Marc-André Morin

[Business of Supply, April 25th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, I have a very quick question for my colleague. How can she come up with the same diagnosis as us and dispute the entire medical file?

[Business of Supply, April 25th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, this morning has been an excellent demonstration of the current and former governments' lack of action.

Oddly enough, it reminds me of all the problems facing aboriginal communities across the country. Judging solely by the rhetoric of these two parties, you would think that they had done some incredible work and made some wonderful decisions. However, the reality is that aboriginal people are not living in beautiful bungalows with running water and their kids are not attending shiny new schools.

The same will be true when the effects of climate change hit us. They will wake up when there is no water left in the rivers.

[Business of Supply, April 25th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, I would like the hon. member to comment on the economic importance of taking effective action.

There is a business called La patate du Gouin on a logging road in my region. The owner does not have a university degree, but he figured out that he was burning $50,000 worth of diesel every year to produce his electricity. He converted to solar energy and it works very well. This was not the decision of an idealist or an environmental fanatic; it was an economic decision made by someone who wanted to make his business more profitable.

I would like the hon. member to comment on that.

[Combating Terrorism Act, April 23rd, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, using the inappropriate strategy or weapon in a battle is like trying to kill a fly in a greenhouse with a hammer.

If, through the use of a drone, we manage to locate a tank in which a terrorist is hiding, we can blow up that tank and the matter is settled. However, if we bomb a house in which 10 children are sleeping, that is a blunder which results in collateral losses. What the military calls collateral losses are in fact human lives, and those who are wrongfully imprisoned are victims.

[Combating Terrorism Act, April 23rd, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, those cuts are part of the government's law and order agenda.

The government is constantly accusing us of being on the side of pedophiles. However, everyone knows that many Canadians are involved in international pedophile networks. Some European countries monitor the movement of suspected pedophiles and carry out investigations in Cambodia, Thailand or Laos. They mobilize the resources needed to arrest those criminals and bring them to their countries of origin to be tried.

Here all we get is blah, blah, blah, and no resources. However, to stop terrorists, we need to apply the same principle and provide the resources necessary to identify where terrorists get their supplies and their logistical support from.

[Combating Terrorism Act, April 23rd, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, it is disappointing when old ghosts from the past come back to haunt us.

All these ideas were trotted out hastily, out of political opportunism, following the events of September 11. Today, they are resurfacing in an even more dangerous form, once again in a context of political opportunism, simply to give the appearance of having done something. Those who support these ideas simply want to look like they are on the side of those who want to look like they are doing something.

Although the members on the other side of the House accuse us of being soft on crime and other fictions, I am sincerely convinced, like my colleagues, that randomly killing innocent people can never be justified, not even strategically as part of a military strategy. There can be no justification for it.

We cannot fight an enemy until we identify it. Terrorists are not an organized army with headquarters, troops and equipment. They cannot even be identified by their physical characteristics.

Take the Boston Marathon terrorists, for example. The image they projected was that of charming young men. They could have been our children. In a crowd, there was no way to differentiate them from others, yet after the crime was committed, they were identified as transporting what might have been bombs. Walking down the street, most people would not recognize them and would think that they were ordinary young Americans.

This proves that resources need to be focused on properly identifying young people who are going astray and who are potentially dangerous. This requires considerably more police resources and intelligence. The police need funds to cover the expenses involved in occasional travel to remote regions to identify the recruitment and training centres of the groups that support these people.

There is also a lot of work to do to ensure that instructions for making bombs are not so readily available to anyone on the Internet.

Over the course of history, mistakes have been made. For example, in the Second World War, Canadians of Japanese origin were detained in camps for the entire duration of the war. With the benefit of hindsight, we now realize that the allies were able to defeat the Japanese thanks to the efforts of Japanese Canadians and Japanese Americans, who managed to break the Japanese navy's secret codes. This is what made the great allied victories possible.

The upshot is that businesses, fishers and people with prosperous companies on the coast were bankrupted in the small villages in the centre of the country. Their lives were completely destroyed. Years later, they were given an apology, but their lives were, nevertheless, ruined.

When one considers the Liberals’ position, the debate makes us—especially those of us from Quebec—think of the good, old Liberals, the Liberals of 2001, who passed this insane measure.

