Matthew Kellway

[The Budget, March 26th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, that is a simple and short answer: an open and transparent competition.

Let me applaud the courage of the member for standing up to try to defend the Liberals for their history and their record on military procurement, because it is indeed dismal.

I did not really talk about it here, but they are often accused of being responsible for the decade of darkness. I think the important point for today is that the government, with the CFDS, promised stable and predictable funding, and what we find out is that we are back on the yo-yo.

The Liberals took us down. The Conservatives decided they would take us up, but we are headed down again, and that is the problem. The NDP government, post 2015, will bring stable and predictable funding for the Canadian Forces and ensure that they have the right equipment to do the job that we ask of them.

[The Budget, March 26th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, I am happy to talk about what I am for. I am for honesty with Canadians in the budgeting process. I am for competent management.

The government has pretended that its military procurement strategy is a live document. For three years it has carried on this pretence. It is dead. The government has acknowledged it cannot afford it. The department has advised the government it cannot afford it, and the Conservatives continue to play games with budgeting.

The challenge is the challenge of program failure. Because of that incompetence, because of that mismanagement, the government now has less purchasing power for the joint support ships a decade after that process started. That is how incompetent the government is.

The government started procurement for fixed-wing search and rescue aircraft a long time ago. Because of incompetence and mismanagement, we are at a place now where the specifications for fixed-wing search and rescue aircraft have not even been written, and those planes are 50 years old.

[The Budget, March 26th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Pierrefonds—Dollard.

It is a reasonable expectation that a budget should not just explain to us but to all Canadians how the government plans to spend its revenues. It should tell Canadians what it plans on doing with their tax money. Further, it is a reasonable expectation that a government putting forward a budget would want, and therefore make efforts, to explain to Canadians how it would do that.

However, these are disappointed expectations. Instead, we have a government that lacks the courage to live up to these expectations and even lacks the courage of its own convictions. Instead, we have a fundamentally dishonest document in this year's budget. It ducks, dodges and dives. It makes stuff up and pretends.

Let me illustrate this point with the subject of military procurement. In 2008, the government introduced the Canada first defence strategy, or CFDS. It is not so much a policy or strategy, as it is a mighty expensive shopping list, calling for $490 billion of spending over 20 years. We now know that is vastly understated.

Only two years after its introduction the Department of National Defence deemed the CFDS unaffordable. The briefing book prepared for the Associate Minister of Defence by the department in the wake of the May 2011 election stated, “The funding reductions from Budget 2010 and the reduced funding line going forward will make the Canada First Defence Strategy (CFDS) unaffordable”. The recommendation is to “conduct a CFDS Reset to confirm level of ambition”.

It needs to be noted that the CFDS was considered unaffordable even when the department was still budgeting just $5.7 billion for the sustainment of the F-35, which the CFDS states the government will buy. Therefore, the department's assessment of the unaffordability of the CFDS was and remains accurate.

Of course it is not just the associate minister's briefing book that we have to look to for an assessment of the affordability of the CFDS. The Minister of National Defence put together a transformation team in 2010 to “develop ideas to increase efficiency and effectiveness, and to act as the driving force behind organizational changes needed to reposition the DND/CF for the future”.

I am quoting from the forward to the “Report on Transformation 2011”, otherwise known as the Leslie report after its main author, now retired Lieutenant-General Andrew Leslie. This was not just about finding savings to the tune of a billion dollars per year from the budget. Rather, in Lieutenant-General Andrew Leslie's terms it was also about making “the Canada First Defence Strategy more achievable within the resources available”.

As early as 2010, that shortfall was anticipated to be at least a billion dollars per year.

It should be noted that none of Lieutenant-General Leslie's recommendations were implemented. Also, the reset or rewrite of the Canada first defence strategy recommended by the department and the associate minister remains an outstanding promise of the current Minister of National Defence. In other words, since 2010, the government has carried on pretending that it has a real, viable, affordable plan for military procurement. That pretense carries right on through into this budget with the incorporation of a document entitled, “Canada First: Leveraging Defence Procurement Through Key Industrial Capabilities”, otherwise known as the Jenkins report.

The Jenkins report's principal objective is to “outline an approach to maximize the overall benefit of the government's CFDS investment”. It assumes that the CFDS is affordable, that it is a viable military procurement plan and that it is what it had proclaimed itself to be in 2008. It assumes that military procurement under the CFDS will generate $49 billion of industrial and regional benefits. It continues the pretense that the CFDS is not long dead, and by way of the incorporation of that report into the budget, so does the budget.

