Keith Martin

[Question No. 134, March 24th, 2003]

For the fiscal years 1993-1994, 1994-1995, 1995-1996, 1996-1997, 1997-1998, 1998-1999, 1999-2000 et 2000-2001, from all departments and agencies of the government, including crown corporations and quasi/non-governmental agencies funded by the government, and not including research and student-related grants and loans, what is the list of grants, loans, contributions and contracts awarded in the constituency of Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, including the name and address of the recipient, whether or not it was competitively awarded, the date, the amount and the type of funding, and if repayable, whether or not it has been repaid?

Return tabled.

[Criminal Code, March 21st, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure today to speak to the amendment to Bill C-20.

Our problems with the bill are many and varied. Let us back up for a moment. If the objective of our justice system is the protection of innocent civilians, then surely the protection of children must be at the forefront of our justice system.

For 10 years people in my party and in others have asked, pushed, cajoled and coerced the government to implement solutions that will protect children from that most egregious crime: the sexual, violent abuse at the hands of a predator or a pedophile.

To understand why we are so adamant about this, let us look at pedophilia for a moment. It is an incurable problem. Pedophiles, by and large, are not cured of this. When somebody comes before our justice system to be tried and sometimes convicted for these offences, it is usually not the first time the person has sexually abused a child. In fact, studies show that when an individual comes before the court charged with the sexual abuse of a child, generally the person has abused at least 12 children before that.

Hon. members should think about that for a moment. When a person comes before a court for the very first time, the person has sexually raped and abused at least 12 children, not once but generally over a prolonged period of time. As my colleague has mentioned, that has profound implications upon the life of a child for the entire length of the child's life. It is something that they never, ever get over.

As a result, we are aghast and appalled that the government has not adopted the constructive solutions that we put forth that would have strengthened our justice system, protected children and enabled our courts to do the job they were supposed to do: protect the Canadian public.

It is also without a doubt the responsibility of the courts and our justice system to implement solutions that will help in the rehabilitation of the convicted. We make no dispute about that and, in fact. we encourage that. How can we have a society where those who have made mistakes and who have committed offences do not have the hope of retribution or of being cured of their problem?

Pedophilia is in a category very different from all others, with the exception, I would say, of individuals who commit violent sexual abuses against other individuals. Violent sexual behaviour, pedophilia, is in a class unto itself. Most of those people do not get cured. It is true that most of those people, it is sad to say, have endured sexual abuse, violent or otherwise, themselves. That is a profound tragedy and we have great sympathy for those individuals. However it does not exonerate them from committing acts of violent sexual abuse against others during their lives.

Therefore it is our responsibility here in the House to ensure that our justice system, our courts and our police have the tools to not only protect civilians, but also to ensure that to the best of our ability we can give the individuals who committed those offences as much treatment as possible to ensure that when or if they get out we can be confident that they will not reoffend again.

Herein lies the problem. The court system gives individuals a sentence. They finish their sentence and then they are released. We are fairly confident that some of those people will not reoffend but, having worked in jails, I can tell the House that a lot of those people, whether they are sexual predators or violent offenders, are being released with the full knowledge and awareness that they will commit that type of offence again. Those who work in our penal institutions, those who are part of our court system and those who are part of our police forces are aghast, appalled, saddened and often demoralized by the fact that our system does not at the end of the day, at its heart, protect our society from those individuals who commit the most violent, appalling and egregious offences against innocent civilians.

These people are predators. I will provide an example. Friends of mine, a couple, were living in Vancouver. An individual moved in beside them and befriended them. He came over with gifts and food. One day the wife of this friend of mine was at home and suddenly found their next door neighbour in their home, uninvited, with candies for their daughter, who was seven years old at the time. Subsequent to that they found out that this individual, their neighbour who they thought was perfectly fine, had a long history of violent sexual abuses against children. He was and is a predator and was an individual who was trying to sexually abuse their seven year old daughter.

When this friend of mine went to the police, the police said they could do nothing about this since the person had not committed a crime. What do we have to wait for? Do we have to wait for that individual to rape that seven year old girl so the police can say they have a crime and therefore can incarcerate that individual?

