through. Perhaps I should point out that it was with our agreement and the agreement of the Conservatives that it was put into play.

What is going to happen now? There will be a review after five years, I believe, and we will then have to come back and find solid proof that what the prosecutors, the crown attorneys, and the police officers were telling us is in fact true: that it is not going to be effective in dealing with those cases where there are exploitation and dependency, the classic of the young person being exploited, oftentimes right into prostitution.

I firmly believe that the system now being put in place is not going to work and that we will be back here in five or six years and will move to what the Conservative justice critic moved at that time, which we supported. I believe that very strongly.

In conclusion, I want to make one final point. The decision of making this move has to be put in the proper context of dealing with the age of consent. The reality is that when we look at other jurisdictions that have moved to increase the age of consent there has not been a significant increase in the number of convictions, even when they were very solid in what the age of consent should be.

What it has some effect on, and perhaps this is the most positive thing we can expect, is that there has been a communication by the legislature of that jurisdiction of its disapproval. I will not say it is significant, but it has had some effect on lowering the sexual activity among our youth.

We heard from psychologists during the course of the committee hearings that most youth, particularly those who are 14 or 15 years of age, are not in a position to properly judge whether they are ready for full sexual activity. By communicating this as a legislature, we have some impact on those youth. Again, it is not significant in terms of overall percentages, but it does communicate from us as legislators the need for them to perhaps have second thoughts about what type of sexual activity they will be engaged in.

For that reason, we believe that the age of consent should be raised so long as we have that defence ingrained.

[Age of Consent, June 27th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I am rising today on behalf of my party to oppose this motion. As usual, from the lack of knowledge that comes from the Conservative side of the House, I am not doing this on the basis of what the Conservatives think.

They should be aware, and obviously most of them sitting over there are not, that the amendments that were moved by their justice critic in committee were supported by myself, as a representative of my party, to change the age of consent but at the same time to build in protection. As opposed to again what the Conservatives normally do, I thought it would be best if we dealt with the facts of the situation we are confronted with in this country which is the need to have a defence in the legislation that would not criminalize a large percentage of our youth population who are engaging in sexual activity with other youth of roughly the same age.

I heard from the last speaker, who obviously is not being briefed by his own justice critic, about the present age of consent and the defence of a person being within two years of that age. That was not the amendment and that was the reason we opted to support the Conservative amendments.

The Conservative amendment would have a gap of five years. I believe the justice critic for the Conservative Party moved the amendment to five years as opposed to two, which seems to be satisfying the mover of this motion. If we were to look at the statistics of sexual activity among youth in this country, one would be criminalizing approximately 42% or 43% of male youth who are engaging in sexual activity if we went with the two year gap. In fact, there is that much of a difference.

There is always the stereotype that it is the male who is older. In fact, in 33% of the cases the female is older and in 43% of the cases it is the male. We had a potential for criminalizing literally hundreds of thousands of youth. The figures we were able to gather showed that roughly 800,000 youth in the age group of 14 to 16 are engaging in full sexual activity.

We would be potentially criminalizing somewhere in the range of 40% of them if we simply adopted this motion. That is what we are confronted with. I realize those facts may be somewhat disturbing to certain people, but that is the reality and as legislators we must deal with that reality.

We were very clear. We supported the amendments to raise the age to 16 and build in this other defences, so that we would not be criminalizing a large percentage of our youth.

[Devils Lake Diversion Project, June 21st, 2005]

Madam Speaker, this may be a bit unfair to the member for Charleswood--St. James--Assiniboia, but the last speaker from the Conservative Party advocated right to the very end. I did not get a chance to ask him if Canada should take on the bill, in effect, for dealing with the pollution that is coming from the U.S. side of the border.

Is that the position of the member's party? Because that is not the first time I have heard it. I have heard it informally before this. If so, will it also to take the position that we will start to pay for the clean up of the coal-fired plants on the U.S. side of the border, the transboundary air pollution which is literally killing a number of people in my riding in southwestern Ontario?