One might ask what the harm is in pretending that we can afford that shopping list, when we cannot.

Let us examine the recent case of the joint support ships. In 2004 the Liberal government set out to purchase three of these with a budget of $2.1 billion. By the time the bids from industry rolled in under the Conservatives in 2008, it was clear that there was not going to be enough money to get just two ships. The Department of National Defence advised the minister in August 2008, the very same month that the bids were deemed non-compliant, that it was going to cost at least $3 billion to buy those ships.

The Conservatives responded by budgeting $2.8 billion two years later in 2010. Now the PBO has advised in a recent report on the matter that the government should be budgeting over $4 billion for what it intends to buy. More important, it also advised that the $2.8 billion that the government has budgeted has actually less purchasing power than the $2.1 billion the Liberals had budgeted in 2004.

The Conservatives started from behind and then stepped backward. The threat is that if the government continues to behave this way, if it continues to pretend that it can be things that it cannot, that it can buy things that it cannot, then we will continue to walk backward. It is called program failure and it has devastating consequences to the recapitalization of our Canadian Forces.

From the sea to the air, we can see that when one pretends to be able to buy it all, a priority is put on nothing. We have fixed-wing search and rescue being performed in this country by aircraft that is nearly 50 years old, belongs in a museum and is in need of replacement. However, the effort to procure replacement fixed-wing search and rescue capability has been grounded, squeezed out by other procurements higher up on that shopping list. Asked just last week about this procurement, the minister responded by saying that it was a good question and pointed his finger at his colleagues and their departments.

On the ground there is a different story still. Procurement projects for the family of land combat vehicles are all at different stages. This includes the LAV III upgrades, close combat vehicles, tactical armoured patrol vehicles, tanks and howitzers totalling, as best as one can make out from beating the bushes, about $6 billion in acquisition costs.

Obviously it is the army for whom these vehicles are intended that seems to be taking the brunt of the budget cuts. Now there is no reference per se to DND budget cuts in the budget. Those facts, that information, in the words of one budget commentator, is only being whispered “in Swahili at the bottom of a well”. However, the chief of the Canadian army, Lieutenant-General Devlin, appeared before a Senate committee recently, acknowledging that his force is facing at least a 22% cut. Reports suggest that a further 8% cut is coming effective next week.

With the government keeping up pretences that the CFDS is affordable, that budget axe is going to fall on operations and maintenance and readiness. It means no more Arctic training. It means a fire sale on government property. It means recapitalized fleets with empty gas tanks as the fuel budget going forward comes nowhere near covering cost increases from the past.

The Conservative government introduced the Canada first defence strategy with the promise of “stable and predictable defence funding”. That promise did not even last two years. It is just that the government has spent the last three years pretending that it did not break that promise.

This budget continues that pretence to the detriment of the Canadian Forces. This budget perpetuates the pretense that this is a competent government. It is most certainly not. The military procurement file brings that truth into sharp relief.

[Strengthening Military Justice in the Defence of Canada Act, March 21st, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, I would point out that it is not a matter of mistrust of the military. The accountability framework emerged from an inquiry in a very unfortunate part of our military history. It set out very clear purposes and principles that Canadians believe in and that New Democrats accept and demand for civilians of this country. That accountability framework was signed by Vice-Admiral Garnett, who was the VCDS at the time, and Colonel Samson, who was the Provost Marshal at the time.

[Strengthening Military Justice in the Defence of Canada Act, March 21st, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, the government side has offered up this very narrow hypothetical set of circumstances to put a bill, which is on the whole a very positive step forward, in danger of being deemed unconstitutional. The general rule and principles set out in the accountability framework should survive in Bill C-15. It is the expectation of Canadians that any justice system be fair and reasonable; I would even dare suggest that most Canadians would suggest that there be a higher onus on a justice system that applies to the men and women of our armed forces in light of what we ask them to do on our behalf.

[Strengthening Military Justice in the Defence of Canada Act, March 21st, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to be on my feet today to talk to Bill C-15 at report stage and to deal with a colleague's proposed amendment to Bill C-15, An Act to amend the National Defence Act and to make consequential amendments to other Acts.

The title is interesting. One wishes there were a shorter handle on the title, but it is also more commonly known as the “strengthening military justice in the defence of Canada act”.

