Keith Martin

[Foreign Affairs, February 5th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, this is not an academic exercise. Mr. Tsvangirai is the leader of the opposition. The evidence demonstrated that this is a failed and flawed tape.

Mr. Ben-Menashe has been known to lie like people breathe. He is allegedly involved in the trafficking of blood diamonds and is wanted for fraud internationally.

Will the Government of Canada ensure that the trial of Mr. Tsvangirai is going to be free, fair, transparent and that a Canadian is not going to be implicated in the murder?

[Foreign Affairs, February 5th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, on February 3 the trial of Zimbabwean opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai began in Harare. The trial's principal witness is Ari Ben-Menashe, a Canadian who produced a tape that led to the charges of treason against Mr. Tsvangirai.

An RCMP investigation showed very clearly that there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever linking Mr. Tsvangirai to the alleged murder attempts against Robert Mugabe.

Will the government release the outcome of this RCMP investigation and make it available to the court in Harare?

[Antipoverty Act, February 4th, 2003]

Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to talk on this topic of poverty. The government adheres to a socialist, archaic method of dealing with the issue of poverty that has proven to be an abysmal failure. If we are truly going to deal with poverty, there are a number of constructive solutions that have worked internationally to elevate those people who are in the lower socio-economic groups while not harming anybody else.

Traditionally this and previous governments have adhered to a socialist economic platform, that is, they have adhered to the notion that we must raise taxes and redistribute those moneys from the haves to the have nots. At a certain level that is appealing, but in effect what it actually does is retard and harm the ability of an economy to provide jobs and indeed to provide the investment in our social programs that we require to help those who simply cannot help themselves, the mark of a humane society.

We see this in Atlantic Canada, for example, where fiscal federalism, handouts from so-called have to have not provinces, have not had the effect that we would like. In actuality, they have hamstrung and retarded the ability of the competent, dynamic people of the Atlantic provinces to improve their economic situation. That is a fundamental difference between the Liberal government and the Canadian Alliance in how we would deal with poverty.

Our country has indeed the highest personal income taxes of any G-7 nation. When we look at the OECD countries, we see that we fit in at about the middle. This is a significant hindrance, because as I mentioned before it actually impairs the ability of the private sector, which is, as the former finance minister said, the prime generator of jobs in Canada, from being able to provide those jobs. It creates a brain drain to areas of lower taxes, lower regulations and lower restrictions on the ability of the private sector to provide those jobs and expand.

In the end, what would we propose in order to alleviate poverty in Canada and provide the resources for the social programs we have come to enjoy? I would propose the following.

First, nobody in the country who is making less than $20,000 a year should be paying personal income taxes. One cannot live on $20,000 a year, so why is the government taxing people who make less than that? The most important thing that the government can do for those in the lower socio-economic groups is abolish all personal income taxes for those making less than $20,000 a year.

Second, we need to flatten and simplify the tax structure. In our country today it is so difficult to do our taxes that most people require an accountant. Therefore I would suggest that there be two tax structures: one between $20,001 and $60,000, and one for those who make above $60,000 a year, lowering the tax structure for both those areas.

Third, the elimination of capital gains taxes would add a significant impetus to investment and research and development in our country.

Fourth, we should elevate the amount that people can put away in RRSPs and also increase the foreign ownership content.

Fifth, we should allow people to work. We are going to see in the changing demographic that we have in our country a very large bubble of baby boomers who are going to retire. The pension structure we have right now is not going to be sufficient to provide for those people, and many of those people have not saved up enough or invested well enough to be able to provide for themselves. We have to enable those people to work. What we should do is eliminate the mandatory retirement age of 65 and enable people between the ages of 65 and 70 to have a graded ability to accept their CPP while being able to earn money. That would take the pressure off the CPP while enabling individuals to work and to make an input into our economy.

We know that in the future with our changing demographics fewer people will be working and therefore fewer people will be paying taxes into the social programs we require. This contraction of the workforce in one area and the expansion of the retirement age will put an unsustainable amount of pressure on our social programs. The way to alleviate that is to abolish that retirement age of 65, enable people to work beyond that, keep the money they earn, and actually also earn a percentage but not a complete amount of the CPP.

