Pat Martin

[Lobbyists Registration Act, June 12th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister has belatedly realized that the revolving door between his transition team and lobby firms is wrong.

Why does he not apply that same cooling off period to his war room veterans, people like Reynolds, Norquay, Baran and Boessenkool. It seems that they slammed the door shut only after all their inside buddies were firmly set up in the big lobby firms.

The Conservatives said that they would put a stop to the Liberal legacy of political influence peddling. Why are there such glaring inconsistencies in the application of Tory principles when it comes to lobbying?

[Criminal Code, June 12th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. Surely there is some obligation for hon. members to stay away from complete fabrications and untruths. Is there nowhere in the rules or Standing Orders that one has to tell the truth from to time? Is there nothing barring somebody like him from standing and making an insultingly, completely--

[Criminal Code, June 12th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague, the member for Malpeque, is a former attorney general. I do not have to tell him that sentencing has more than one purpose and one goal.

The first element of sentencing has a punishment and a consequence element to it. However, there is also a rehabilitation element, hopefully. If these people will be on the streets again some day, we want them to get the services that rehabilitate them. The third point I want to dwell on is that there has to be a deterrent factor.

I come from the riding of Winnipeg Centre. On a hot summer night, there is gun play every night. Kids, with a cavalier attitude toward guns, use them more and more frequently. Families will not sleep in the outside rooms of their houses; they sleep in the inner rooms. They are worried about a stray bullet coming through their houses.

From a deterrent point of view, what is wrong with mandatory minimum sentences in a crimes committed with guns, a violent crime perpetrated on the streets of Winnipeg where a gun is used?

We want the message out there that there is a deterrent so kids will take it more seriously. Instead of fooling around with guns in the back lanes, we want them to know that there is a serious consequence to that in my riding.

[Criminal Code, June 12th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I wish to thank my colleague from Abitibi—Témiscamingue for a very enlightened and passionate speech. Clearly, he is coming from an informed point of view, from his personal background in the criminal justice system in the province of Quebec. I am sure that his reasoning applies to all regions of Quebec.

He had very strongly held views that simply applying longer prison sentences in and of itself is not a sufficient deterrent. What would be a deterrent then because we have been wrestling with every aspect of the criminal justice system to make our streets safer? It was only in the catastrophic event that led my party to agree in theory at least with mandatory minimum sentences in cases where a violent crime has taken place with the use of a gun.

However, the shock of the incidents to which I am referring has been such that the Canadian public is demanding some extraordinary measures. They are seized by this issue in a way that I have never seen before. Overwhelmingly, when I canvassed the constituents of my riding, by a factor of five to one, the number one top of mind issue is to make our streets safe. They told me to go to Ottawa and do whatever I can, so that they can send their children to the corner store to buy a quart of milk without worrying about their safety. That is how extreme it is in the inner city, in the core area of the city in which I live.

I loath the idea of the heavy-handed enforcement crime and punishment model that would contemplate locking up more people and throwing away the key, but I am convinced that we are doing a disservice to Canadians if we do not at least acknowledge the severity. The severity of the crime deserves a serious enough punishment to be a genuine deterrent.

I am proud that in the province of Manitoba we have a multi-faceted approach, a very sympathetic approach to the causes of crime. I believe that chronic long term poverty is surely one of the most obvious root causes of crime, but also the cause and effect situation. If longer sentences are not a deterrent, what does my colleague propose would be a proper deterrent?

[Criminal Code, June 12th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, as interesting as I find the comments from my colleague from Yukon in hearing the rest of his speech, I wonder what bearing it has on the speech in terms of questions and comments of the other valid points that my colleague--

[Criminal Code, June 12th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague is quite right. At the end of the hours allocated for debate on Bill C-10 on Friday, I was trying to share with the House some of the innovative ideas that the NDP government of Manitoba had been introducing in seeking to address these criminal justice issues.

I went through the importance of opportunities for youth. Much of the activity or the irritant bothering people in the inner city of Winnipeg is seen to be youth gang related. The attorney general of Manitoba, the Hon. Gord Mackintosh, has talked about a three-legged stool in criminal justice issues. He has said that one of the key legs is economic opportunities for youth, a sense of involvement, a sense of inclusion. This is key and instrumental in satisfying the concerns of people and safety issues.