Certainly a crime has to be committed before someone is incarcerated, to be sure, but on the other hand, does that family not have a right to know that the person living next door to them is an individual with a long history of violent sexual abuses, an individual who the police know is fully expected to reoffend? Does that family not have a right to know that its next door neighbour has a very high chance of sexually abusing another child? The hands of the police were tied in that case, as they are tied in other cases around the country.

We understand and are fully cognizant of the fact that all individuals have rights, but at the end of the day the rights of a child have to trump the rights of a sexual predator. That has to happen. That is what we in our party are trying to do. We are trying to change the laws of the land to ensure that children are not going to be preyed on by pedophiles who have a long history of these actions and, by and large, as I said before, are incurable. Some can be controlled and should be allowed out after serving their sentences, but those who cannot should be kept in jail until such time as the judicial system is confident that these individuals will not reoffend.

We also know that on the international stage there are pedophile tours. These adults, working underground, get together to go on tours to Colombia and southeast Asia where they are taken to brothels and children are presented in front of them so that they can rape them. That is what is happening now. It is an underground system. The international judicial system is aghast and appalled that collectively we have been unable to prosecute these individuals who go on these tours to sexually abuse the children of people in faraway countries.

I know that the Thai government and the Malaysian government are aghast because many of these pedophiles selectively go there to sexually abuse children. This cannot be allowed to happen. Our Minister of Justice must work with other ministers of justice and international policing organizations to develop a system for the identification and prosecution of individuals who actively go after children on these international sex tours.

My colleague has mentioned the issue of child porn. I will not belabour the issue because my colleagues have spoken eloquently about it. Suffice it to say that we are not talking about some individual who accidentally pulls something off a computer. We are talking about individuals who have a long history of pulling up and using child pornography. What adults do among themselves is adults' business, but when people are actually buying child pornography, attached to that must be victims, and the victims are children who had absolutely no say whatsoever in being part and parcel of those movies or photographs that show them being sexually abused by adults.

As for solutions, we have spoken about heavier penalties and minimum sentencing for people convicted of pedophilia. Release should be conditional upon the knowledge that individuals who are pedophiles, and I would extend this to people who commit rape, are violent sexual offenders. We must be certain that those individuals and people who commit pedophilia and sexual and violent offences are not going to reoffend. That category of offences is very different from others because at the end of the day the victims of those offences are individuals who have to sustain and endure terrible penalties that they have to live with for the rest of their lives.

Dangerous offender status should be more liberally applied to those individuals who are pedophiles. As I said before, it is an incurable problem.

I know my time is up, but I hope the government listens to the constructive solutions my party has put forward. We are very willing to work with the government to implement a constructive Bill C-20 that will protect our children from predation by violent sexual offenders.

[Transportation Amendment Act, March 21st, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I want to ask my hon. colleague in the NDP a question that relates to our province.

On Vancouver Island we have the Esquimalt and Nanaimo Railway that has been deliberately run inefficiently on the part of VIA in an effort to get VIA out of it. For years and years the community on Vancouver Island and MPs on the island have asked the Minister of Transport to work with VIA, work with its current owners, RailAmerica, and work with the people on the island to put this railway in the hands of a private company that will be able to run it in a profitable fashion while keeping ownership in the hands of the public.

I would like my friend's views on whether she would support allowing this railway to be in the hands of a private company that can run it in a profitable fashion for the benefit of the people of Vancouver Island and whether she will ask the Minister of Transport to follow along those lines.

[Assisted Human Reproduction Act, February 27th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to speak on Bill C-13 and the Group No. 2 amendments. No one can underestimate the importance of this issue with respect to the health of all human beings.

I want to say that unfortunately the bill has been bogged down with a lot of issues surrounding the definition of life and has actually polarized two groups: those who believe in choice and those who really are part of the anti-choice movement and believe that the definition of life begins with the fertilization of an egg. Both sides must have their views respected and certainly both are understandable; however, this detracts from the larger issues, I would say, that the bill could afford all Canadians.

A person may be sick or have amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or Lou Gehrig's disease, or Parkinson's disease, or diabetes, which is epidemic in our country, and it is easy for those of us who are healthy to say that we should ban and prohibit science on the basis of our moral conviction that life begins at the moment an egg is fertilized by a sperm. Unfortunately, when we do that, we will deprive thousands upon thousands of people, not only in our own country but around the world, of potentially life saving tools, technologies and treatments that will improve their lives and indeed save their lives.