Furthermore, with regard to the OAS and GIS, we can ensure that people who make less than $60,000 a year will receive that but those who make above that amount will not. This is to ensure that OAS and GIS will be there for those individuals at their retirement age.

We have to invest in education. Professional faculties are becoming the purview of the rich. There is no way that I could afford to go to medical school now on the income I had, even with working every summer. It is not possible. The professional faculties such as medicine and dentistry are becoming the purview of the rich. Individuals can go to these faculties if their families have enough money, but if they do not, they cannot attend even though they might be qualified. Our education system must be available for those individuals who have the competence to be accepted into those faculties.

We could adopt what I call an income contingent loan replacement fund. It would enable people to receive government loans and pay back those loans based on the amount of money they earn when they retire. Back in 1994 the former leader of the Reform Party also proposed this idea.

People should have greater labour mobility in Canada. The provincial barriers are a significant hindrance to labour mobility.

We should also encourage research and development. Lowering taxes would enable the private sector to invest in research and development. In so doing, Canada would regain its rightful place as the engine of growth and innovation.

Governments have to become much more efficient. We in the Canadian Alliance have always said that we want a smaller, more efficient government. Some people think we just want to slash and burn but that is not true. We want a government that states its objectives clearly, that measures those objectives and is transparent about them.

Too often ministries do not have specific measurable objectives. They do not state their objectives clearly, they do not measure them and we do not know what the outcome is. There is no transparency in government spending. If we had that we would have a more efficient government. The taxpayers' money would be better spent and we would be better stewards of that responsibility.

The mark of a humane society is to enable individuals to work, to thrive and to be the best that they can be. On the other hand, thankfully in our country as a mark of a humane society, we have social programs to take care of those who cannot take care of themselves.

As the system is now, those in the private sector who are generators of our economy are being penalized and are being driven out of Canada. The poor are also being hurt because the prime generators of jobs have been squeezed out. The ability to generate jobs is being contracted which prevents people from getting jobs.

Because of the relatively high taxes, we are harming the ability to provide money for our social programs, for example, health care. Back in the early 1990s then Prime Minister Mulroney for one brief moment in time actually lowered taxes. His government found that because of the expansion of the economy, more tax money was going into the public coffers. There was more money for health care, education, and pensions. The bottom line was to take care of those who could not take care of themselves.

If we reversed that, those who adhere to the notion that raising taxes will somehow enable us to redistribute income to the have-nots would find that it actually impedes the have-nots from getting a job and getting the social programs they require. Social economics is voodoo economics. It has never worked. One only needs to look at what happened in northern Europe.

A job is the best social program anyone could ever have. We want to provide for those social programs. We want to enable people to work. We want to enable Canadians to be the best that they can be and provide for those who cannot provide for themselves.

[National Defence, February 4th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, on February 2 HMCS Regina became the sixth ship to leave CFB Esquimalt to help in our battle against terrorism.

I would like to thank the crew of the Regina and indeed all of the military personnel at CFB Esquimalt for their service to protect us. I also salute their families who bravely support these courageous men and women.

Now on the cusp of war our government has chosen this month to cut the cost of living allowances of our soldiers by $151 a month. These cuts are enormous when we consider that an ordinary seaman grosses only $2,200 a month. The government also increased their rents by $100 a month last November. These cuts exceed their raises last year, making our soldiers worse off this year than last.

I wish to challenge the government to do the right thing, and stop these heartless and insensitive timed cuts to the finances of our armed forces personnel. We must respect our soldiers and their families, and not penalize them while they are being sent half a world away to protect our interests.

[Criminal Code, February 3rd, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I agree. When we deal with the protection of children against pedophiles, clearly the justice department and our judicial system has to err on the side of protecting the children against sexual abuse. Conditional sentencing does not do that.