Another key leg on this three-legged stool is a newly developed idea that has recently been introduced into law in Manitoba. My colleague from Burnaby—Douglas and my colleague, the justice critic for the NDP, from Windsor—Tecumseh may be interested in knowing more about this. We are trying to make it so that crime does not pay.

In that vein, we have introduced legislation where the government can seize the proceeds of crime, which it deems or considers to be proceeds. If the provincial government can demonstrate to a judge what it believes to be proceeds of crime, then there is a reverse onus situation. People holding that property would have to demonstrate, beyond reasonable doubt, that they did not purchase the products with the proceeds of crime. This has been a powerful tool. It reverses the burden of proof and the onus.

Let me give an example of a recent case. A known patch member of a motorcycle gang was living in a $600,000 to $700,000 house, which in Winnipeg is an expensive house. That would be a couple of million dollars by Toronto standards. The driveway was full of power boats, motorcycles and all the toys and luxury items that one could possibly be imagine. Yet there were no visible means of income for the past many years.

The question was put to the individual whether he had won a lottery or had inherited money from a rich uncle who passed away. He was unable to demonstrate, in any way, where the money had come from to allow him to live in such a luxurious setting.

The government had pretty good evidence that the items were purchased from proceeds of crime, but not quite enough to charge him criminally. Roughly $600,000 worth of material things, luxury items, were seized. That money is dedicated to further enforcement. It does not only go into general revenue. The money goes into policing and catching more people.

If crime is not profitable, there will be less crime. This is another tool in the toolbox of law enforcement officials that puts the burden of proof where it belongs, on criminals to prove that they purchased the products, the bling bling, through legitimately earned money and not the proceeds of crime.

I would like to add that to the mix for the consideration of all members as we address this pressing issue.

[Extension of Sitting Hours, June 9th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I work closely with my colleague on the committee, but I would point out that if we played Bill C-2 backwards on a turntable, a hidden message would come through. It would say to beware the enemies of accountability because they are lurking around every corner and they are deliberately trying to undermine the bill. I am not making this up. There are serious enemies to the bill.

I tracked what happened the last time we tried to introduce transparency when the Liberals were in power. I have done the research and I have found the exact moment when the Liberals bailed out on the access to information reform. Believe me, the enemies of accountability and transparency on that side are powerful, well connected and come right from the top.

We were well along the way to having access to information reform in our hands. We were that close. We had studied it for eight or nine years. I think that should be long enough to even satisfy my colleague who really wants to micro-analyze every t and every i, to her credit. The study was done. We all knew what needed to be done and the minister of justice committed to us, to our committee, to me personally, that he would introduce meaningful ATI reform. It was sabotaged. It was undermined by the leadership of that party. Even though the minister of justice himself, I believe, shared my view that freedom of information is the oxygen democracy breathes, certainly the people who surround him in the back rooms of the Liberal Party do not agree. There are many enemies to accountability.

[Extension of Sitting Hours, June 9th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague also sits on the special legislative committee on the federal accountability bill and I have noticed his interest. I have even noticed some sympathetic treatment toward some of the issues that we have raised that we would like to see as amendments to the bill. The NDP has put forward some 20 amendments, most of them not too onerous, most of them minor in nature. I do appreciate the reception most of them have received from not just government members on the committee, but from other members as well.

The public appointments commission is one issue that is particularly interesting to us and one we are committed to, and we would appreciate the government's support on that when the time comes up.

As my colleague has said, this is the last day that a motion can be moved to extend the hours. I would put it to the House that we are also running out of time to introduce meaningful amendments to the Canada Elections Act so that we can stop what I see as the wide scale, wholesale abuse of the Canada Elections Act in the context of the Liberal leadership race as we are seeing it today.

We began by exposing through the media the fact that some people think it is appropriate to launder money through their children's bank accounts in order to exceed the donation limits of the Canada Elections Act. I do not care how this is portrayed or how it is painted and I do not care if somebody gets sued for it, but that is fraud. That is a deliberate attempt to circumvent the donation rules of the act. That was exposed by the hard work of journalists who drew attention to it and by the hard work of members of this House of Commons.