We have had lots of discussion this morning on the issue of relevance of the debate and what we are talking about. What is important to understand and appreciate here is that the amendment before us for discussion and debate is a piece of a system. It sits in the broader context of the military justice system. It is important to understand the relationship of that amendment and the issues implicated by that amendment in the context of the broader justice system.

Members may recall that we had opposed this bill at second reading on this side of the House, but an important amendment has come out of committee that allows us to reluctantly support the bill when we move on to third stage. I say “reluctantly” because the bill would still be far from what it ought to be. It would make a number of changes to the military justice system that would be positive, but not all of its changes would be positive, and that is why our colleague's proposed amendment to the bill is welcome today. It is an important issue to contemplate and debate.

The bill has had a long history. It was 10 years in the making to get to this point, and it is important that it get a thorough vetting. The parliamentary secretary talks as though his party was not in government for seven of those years, but in fact it was, and he should be asking questions back in the lobby about why we waited around for seven years for this important bill to arrive.

Nevertheless, there is a long history to this bill. It emerges out of a couple of very comprehensive reports.

The Rt. Hon. Antonio Lamer had a crack at it in 2003. He made 88 recommendations, which is suggestive of some of the very significant deficiencies in the military justice system.

There was a Senate committee report dealing with the same matters. Then again there was another report by a former chief justice of the Supreme Court, Patrick LeSage, and the parliamentary secretary should contemplate why the Conservatives sat on that report for a year before bringing it forward if he is in such a hurry to see this bill and these changes implemented.

In the interim, we have had elections. The Liberals had two years with it as well, and they did not do anything, and we have had a Conservative prorogation. It seems there is a general resistance. In fact, we have even walked backwards from where we have been in earlier Parliaments, when we had Bill C-41 die on the order paper.

The significance of Bill C-41 was that it dealt with an issue that is very important to our party, and that is the issue of service-related offences that can proceed through summary trial and result in a criminal record.

Former Colonel Michel Drapeau has spoken at length about the unique nature of military justice systems and the need to balance an expeditious justice system providing for deterrence and ensuring discipline, and the importance of that in having efficient armed forces while also ensuring that the rule of law predominates.

Therefore, in the military justice system we get this summary trial process which, in the normal course in civilian life, we would not recognize as a form of fair justice.

In this process, one's own commander can sit in judgment and there are no transcripts, no right to counsel, et cetera. This is important, because about 95% of cases that go to trial go through this system.

However, we are supporting the bill because at the end of the day we have managed, over the years, to persuade the Conservative Party that fewer of the offences that can go through the summary trial procedure can actually attract a criminal record that a member of the armed forces might take into civilian life. Bill C-15 would lessen the number of those offences. That is a very positive thing and that is why the bill, with or without this amendment, is worthy of our support.

Nevertheless, we are left with an approximate form of justice with this summary trial process, and this is where the importance of the amendment comes in. It is the investigation that precedes that approximate form of justice that becomes extremely important, and that investigation process must be done properly.

The Conservatives have taken the accountability framework that was put together following the Somalia inquiry that set out the relationship between the Vice Chief of the Defence Staff and the Provost Marshal and are turning that administrative document into statute, which is a worthy thing to do. However, in the course of doing so, the Conservatives have done something quite unfortunate, and that brings rise to the amendment today.

This amendment is worthy because the bill would provide new powers to the Vice Chief of the Defence Staff with respect to military police investigations, those very investigations that will end up in summary trials. Clause 4 of the bill proposes adding a subsection 18.5(3) to the National Defence Act to say that:

(3) The Vice Chief of the Defence Staff may issue instructions or guidelines in writing in respect of a particular investigation.

Currently the accountability framework language says:

The VCDS shall not direct the CFPM with respect to specific military police operational decisions of an investigative nature.

Further, it says under section 7(a) that:

The VCDS will have no direct involvement in individual ongoing investigations but will receive information from the CFPM to allow necessary management decision making.

Those provisions are there, and they flow from the principles and purpose of the accountability framework. Of course, this accountability framework flows from the extremely unfortunate incidents in Somalia, which, although they may have been in the last century, are critically relevant to this discussion today.