One of my colleagues mentioned this to me because I am of the view that human cloning should be banned. That is generally accepted by scientists, ethicists and the general public, but there is a far greater range of views on and a far greater acceptance of using medical technology, particularly when, at the early embryonic stages, it can provide that information. I will tell members why. When an egg is fertilized by a sperm, what happens in that ball of cells are things that we simply cannot get or understand out of any other science we have today. Cells that are undifferentiated and look much the same have what we call a potential to develop into any part of our body. It is truly an extraordinary time in the life of those cells.

What happens with those cells is that they begin to differentiate into organs. They also move and migrate around various parts of the body. Why this is important is that this kind of behaviour is the same type of behaviour, in many cases, that occurs with cancers. Cancerous cells suddenly become one normal cell and then, for reasons that we do not fully understand today, become cells whose behaviour changes. In the changing of that behaviour, they start to move into various parts of the body and they start to eat and erode away at other cells and other tissues, too often ultimately killing people.

What we can understand and glean from the first fertilization of that egg are behaviours in the cell patterns and a differentiation that we really cannot get from any other source, including adult stem cells, although I will certainly agree that the research in adult stem cells has changed dramatically.

My colleague said to me that he had a gentleman call him up after he heard my comments on television, the same comments I have just made. The gentleman said he was a man who was dying of cancer and he would not sacrifice a single fertilized embryo even if it were to provide life saving knowledge that would save his life from the cancer eating away at his body.

That gentleman is perfectly free to make that comment. However, should we use that viewpoint to prevent or deny other people who do not have that luxury from having the medical knowledge and the tools that could ultimately save their lives? I would submit that we cannot do this.

Bill C-13 really deals with two important areas: assisted human reproduction technologies without compromising the health and safety of individuals, a very worthy endeavour, and prohibiting certain practices, what are known as unacceptable practices, such as human cloning.

I would submit that we should allow the use of embryonic stem cells up to seven days, and many scientists would agree, so that we can glean that invaluable knowledge on the differentiation, migratory pathways and communications that cells have between each other. It is absolutely essential for our ability to combat the cancer that kills so many people in our country and around the world.

On the issue of surrogacy, the bill seeks to provide compensation for costs incurred in surrogacy. We have between 50 and 100 women per year who actually become surrogate mothers, providing infertile couples with a child. The bill states that if an arrangement is made such that the woman receives more compensation than just costs like air fare and such, she will be criminalized to the extent of anywhere between $500,000 and up to 10 years in prison.

Let us imagine a woman who is a surrogate, who is giving of herself in an enormous way in terms of the pain and suffering, the time off work and the effects on her own body. If she has a child for another couple and receives money that somebody deems to be more than just compensation for costs, that woman would be criminalized and thrown in jail for up to 10 years. That is ridiculous. We need regulations because we do not want to commodify human reproduction, and everybody would agree with that, but for heaven's sake, to criminalize a woman or a couple for engaging in this is absolutely unbelievable.

The second point I want to make is what some put under the rubric of the buying and selling of sperm and eggs. Again, nobody wants to commodify that. However, people need to receive fair compensation for the time and effort it takes to make those donations. The extraction of eggs from a woman is not a simple procedure and is not without risks. Surely the person deserves a lot more than the bus fare to get down to the clinic. Those decisions should be made in a reasonable way with guidelines, not laws, that will enable reproductive groups to provide fair compensation to those people who give of themselves so that infertile couples will have the opportunity to have the children they want.

Another point is the issue of identification. The bill seeks to make public, or at least public for the interested parties, the identification of the donor. If this passes, we will see that up to 75% of people who donate sperm or ova will no longer be donors. They will be gone. They will not want to make their identities known.

I believe that the intent of the bill is to ensure that the child born of that conception and the parents of that child should have access to and knowledge of the medical health of the donor. That is perfectly reasonable. That has relevance for the child's future as well as for the parents taking care of the child. There is no reason, however, to make the personal identification of that donor known to any other party. That is not necessary.

The bill will also put a chill on and do an enormous amount of damage to the ability of organizations that deal with infertile couples to gain access to the material they require. I want to close, if I may, on that point and quote the Canadian Fertility and Andrology Society, which is the professional body of fertility physicians. They object to Bill C-13 and its prohibition of payment. I want to quote the society, because it says this very well:

We believe as strongly as anyone else that human gametes are not commodities; they are things to be given freely.