I think everyone is now aware that we do not want undue corporate influence in our elections. We do not want union money influencing or having a disproportionate influence in elections. It should only be a voter, or at least a landed immigrant or a permanent resident of Canada who should be participating in the election process, and even then, with pretty strict guidelines and pretty strict limits.

My colleague, the parliamentary secretary, said that today was the deadline for extending the hours. We should have unanimous consent to do just that so we can introduce these important amendments before it is too late, before we lose the confidence of Canadians and before we lose this window of opportunity to restore integrity to the democratic system here in Canada.

[Extension of Sitting Hours, June 9th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, that is right. I thought it was clever that when someone criticized the $1,200 child care money the Conservatives said that at least they were not trying to shake down $5,400 from kids, that they were giving money to kids.

The other aspect to election financing reform that we have an opportunity to do something about is an amendment that we put forward dealing with these huge Liberal leadership loans. These leadership loans are tantamount to a corporate donation. If one does not repay these loans after 18 months they are treated as a donation. If one is only allowed to donate $5,400 a year but one loans somebody $100,000 and, wink, wink, nudge, nudge, one does not repay it, it is then treated as a donation. That is corporate sponsorship. It is deliberately circumventing the donation limits of the Canada Election Act and it is wrong. It means that some people are getting disproportionate influence through their donations than others. We want that curbed.

We have one classic example of a member, who actually crossed the floor from the Conservatives to the Liberals, having a loan that after 18 months would have rolled into being considered a donation. She would then have found herself in violation of the law and would simply have taken out another loan to pay off the first loan and rolled it over. I do not want to use the word useless but that is how flawed our election financing laws are. They are easy to circumvent. People are taking steps to circumvent them.

On these corporate leadership loans, one was given to the member for Kings--Hants from the head of a fishing company who in fact was the leading advocate and champion for the income trusts situation. We do not have to be a rocket scientist to connect those kinds of situations.

We have a unique opportunity to deal with the stated priorities of Bill C-2, which includes the access to information reform, a new public appointments commission and to do away with the patronage. I will stop for a second and restate how passionately I feel about this. The governor in council appointments used to be done from a single desk in the PMO. The main qualification was the colour of the membership card that one had in one's pocket. Everybody knows that. Let us not kid ourselves.

The reason we do not need to study some of these things to death is that they are so blatantly obvious. It was just the way Ottawa ran for years and years. This public appointments commission would be a merit based process, an objective transparent process where these 3,500 GIC appointments would be filled based on one's merit or skill and not on one's membership card and the ruling party of the day. That is critically important, as is cleaning up the whistleblowing and lobbyist registration.

It is ambitious. When it was first introduced some said that it is too ambitious. I myself commented that it looked as if it was designed to fail because it was so huge and such an ambitious undertaking. Maybe that is something a newly elected government will do. Once it is two, three or four years into being the government it knows the complexity of these things to a greater degree. It is an ambitious thing but it is a good first project.

Now we are seeing that it is achievable. Yes, it is challenging and, yes, we are burning up a lot of hours in committee. Those who would accuse us of fast-tracking it in committee are not counting the number of hours that we are in session. Yes, it is a small number of days but when we are meeting six, eight and nine hours a day, we are compressing six months worth of committee time into a few weeks.

Normally committees sit two hours a day twice a week, which is four hours week. We are sitting 24 hours a week, which is a six week sitting in one. I will challenge anyone who stands up and says that we have fast-tracked this to the point where we have jeopardized the integrity of the bill because it is simply not true. I would accuse them of having some other motivation in making that accusation.

One of the reasons we need to deal with this before the end of this particular session of Parliament is that we do not need to give the enemies of transparency and accountability time to regroup, time to sabotage and time to undermine our activities because villainy wears many masks and none so dangerous as the mask of virtue.