What my friend has not mentioned, but I am sure would like to, is the issue of concurrent sentences. Sentencing somebody to concurrent or conditional sentences does not protect civilians. We have heard repeatedly in the House that many of these individuals, once they go in front of the justice system, have already sexually assaulted more than a dozen children. This is not a one off deal. It is a pressing, persistent, pervasive and consistent abnormal behaviour of sexually abusing and assaulting children.

Clearly we need a judicial system that puts the protection of children from these predators first and foremost. Conditional and concurrent sentencing does not do that. That is why we are asking for the minimum sentence.

[Criminal Code, February 3rd, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, my friend from Surrey Central has made an excellent point. He has illustrated quite clearly that the Prime Minister acknowledged publicly the problem of sexual abuse of children in our society 20 years ago. We in the opposition cannot understand why it has taken 20 years to come up with a bill that is less than adequate given the fact that one-third of all girls under the age of 16 and one out of every six boys under the age of 16 have been sexually abused at some time. That is a staggering amount.

We have not heard what the effect is on those people. What does it lead to? Clinically it often leads to various psychiatric or psychological problems, depression, affected interpersonal relations and sometimes suicide. An inordinate percentage of the individuals within the population of abusers have also been sexually abused.

The point I am trying to make is that clearly we know that this is an epidemic in our society that has been neglected for too long. As my friend from Surrey Central has mentioned, we in the Alliance are pushing the government to act effectively, in a timely fashion and above all, to work with the rest of us for the protection of Canadian citizens and particularly Canadian children.

[Petitions, February 3rd, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, on behalf of 5,043 Canadians who support Project Guardian in the protection of Canada's children against pedophiles, it is my pleasure to present this petition that calls on Parliament to enact legislation to establish a pedophile registry.

[Criminal Code, February 3rd, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with my friend and colleague from Surrey Central.

I want to address the statements the parliamentary secretary made in his speech. I have some sympathy for him being forced and obliged to give a government position that is so weak and effete in its intent.

As my colleague from Calgary Northeast mentioned, many of us have been in the House since 1993 and we have been trying to get the government to act on something that should be very basic, yet it refuses. This deals with the safeguard and protection of children in the face of sexual abuse and predation.

I want to address the comment made by my friend, the parliamentary secretary, about the case of Mr. Sharpe, who was, as he quite correctly said, convicted of an offence under the laws of our land. The reason we are putting forth an alternative and a tougher position in the case of Mr. Sharpe is that he did receive a conviction but the penalty did not fit the crime. That is the problem. At the end of the day, Mr. Sharpe paid but he spent a very small amount of time in prison. In fact he was let out after a small period time and the parliamentary secretary knows that.

That is the crux of the matter. One of our concerns with the bill is that this is not a case of where somebody stole something from somewhere else. This is not a young person or any person who has made a mistake. Anyone can make a mistake, that is part of being human. However the type of creature with whom we are dealing, to which this law applies, is a serial predator and sexual abuser of children. That puts these types of individuals in a class by themselves I would think.

At the end of the day our objective is to protect the most vulnerable people in our society against those often violent repeat predators and sexual abusers of little children. In its blunt form, that is what this is all about.

What we would like to see, in the case of Mr. Sharpe and individuals of his ilk, is that they will not be released into the public until the authorities are sufficiently confident that they will not reoffend. One of the deep and pervasive concerns that many of us have, as I said before, having worked in a jail, is that individuals who we know will reoffend and sexually abuse a child or even an adult, are let out. A singular failure of our judicial system is that it allows individuals who commit these heinous crimes out of prison knowing full well that they will reoffend.

We know we cannot treat this lightly. We know we cannot put individuals behind bars forever. That is not the mark of a free and fair society. However, on balance, surely in the case of children, we have to err on the side of being conservative and on the side of protecting children.

I personally hope the government will, under the bill, modify it and make changes so that at the end of the day we will have a mechanism to assess those individuals, who are sexual abusers, violent individuals or pedophiles, to see if there is sufficient cause for concern that they will reoffend before we let them out of jail. We must be sufficiently confident that they will not reoffend before we allow them out of jail.