[Devils Lake Diversion Project, June 21st, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, although I think the member's comments are reasonably justified, I take some issue with the significance of this and with the people who are here this evening.

This issue is a phenomenally important one with regard to the Great Lakes and, in particular, with some of the issues that have been going on for the last four or five years where eight of the Great Lakes states in the U.S. are very interested in accessing the water in the Great Lakes and exporting and diverting the water out of the Great Lakes.

I want to say to my colleague from Winnipeg that if in fact the Devils Lake diversion is allowed to go ahead without IJC involvement, it will have a major impact, so that the Great Lakes region is very much watching this issue.

Being that the member is on the government side of this, I am very concerned that I am not hearing an alternative strategy from the government. We have pushed it as far as I can see it can be pushed with the federal government and certainly with North Dakota. Is the member aware of any alternative the Government in Canada has if we cannot reach an agreement to resolve this issue?

[Canada Border Services Agency Act, June 13th, 2005]

Madam Speaker, overall we are not satisfied with the response.

The cabinet member who is now the Minister of Foreign Affairs was in Windsor. We were having a meeting with representatives for both sides of the border. I remember raising with them that the big issue right then was the need for the U.S. side to expand the number of gates into the U.S. side. The American side was way behind what Canada was doing at that point in terms of providing the proper services at the border crossings to allow the free flow of goods at the same time as providing security.

I agree with my friend from Mississauga South that there is a need for balance. There have certainly been times that we in the Windsor area in particular have felt that the security demands from the U.S. side were unreasonable. On a number of occasions we have been able to convince them to take a step back so that goods and passengers would flow freely.

On the basic question about whether the government's response has been as fulsome as it should have been, I said in my opening comment that I did not think so. I am going to use as an example the provision of a ferry service that we have in the Windsor area. There is litigation going on about this right now which may be close to being settled finally, but even before 9/11 we had set up a system that allowed the bridge company, which is a private company, to receive customs services for free. It is not charged anything.

On the other hand, the ferry service is being charged a per vehicle cost in order to have customs and border security people at the crossing. It is a small company in comparison with the bridge, which is a huge corporation, but the government has refused a simple change in the regulations that would make it possible for customs people to be there, to move vehicles across in an efficient way without costing the service that amount of money. That service would be a good alternative to deal with some of the backlog at the bridge and the tunnel in the Windsor area. The government has refused to follow through on that.

With regard to the member's other question as to marshalling guards, that has been considered. It was proposed by the former mayor of Windsor. It has never been taken up by the government and it still has not responded to that request.

[Canada Border Services Agency Act, June 13th, 2005]

Madam Speaker, as we can tell from the comments of the member that just spoke, he is quite passionate about the subject, a passion which I share, because of the impact that the border has on our economy in the Windsor-Essex county area and on the livelihood of so many of our people. A good deal of that livelihood is being threatened at this point to a great degree because of inaction on the part of the government.

Specifically, the bill is part of an overall strategy by the government to consolidate services into one super ministry under the Minister for Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness. This is just one component of it. With this particular bill, which all parties agreed was an appropriate step for the government to take, we are consolidating the customs program, the customs investigations and appeal functions, and the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency. We are taking part of that agency, bringing in the intelligence interdiction and enforcement program, including ports of entry from the Department of Citizenship and Immigration, and finally the inspection of ports of entry and the Canada Food Inspection Agency.

The NDP has been willing to support this because we believe it is important to focus attention on our border crossings and our ports of entry. All too often in the past, because these programs have been somewhat isolated within their respective departments, there has not been enough attention paid to the issues with regard to ports of entry. With regard to the security at ports of entry, and at the rest of the border crossings, a secure but efficient methodology must ensure that cargo and passengers are able to move back and forth without undue hindrance. This development, in terms of bringing this together, makes good practical sense.