I do not trust some of those people. I am talking about people not just in other parties who may have ulterior motives. There are people who would rather see the federal government maintain the status quo of corruption, lack of transparency, et cetera, for their own narrow partisan purposes at everyone's expense and, I would argue, at the expense of the nation state itself, not to overstate things.

There are others within the permanent government, within the senior bureaucracy, who are no great friends of transparency and open government. In fact, it is contrary to everything for which they stand. A certain culture evolves. It was the culture of secrecy that allowed corruption to flourish in the Liberal years, was it not? The Liberals could not have operated in the light of day. If sunlight is a powerful disinfectant it would have exposed the rot that was taking place year after year within the sponsorship scandal.

The sponsorship scandal was not limited to Quebec. Winnipeg, Manitoba was cheated by the sponsorship scandal as well. Chuck Guité delivered $2.3 million to the Pan Am Games in 1999. Do members know how much we received? We received $600,000 while $1.7 million was hived off as production costs by a Liberal advertising firm. No one ever found out what those production costs were but I say that was the Liberal Party of Canada's take of that $2.3 million. I accuse them of that. I will say it inside the House and I will say it outside the House. The vice-president of sponsorship for the Pan Am Games, who is now a sitting Liberal Senator, worked directly with Chuck Guité to rob our sponsorship of the Pan Am Games of $1.7 million. I defy them to show me where that money went.

It was not just Quebeckers who were outraged by this and who should celebrate putting a stop to it. Winnipeg, Manitoba fell victim to Chuck Guité and Compass Communications, the Liberal Party of Nova Scotia, the president of the company, the fourth largest beneficiary of sponsorship contracts. It is not as though we do not have Liberal advertising companies in Winnipeg. We have plenty that are plugged right into the Liberal Party, but this contract had to go to this out of town contractor because it would play ball with graft, fraud and corruption.

I am speaking on behalf of Winnipeggers when I stand in the House, and it is an honour to do so. On their behalf I send the very clear message that I am willing to roll up my sleeves and do what I can to ensure this bill is a success and that it does not fall victim to the enemies of transparency and accountability. For those who would seek to carry on with the status quo, they are jeopardizing the very integrity of the nation state of Canada. Do they realize how much harm they did and how critically important it is to now show some contrition? Jimmy Swaggart even showed some contrition when he prostrated himself before his followers and said that he had sinned, that he was wrong. I want to see that from the Liberals, the televangelists' style. They know how to apologize. I want to see a real apology from the Liberal Party of Canada for jeopardizing the nation state of Canada.

[Extension of Sitting Hours, June 9th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, on behalf of the NDP caucus, I am pleased to join the debate on the motion by the government House leader to extend the hours of Parliament's sitting so, within the current calendar, we have enough working time to do justice to Bill C-2, the federal accountability act.

At the outset, the NDP is pleased to roll up its sleeves and be here as long as it takes to ensure the bill gets dealt with as a top priority because Canadians are watching.

The bar has been set pretty high. The government made it its centrepiece when it was first elected. It was a campaign promise first and then part of the legislative package. It was the first bill introduced in Parliament, a bill that would clean up government and clean up accountability and transparency. It was done in the hopes that it would have an effect on the confidence of Canadians in their institutions, not just the federal government itself, but the institutions created such as crown corporations, agencies, et cetera.

Let us face it, what we are left with is a pretty tarnished package. I fear we have done such great damage to the confidence Canadians have in their government that they are less likely to vote. That lack of confidence in their institutions undermines the whole democratic process. People are jaded and circumspect. Because of that, they may not exercise their democratic right to vote and send people to Ottawa. This does lasting harm that takes generations to heal.

When we started in this 39th Parliament, quite rightly the number one priority was a comprehensive act, and some say almost too big a project, to try to restore the faith that Canadians should have in their system.

We are pleased to work extra hours to get this project through the House before we break for the summer recess. We are afraid, if this process is delayed and put over into the fall, or God help us put over into the spring, that it will lose momentum. It will lose the drive, the attention and the focus of not only members, but of the media and the general public. If we fail, if we let the public down on this initiative, I do not think we will ever get their confidence back. If we fail now, we will have done irreparable harm to the confidence that Canadians should have in their government.