When I was working in a jail on a Sunday night I remember being called to see a person who was going to be released the next day. The person had a very long rap sheet for extremely violent offences. As the physician responsible I was asked to see the person because he was acting up. I went into his jail cell and started to interview him. Within three minutes the person attacked me.

We managed to get the person into a psychiatric institution. The day after I went to the head of the jail and asked how we could possibly have a system where an individual with a long history of repeated violent offences who had been incarcerated was going to be let out into the unsuspecting public to commit another violent offence and perhaps kill somebody. Within three minutes of merely interviewing him, the person attacked me. What kind of a system is that? The response was, “That is the law. I cannot do anything about it”. That happened before I got into politics.

It points to a deficit in our system which we desperately need to fix. It is our responsibility to give our police and judicial system the ability to protect innocent civilians. We can all agree that has to be a fundamental job and responsibility of our judicial system. The problem is we do not have that right now. We are trying to offer the government a way in which the protection of innocent civilians can be put first and foremost. Specifically we are dealing here with children.

I personally would like to see it extended to other groups, to the violent offenders, to the sexual abusers, and also to the pedophiles.

There are two somewhat related areas with which we have not dealt. One is an international problem concerning how we deal with pedophile rings, people who travel on pedophile journeys to Thailand and Colombia. Many countries have laws on their books that are supposed to apprehend and convict individuals who travel on these journeys as a group of pedophiles to sexually abuse children in some of the poorest and most impoverished countries of the world.

I hope the parliamentary secretary can take back to the justice minister a commitment on his part to work with the international community to better track, apprehend and convict individuals who are involved in pedophile travel rings. We have to do a better job at that. Very few people in the world are ever convicted for that.

Another related issue involves prostitution. There are pimps and organizations that sexually abuse and enslave young women and some young men into the sex trade in Canada. The judicial system has been unable to deal with those individuals. Many of these people are immigrants to Canada, and some of them are illegal immigrants. Be that as it may, these individuals are still human beings. We need a system that penalizes individuals who are profiteering from sexually and physically abusing individuals involved in the sex trade.

Those people often are swept under the carpet and ignored, but they often live lives of virtual slavery in many of the large cities in our country.

I ask the hon. member to please take that back to the justice minister. Perhaps he could incorporate it in a way where we could go after the pimps and the gangs that are involved in this type of sexual slavery of individuals.

In closing, the government has an opportunity to work with parties in the opposition and indeed some of its own members to put forth a law that will protect children, that will get tough with individuals who commit these offences, that will ban conditional sentencing, and that will no longer allow the spurious argument of “for the public good” for allowing individuals to possess child pornography. We fear that is going to put an enormous loophole in the system which will enable individuals to possess child pornography.

We want tougher penalties. We want to stop conditional sentencing. We want to ensure that people who are a danger to children will be incarcerated until there is sufficient evidence that they are not going to be a danger to society. We would prompt the parliamentary secretary and the Minister of Justice to listen to our constructive solutions for the betterment of all Canadians.

[Carrie's Guardian Angel Law, February 3rd, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the member from the Progressive Conservative Party for his fine speech and also my colleague from Calgary Northeast who, as he mentioned, was a police officer and knows this issue very well.

The first thing I want to address is the speech that came from the government. I cannot believe that the government would have the audacity to put forth such a piece of bureaucratic bafflegab that completely defies imagination. It is a speech that completely flies in the face of the experience of everybody in the House who has seen the effect of child abuse and of pedophilia.

Let me go through some of the comments made by the government. The speech said that the public is taken aback by minimum sentencing for pedophiles. I would like the member to show us one person in this country who is taken aback by minimum sentences for repeat pedophiles.

I want to emphasize that this bill, Carrie's guardian angel law, is not about an individual who has made a single assault on a child, as horrendous as that is. This is about an individual who has not only made multiple assaults and has been convicted once, but this person has come to the attention of the legal department of the police again and again.

In fact, if we look at individuals who have been convicted once for a sexual offence against a child, we know that those persons have not assaulted one child, but that they have assaulted many children. Pedophiles, before they are caught and convicted, have sexually assaulted multiple children before they come to the fore of the legal authorities. Then they come again because they have committed other sexual offences.