That was said by Dr. Roger Pierson, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Saskatchewan and chair of communications for the society. However, he also said:

But we have to recognize there is considerable nuisance and time involved, and that deserves some form of compensation.

That is the point I want to make on the bill. The bill should not be passed until that is cleared up.

The bill also has to deal with the issue of language, because it is extremely vague. I would like to quote Dianne Irving, professor of philosophy and ethics, who appeared in front of the standing committee and said:

Of all the legislations that I have analyzed--on the basis of the correct science used, the linguistic loopholes employed, and the “genre” of “ethics” assumed--this Bill is probably the most problematic...it is my recommendation that this Bill should not be passed, even with amendments.

I support that and recommend that the government take the bill back and modify it so that it can be a fair bill that does not commodify the reproductive tools we have, a bill that enables infertile couples to have the babies they would like to have in the future, and a bill that does not inadvertently quash good science that could save people's lives.

[Supply, February 24th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, the justice minister always discusses this issue of the gun registry through the prism of public safety, so let us talk about it that way. There is something called “opportunity costs”, as the member knows, where money is taken from one place and is put into another, and we had better make sure we are getting a better bang for our buck in one place rather than the other.

When we look at the statistics of homicide rates in Canada, the fact of the matter is that of all the homicides one-third are due to firearms, and a very small number of them are due to registered firearms. The fact of the matter is that over 90% of homicides due to firearms are due to unregistered firearms, as he quite correctly mentioned.

Putting it in the context of opportunity costs, the question is this: Is it worth spending $1 billion to really save the lives of a handful of people when what it is actually doing is removing that $1 billion from something else where we could save thousands of lives, for example in health care?

[Supply, February 24th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I have two questions for my hon. friend. My first question deals with people who die from gunshot wounds, and my colleague mentioned 200. Two-thirds of homicide victims die from the use of something other than a firearm. However the vast majority of the people who die from firearms are killed by illegal firearms which have been smuggled into Canada. Therefore the problem is not registered guns. Only a small handful of those 200 people die from the use of a registered gun. Therefore the firearms registry will have even less of an impact.

My second question deals with the issue of parliamentary oversight and oversight on the part of the Auditor General with regard to government expenditures. One of our primary roles as members of Parliament is to oversee government expenditures, how taxpayer money is spent. In my view MPs and the Auditor General, despite the fine work she does, have lost both the power and authority to oversee these expenditures.

Does my colleague agree with my statements? What needs to happen for us as parliamentarians to exercise our role as overseer of government expenditures? How can we have the power to exercise our role in Parliament? As well, how can the Auditor General exercise her power in a more efficient fashion?

[Supply, February 24th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, when my colleague looks at the government and sees a Prime Minister who can appoint cabinet ministers, deputy ministers, executive assistants to the ministers, and judges to the Supreme Court, does he believe that Canada has a true, rich democracy or have we moved into the era of a dictatorship?

[Supply, February 24th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I wonder if my hon. friend, who has a deep interest in matters financial, would support the notion, in the government's bill on campaign finance reform, that all of us should publish what we receive and those who pay should also publish what they pay. It would be along the lines of the European Union proposal which increases and improves corporate social responsibility?

My second question revolves around what one of his colleagues did for his party. He proposed a solution whereby we would need to know what our inputs are as well as what our outputs are in terms of government expenditures. What are his comments on that?

[Foreign Affairs, February 24th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, three innocent people could be executed and we have the power to exonerate them. We have the proof but we are not releasing it. All we have heard are nice diplomatic platitudes and the cop-out of expected watching.

Again I will ask the government what it is doing to deal with the crisis in Zimbabwe. Seven million people are being starved to death. There are internment camps where state sponsored murder, torture and sexual assaults are taking place.

[Foreign Affairs, February 24th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, the leader of the opposition in Zimbabwe, Morgan Tsvangirai, is on trial with two others on trumped up treason charges. The RCMP did an investigation into these allegations because the person who set up Mr. Tsvangirai is a Canadian, Ari Ben-Menashe. It took place in Montreal.

Unless the results of these findings are released publicly, three innocent people will possibly be executed. Will the Solicitor General release the results of these investigations?