Clearly, they are not in a position to be too critical because they came up with this in the first place. So much for the charter.

Regarding yesterday’s arrests, there is only one thing to be happy about: that the police officers who arrested the two terrorists had not already been laid off as a result of the government’s short-sighted cuts.

Indeed, if they were not operational, in a few months, we could be talking about a terrorist attack on a train in Toronto. That would be a bombshell. We have undoubtedly headed off a disaster thanks to our police and law enforcement efforts.

The solution is not to pass legislation to arrest more people, but to put a stop to the cuts the government is making to the resources available to Canada’s police forces.

There are a lot of examples internationally. It is coincidental that the two Boston terrorists were Chechens. The Russians have always had a specific technique. In the 1930s, the entire Chechen population was deported to Siberia. They returned years later, completely destroyed and penniless. A third of them died in exile. They were never again made full-fledged Russian citizens.

That caused a whole host of problems that led to civil war and terrorist attacks. It does in no way excuse the wanton killing of people, but it does, to some extent, help to explain the root causes of the problem.

Over the course of the two recent wars in Chechnya, the Russian army engaged in neither interrogations nor temporary detentions. It carried out preventative executions. That only made the problem worse. As soon as compromises are made when it comes to human rights, society takes a step backwards.

Maher Arar and his family’s lives were ruined. Even though mistakes were acknowledged and his name was cleared, he is still living with the burden of what happened. Indeed, two months ago, he was still wearing an electronic bracelet around his ankle and he could not enter the Confederation Building because his photo on the computer screen had a red border around it. How long will it take before he is once again a Canadian citizen with the same rights as other Canadians?

We always end up regretting actions that are taken arbitrarily. It is time that the government started thinking before it acts and investing the necessary resources to address this problem. I am really fearful that somebody, like the terrorists that sought to derail a train, will wreak havoc in Canada. A stupid bill like this will not prevent that from happening. Resources need to be allocated appropriately and there needs to be better coordination between services in order to identify criminals and prevent such things from occurring.

[Combating Terrorism Act, April 23rd, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague seems to have a very good recollection of all these events. What does he feel we need to remember from the war on terror that has been under way since 2001?

My impression that the only salient points are Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, the war in Iraq—for the so-called weapons of mass destruction that turned out to be a fabrication—the Maher Arar case in Canada and a few other cases. That is what is left of that whole ideology, because it was an ideological position on a problem that the Canadian and American governments did not understand. They did not understand what terrorism was and they did not know how to respond. They acted randomly and the results were dreadful

I would appreciate my colleague’s comments on this matter.

[Combating Terrorism Act, April 23rd, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, I can explain the Liberals' behaviour. It is becoming increasingly clear that there is no difference between them and the Conservatives. The Conservatives are doing all of this so that it looks like they are doing something, and the Liberals are acting this way so that they look like they are on the same side as the ones who want to look like they are doing something. In the end, nothing really happens.

We are used to seeing this type of behaviour from the government. The Conservatives claim to want to give rights to aboriginal women, but they know full well that these women will not have the resources or means to exercise those rights because they live in isolated communities that are dealing with a housing crisis and a lack of resources.

We are in a whole other league, and we want to take real action. We are truly concerned about public safety, and we want more resources to really fight terrorism.

[Combating Terrorism Act, April 23rd, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, I would like the hon. member to talk about something that has not really been explored.

In most cases—such as Boston and many other examples—the perpetrators of the attacks had already been identified by the police as radicals. Could the answer simply be to provide more resources in order to conduct investigations in those countries and make sure that the people identified as radicals are not dangerous? I think that would solve the problem. It is all well and good to provide tools to the police, but you do not give someone a hammer to kill a fly on a window.

[Business of Supply, April 18th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, I find it somewhat cynical of my colleague to use Chinese Canadians as an example.

Every Chinese Canadian I know loves their adopted country and their homeland. I would point out to my colleague that those people fled a corrupt totalitarian communist regime whose economy is controlled to the nth degree. They came to Canada because it made sense.

Now they see that China could end up exerting the same type of control over our Canadian economy through protectionist measures that do not work.