At the end of the day, this bill only applies to individuals who have sexually assaulted more than two dozen children. What kind of person does the government want to protect who would sexually assault, sexually abuse, and rape two dozen or more children?

As my friend from the Progressive Conservative Party said, one-third of all girls before the age of 18 and one-sixth of boys before the age of 16 have been sexually abused. They have been abused by individuals who are parasites, who are predators, and who in no way, shape or form should have the protection of the law above the protection of Canadians.

The member also said that Canadians want to feel safe and secure. They want to have high penalties, they want peace, and they want a safe society. That is why my colleague and Carrie Kohan have put the bill forward. That is why I have underneath my hand the names of more than 60,000 Canadians who have signed and supported this initiative. That is why Canadians want the law changed. That is why Bill C-214 should be adopted unanimously by the House.

The problem with the current law for the hon. member and the government is that the law is not protecting innocent people. The sentences are not being applied. Individuals are actually spending only a few months in jail for repeatedly sexually assaulting children. That is the line in the sand and that is the crux of the matter.

This is not like somebody who makes a one-off mistake by stealing something, by committing some offence where the victim is an adult, as horrendous and terrible as those offences are. This is about an entirely different circumstance, where the victim is a child or a baby. The victim is someone who cannot in any way defend themselves and the perpetrator is an adult who has done this multiple times before, two dozen times before the bill would actually come into force. That is what this is all about.

If the members of the Liberal Party do not support wholeheartedly Bill C-214 and unanimously adopt this in the House of Commons, they will pay a terrible price at the election booth. Worse, when they look into the eyes of their constituents and children of those constituents, they will have to ask themselves why they did not stand up to defend those children from sexual predators and from rape.

The gentleman from the Bloc Québécois spoke about rehabilitation. We are all in favour of rehabilitation. I used to be a guard in a maximum security prison, and I am a physician. The problem with pedophilia is that it is incurable. On balance, what we and the justice department have to do for justice to be served, is put the protection of children from pedophiles first and foremost. We have no alternative. That is the line in the sand.

The public may want to ask itself why it has taken so long for this issue to come to the House, why has the government not brought it forward itself and why has the government not made a bill that is patently in favour of the protection of children votable? Why has it prevented that from happening?

Government members were elected 10 years ago. This is not rocket science. As my colleagues have mentioned, a litany of violent pedophiles have raped dozens and dozens of children in our society. As Carrie Kohan would tell us, the justice department and the police are not there to protect them, not because the police do not want to, but because the police do not have the power to do so. Our justice department has not given the police the tools to do the job. Heart-rending as it is for our police officers, they cannot protect those children.

I have known Carrie Kohan for 17 years. She is a fighter. She does not quit. She, my colleague from Calgary Northeast and people across the country, including police forces, want to do something. It is not because they want to be punitive, or unforgiving, or lenient, it is because they recognize that the current state of affairs of the laws do not protect innocent children from pedophiles.

Why should a parent or parents not have information that a pedophile has moved next door to them and is a dangerous threat to their children's lives? Why are pedophiles sentenced yet serve only a third of that sentence? Why are they going on unescorted day paroles when only a fraction of their sentence has been served? Why is the public not informed of this?

This is not an action against an adult. This is an action against a child. I ask the hon. member and the government members who have children to look into their hearts and ask themselves if they were in Carrie Kohan's shoes, where a pedophile moved next door and tried to assault their child, what would they do? Would they still stand up in the House and oppose this bill or would they wholeheartedly support it?

I ask for full support of Bill C-214, and we want this passed for the people of our country forthwith.

[National Defence, January 28th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, with due respect to the minister, that is absolute nonsense. Our armed forces personnel possibly are going to war. Their families are concerned. Next month the government is going to slash their cost of living allowance. Last year in November it increased the rents on their substandard homes.

When is the minister going to do the right thing and halt these cuts to their income? I ask him, for the sake of our armed forces personnel, to stop these demoralizing cuts now.