When the bill came before the justice subcommittee, all parliamentarians sitting on that committee felt reasonably comfortable with it, but there were some amendments. I want to touch on those briefly.

One of them affected the reporting function. Although there was a modest reporting function, by the amendment that we introduced and passed in the subcommittee, we strengthened the responsibility of the minister to report. As we will see in a few minutes, when I conclude my speech, that is an important factor, and the need to strengthen it was equally important.

The other point that raised some concern with the employees at the border was that they were defined under the Criminal Code as peace officers. As a result of a decision that I believe came out of my region of the country, the charges that the employees at the border might lay under various pieces of legislation on a number of occasions had been challenged as to their capacity to lay those charges. In a couple of cases the charges were actually dismissed on what was seen as a technical problem.

The employees had been asking the government for the last five to seven years to amend the section of the Criminal Code, so it would be clear they had the responsibility and the jurisdiction to lay the charges. The government had not done that when the bill was introduced originally. The public service employees came forward with a very clear, concise and obviously persuasive argument as to the need for this amendment. It was taken up by all members of the committee, including, finally, the government members, and the amendments were moved, supported unanimously and passed. It is now in the bill which, with support from all parties, will pass and their job will become a little easier.

As an aside on this point, there has been an ongoing debate between the public service employees at the border, arguing that in a number of cases they need to have greater security for themselves.

We have heard of many incidents at border crossings where individual members were positioned there by themselves. There have been several incidents where people have suffered ill health and had no one to assist them. There have been other occasions where there were very clear security threats to them and they had no meaningful backup at all.

There is an ongoing debate as well as to whether border crossing guards should be armed. At this point they are not allowed to carry firearms in spite of some clear cases where that would have been of some benefit to them.

To be clear on this point I must say that this debate has been raised by employees themselves. A number of them have not been trained or properly prepared to carry firearms whereas others have. This is going to be an ongoing debate. A case just came down from the federal court with respect to wardens in our national parks and it may have some impact on this issue. We may be moving to that at some stage in the near future.

By consolidating the departments and more specifically these programs, we are going to have clearer information because we will get annual reports from the minister. We will be able to focus our attention on the actual issues confronting us at our border crossings and ports of entry. I hope and expect that an inevitable result of this consolidation will be greater security and more efficient use of our border crossings to move both cargo and passengers.

With regard to arming border guards and the security issue, major work still needs to be done. We hear reports that some containers coming in at our ports of entry on both the east and west coasts are not being inspected. A very small percentage are in fact inspected. This is worrisome from a terrorist standpoint because inspections are minimal. This issue must be addressed. Once this consolidation is fully in place and functioning, the government will see the need to provide additional services of a security nature at our ports of entry.

As we heard from the member for Windsor West, the border crossing between Windsor and Detroit is the busiest one in the country. It could be argued that it may be the busiest crossing of any place in the world as far as cargo is concerned. In spite of that fact, we cannot get the government to address a number of issues that confront our community.

There is a major issue concerning whether we need an additional crossing, and there seems to be overwhelming evidence that we do. However, the government has been extremely slow in responding to that need. That is having a major impact particularly on the auto industry, but generally on the manufacturing industry.

This is not just an issue with regard to the Windsor-Essex county area. We have heard substantive evidence about problems with regard to moving manufactured goods across our border and the backlogs this is creating. There are backlogs throughout all of southern Ontario, right into Quebec and all the way back to Montreal.

We expect these issues to be addressed in a much more efficient and responsible manner than they have in the past. We expect that the additional resources that are required to meet our security needs at our ports of entry and border crossings will be forthcoming in geographic areas like the Windsor-Detroit area. We expect that an additional crossing, when needed, will be addressed much more rapidly than it has been historically.

The NDP will be supporting Bill C-26. However, we will be watching the outcome once it is in place to see how these programs are functioning and we will be pressing very hard for them to be expanded.