The purpose of the accountability framework that came out of the Somalia inquiry is to ensure the provision of a professional and effective military police service for independent investigations, to balance competing interests and priorities and, critically, to ensure that the Provost Marshal is accountable to the Vice Chief of the Defence Staff for “developing and maintaining police standards which are consistent with those of other police agencies”. Who in Canada would want to deny the men and women of our Canadian armed forces an investigation into alleged misconduct that is consistent with those of other police agencies?

That is what the accountability framework allowed. History proves that it is a workable document and provided for reasonable, fair investigations leading into these summary trials.

It is most unfortunate and very much a backward step for the government to now propose in Bill C-15 an investigation process that is inconsistent with those of other police agencies in this country.

[Response to the Supreme Court of Canada Decision in R. v. Tse Act, March 19th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, the member said in his speech that the Conservatives had set records for time allocation motions. To be fair to those on the other side, they are tied with the Liberals for the number of time allocation motions that have been brought before the House.

I am wondering if that is consistent with the member's argument that what the Liberals say in opposition is different from what they do in government.

[Response to the Supreme Court of Canada Decision in R. v. Tse Act, March 19th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Timmins—James Bay for his struggle on behalf of Canadians and their interest in their privacy rights, in particular with respect to the bills he mentioned, Bill C-12 and Bill C-30.

I cannot speculate on why the government has such callous and obvious disregard for the privacy rights of Canadians. I cannot account for the zealotry of the minister himself and, perhaps as my colleague suggested, the PMO, nor the disregard for the charter, the Canadian Bill of Rights and the other legislation that, frankly, obligates the government to bring forward legislation to the House only after it has been vetted for conformity with the charter.

There is obviously a trend here. I reflect on past speeches I have given and all of these issues ultimately go to accountability. Bill C-42 had the opportunity to provide the House with oversight of the RCMP, and the Conservatives ignored that. They go to Senate omnibus bills and so on and so forth.

[Response to the Supreme Court of Canada Decision in R. v. Tse Act, March 19th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate my colleague's hypothesis on this. She may very well be correct. I do not want to be interpreted today as suggesting that the minister was off message. It is a message that is too frequently given. As I said in my speech, it is this juxtaposition of sympathy for the victims and civil liberties and constitutional freedoms, but somehow we cannot be for both.

In this case, the binary option was expressed with the government or with the child pornographers. It was perhaps a little overzealous. It has been described as being hurtful and offensive. It is certainly all that, but it is also extremely juvenile and it brings shame upon the minister himself and, frankly, upon this institution to have that level of debate and discourse in the House.

[Response to the Supreme Court of Canada Decision in R. v. Tse Act, March 19th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, I am happy to rise today in support of Bill C-55, An Act to amend the Criminal Code. I will be splitting my time with the member for Terrebonne—Blainville.

Finally, we have a helpful, useful intervention by the government, a crime bill we can support, not one laced with poison pills. That owes to the circumstances under which the bill comes before the House. It is really the force of circumstances in the form of a Supreme Court imposed deadline operating here, serving in a sense to take the matter out of the government's control.

It is the Supreme Court that has forced this amendment by way of its ruling in R. v. Tse, a case that dates back to April 2012. The case involved the issue of unauthorized wiretapping and, in response to the constitutional challenges raised, the Supreme Court ultimately ruled that such a practice could be considered constitutional if the matter were authorized properly by way of legislation. Therefore, the Supreme Court gave the government some time to figure this out, a year in fact, and Bill C-55 is the response. It represents the government's effort to ensure such unauthorized interceptions of private communications be done constitutionally, and it succeeds.

This bill would amend the Criminal Code to provide required clarity, oversight and accountability to the rules with respect to wiretapping in circumstances alleged to be too urgent for prior judicial authorization. Oversight and accountability do not come easily to the government, so it is encouraging to see the bill in Parliament. In fact, it is something just short of a miracle perhaps in light of the progenitor to this bill, Bill C-30.

The history of Bill C-55 is interesting and worthy of comment. Indeed, it explains why the bill is before us at the 11th hour, and indeed the last minute thereof, to boot.

The Supreme Court decision that we are discussing today was rendered a year ago, and yet here we are rushing this through before the April 13 deadline, which is looming. I will not be too critical of that because the timing of the bill is very much linked to the content of it and, frankly, what would make it succeed and be worthy of our support. It is the urgency of the circumstances that seem to have rendered the bill uncharacteristically brief and straightforward. It is in a twisted and counterintuitive way that we perhaps owe the Minister of Public Safety some thanks for his tendency to a debating style that is reductionist in the extreme and that very often ends up posing distorted binary options. It is usually some framing of the issue that places sympathy for victims in opposition to a respect for civil liberties and constitutional freedoms. The case in point today was the minister's claim that people were either with the government or with the child pornographers.