There is a saying that villainy wears many masks and none so dangerous as the mask of virtue. What we have seen are the enemies of accountability, those who would seek to preserve the status quo. They lined up against this bill. We have to come together. We have to muster our resources to do combat with those enemies of transparency and accountability, those champions of the status quo who nearly undermined the national unity of Canada.

That is our project. We cannot overstate the importance of trying to restore integrity to federal politics. The survival of the country itself may depend on it. I am not saying that to overstate things or to be romantic. I am not kidding. The bill could be the death rattle of the separatist movement in Canada. Those who were so disgusted with Canada that they sought to leave it would now be confident that federalism not only worked as an administrative institution, but worked as an honest institution with integrity. That is how important this is. Everything else pales in comparison.

One of the conditions we have put forward, in our conditional support of this motion, is that we do not want a bunch of other lesser things to be snuck in under the carpet, in the same rubric with these extended hours.

Because I do not want there to be any doubt whatsoever, I want to make it abundantly clear that our party is willing to do whatever it takes to pass this bill, not only as it stands but to put our amendments and ideas forward so we can participate in making it the best bill it can possibly be. Again, not to overstate things, this might be the last chance we get.

Canadians are abandoning the federal electoral process in droves. It grieves me that in the last federal election, the voter turnout was terribly low. Sixty per cent of registered voters is in the acceptable range for a western democratic country, but it is only 50% of all those eligible to vote. That is not very good and it does not bode very well.

Therefore, there are secondary objectives to the bill, one of which is the very integrity and the very health and well-being of the democratic process for which our parents fought and died to create.

I rise today as a fiercely proud Canadian nationalist who sees more to the bill than just the administrative details of dotting the t's and crossing the i's and ensuring that nobody has their hand in the cookie jar. That stuff is really incidental compared to the big picture. We cannot lose sight of that picture, analyzing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

This is what I mean when I say villainy wears many masks. The enemies of the bill would have us study it until next spring, under the disguise, under the fraud, that it is so important that we need to study it more and more, or that we need to have 10,000 witnesses, or that we have to debate every motion and amendment day after day.

We all know what needs to be done. God help us if we cannot tell the difference between right and wrong. That should be what guides us in this activity. Navel gazing day after day and week after week will not work.

I will share with members the fact that the leader of one of the opposition parties told our leader that we should be hearing witnesses on Bill C-2 until next spring. Can anyone believe that? That would give members some idea of what we are up against. It would be death by committee. We would be analyzing, analyzing, analyzing.

We all know what needs to be done. However, some opposition parties cannot function without the status quo they have built up of unethical practices, of shadowy behind the scenes. They cannot operate in the light of day. Sunlight is a powerful disinfectant. When we turn the light on something, it has a miraculous healing effect on it.

I am fond of saying that freedom of information is the oxygen that democracy breathes. The public's right to know is perhaps the most important tenet of our democratic system.

The bill is about that. Members who use the excuse that they will not support the bill because it does not have one of their pet projects involved and it does not have everything, puts in jeopardy the many good things that it does have.

Our advice to any of those who would oppose rolling up our sleeves and getting busy on this bill is, “Give your head a shake”. This is about more than just administrative process, et cetera. This is about the health and well-being of a system that we believe is the best system in the world, the Canadian democratic system, the Parliament that we enjoy and the freedom.

I do not think it is a stretch to connect Canadian nationalism, pride of Canada and Canadian unity to Bill C-2. I think it is exactly appropriate. They are one and the same, part and parcel. That is why I am proud to be associated with it and to do all we can.

The bill opens a window of opportunity that we did not anticipate on April 11 when it was introduced. There are amendments that we think would be important.

The three pillars of strength in the bill are access to information, whistleblowing protection and a public appointments commission. They form the substance of the legs on a three-legged stool. I suggest we add a fourth pillar to the bill, which would be election financing and reform. This is so timely and so appropriate, and we should do it today. A recent event made this abundantly apparent how necessary it is. We have Liberal leadership candidates shaking down school kids for their lunch money under the guise of fundraising. It is entirely inappropriate. Fortunately, we have within our means the ability to change that and put a stop to this atrocity.