That was the framing for the now dead Bill C-30, the so-called “lawful access bill”. I call it the case in point because Bill C-30 was really the government's first crack at responding to the Supreme Court's invitation to put in place a legislative framework that would render constitutional the unauthorized interception of private communications. However, it was both and alarming and cynical overreach that attempted to exploit all of our disgust and abhorrence for terrible crimes against children in an effort to bully Canadians into giving up their right to privacy in online communications.

It was dubbed the “protecting children from Internet predators act”. That bill would have allowed law enforcement agencies to access Canadians' personal information without a warrant at virtually any time for virtually any reason. It would have given the minister and the government unprecedented powers to access information and to force telecom, Internet, telephone and wireless providers to allow the government to spy on customers. Bill C-30 would have effectively criminalized all Canadians.

That is the legislation the Minister of Public Safety brought to Parliament a little over a year ago when he thought he had a bit of time to play games with the legislation. That is what the Conservative government thought was reasonable: unlimited and unaccountable access to private communication. Luckily, Canadians, Canadian privacy commissioners and civil society organizations were watching, and they did not like what was being proposed. Also lucky was the minister exceeded even himself with offensive hyperbole and sabotaged his own bill in the process. Yes, it is for that and that alone in a strange way that we owe the minister some thanks.

The lesson of Bill C-30, of course, is not lost on anyone. It is that with time to play and left to its own devices, the government will gladly snatch from Canadians their right to privacy. Therefore, we can be sure that Canadians are watching and guarding that right very closely, as are we. Thankfully, this bill is a far cry from Bill C-30. It stands in contrast and, in fact, is short, simple, direct and straightforward.

The task to be accomplished by way of the bill is to amend the Criminal Code to comply with the Supreme Court's 2012 order to change section 184.4 of the code to comply with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms or to lose it. Section 184.4, as it is currently written, allows peace officers to intercept private communications in emergency situations where the officer or officers have reasonable grounds to believe the situation is one of imminent harm to life or property. The urgency of such situations necessitates actions before the proper judicial authorization can be obtained. There are times when this is an appropriate action that can prevent crime and protect Canadians and for this reason section 184.4 exists.

Where it has fallen short up to now is in the area of accountability, largely. Two things have been missing: first, a system of oversight to inform Canadians of when and how this legislation is used; and, second, a requirement to notify individuals whose communications have been intercepted within a period of time defined within the bill. The court found in the R. v. Tse decision that this gap in the legislation constituted a violation of the charter.

Bill C-55 would close this gap, perhaps not perfectly but through the use of four mechanisms. First, the bill would require that the Minister of Public Safety and provincial Attorneys General to make public a report on the use of section 184.4 to intercept private communications on an annual basis. Second, the bill would require that persons whose communications had been intercepted must be notified of the interception within a given period of time. Third, the bill would narrow the definition of who could conduct this surveillance and would change it from “peace officers” to “police officers”. Finally, the bill would specify the list of offences for which section 184.4 could be invoked to those offences listed in section 183 of the Criminal Code.

These four will result in an improvement to the section of the code that serves to both limit the use of warrantless wiretapping to certain individuals, circumstances and offences and to increase the accountability in cases where it is invoked. The Supreme Court of Canada has spoken on the issue and Bill C-55 is Parliament's answer and, in the our view, the right one. Enhanced accountability and transparency is something the NDP will always support.

We know from experience where a lack of oversight and accountability takes us. We get massive omnibus bills, tax bills and omnibus crime bills passed at the last minute, with no time for parliamentarians to vet legislation, as our constituents rightly expect us to do. We get bills like Bill C-30, which outraged the public, and the minister managed to shame himself in that process.

Bill C-55 would revive at least a bit of what the government had run over and left for dead, which is accountability, by requiring the Minister of Public Safety to report annually to Parliament on the use of section 184.4 and the frequency of warrantless wiretaps in emergency situations. It would also require provincial Attorneys General to make this information public as well.

This is the kind of legislation we need, not the kind that gives cabinet ministers or other officials unprecedented powers but one that upholds Canadian law and increases accountability of police to the public. This why my colleagues and I in the NDP will support the bill.