Pat Martin

[Citizen's Arrest and Self-defence Act, April 24th, 2012]

Madam Speaker, it is interesting that my colleague should raise that, because I was just reading a quote by Alexander Solzhenitsyn who said:

Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relations, there is an atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing man's noblest impulses.

Therefore, we need to aspire to more than just the legalistic relations we have in society if we are going to elevate the standards of living conditions as a community. There is a more holistic approach to criminal justice issues than are dreamt of in their philosophy.

[Citizen's Arrest and Self-defence Act, April 24th, 2012]

Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague from Surrey North for agreeing to share his time with me as we debate Bill C-26. I asked specifically for an opportunity to join the debate today on behalf of the constituents I represent in the riding of Winnipeg Centre.

Every time I poll the constituents in my riding as to what their top of mind issue might be, consistently for the last 15 years the number one issue has been safety, crime and criminal justice issues, safe streets and the right to walk the streets free of molestation and with a sense of comfort and safety. That has been the prevailing issue of about 34% or 36% of those people answering my surveys. Things like tax cuts are down around 8%, and perhaps that is a function of the socio-economic demographics of my riding as it is one of the poorest postal code areas in the country. Low income people are more likely to be affected by and have their lives touched by crime, violence and even the criminal justice system.

I am particularly interested in this legislation and how it would affect ordinary Canadians.

I also want to compliment and pay tribute to my colleague from Gatineau for representing the party on this sometimes controversial issue with integrity and a sense of balance that such a sensitive issue calls for. I also recognize the comments that were made by other members of the NDP and the origin of this particular bill.

The member for Trinity—Spadina can claim responsibility for us having this debate today as Mr. David Chen, the owner of the Lucky Moose Food Mart, resides in her riding. It was the very high profile issue associated with Mr. Chen's frustration at so often being the target of shoplifting at his small business that he was compelled to take what we would consider to be dangerous and extraordinary action but which most Canadians would agree was justified and necessary at the time.

However, we are dealing with a bunch of competing rights. As with many pieces of legislation that properly fall before the chamber, it is an issue on which reasonable people can reasonably disagree and therefore we do not want to take this issue lightly.

In the few moments that I have I will start from the premise that the benchmark of a civil society is the quality of its criminal justice system and that the criminal justice system should be measured by its fairness and its application instead of the concern that there is sometimes an arbitrary application of criminal justice issues. Also, in the element of fairness, we must take into account some of the driving forces underlying the problem as it is presented to us.

I am a former labour leader. I have negotiated dozens if not hundreds of collective agreements. Every time we sought to change a clause in a collective agreement, two questions were put to us by the management side: First, why do we want to make this clause change? Second, has this clause been a problem during the life of the collective agreement?

I think we can safely say in this example that there is justification for opening section 494 of the Criminal Code that deals with a citizen's arrest based on the extraordinary case of Mr. Chen and the Lucky Moose Food Market that brought the public's attention to this compelling issue.

The reason I began in the context of trying to describe the socio-economic demographics of my riding is that the opposite of poverty is not wealth. The opposite of poverty is justice. When we look at the high incidents of crime and in fact violence and contact with the criminal justice system in low income areas I think the argument makes itself.

When I look at the circumstances surrounding Mr. David Chen and the case that was put forward so compellingly by my colleague from Trinity—Spadina, I am gratified to know that all parties in the House of Commons acknowledge the necessity but, at the same time, we are confounded by the Conservatives' approach to criminal justice issues in the 41st Parliament and, in fact, even in the 40th Parliament when they were in a minority situation.

We have seen issues used as an excuse to raise the spectre of crime and violence in the streets as justification for putting forward legislation that cannot be easily justified. I am thinking of Bill C-10 where the Province of Manitoba, my home province, actually came to the government asking for certain changes with the detention, for example, in the auto theft situation when Manitoba was experiencing a great rash of auto thefts, often by young offenders. The police and the courts were frustrated by the limitations of holding a young offender who may have been apprehended that evening in the act of auto theft, being released the same night and then sometimes getting picked up by the same police in yet another vehicle, all in the context of a 12-hour period.

The Province of Manitoba came to the federal government urging it to make changes to where young offenders could be detained overnight until such time as they could make their first court appearance. That found its way into this new bill that has been quite controversial, but talk about baby and the bathwater. The ultimate legislation that we wound up with went far beyond any reasonable justification.

As I illustrated, the first question we need to ask when we open legislation to amend a clause is whether there is justification for it. We need to know whether the clause has been a compelling problem? In many of these cases, the only thing we were trying to address was a straw man built up by the Conservatives to strike fear in the hearts of Canadians and then they tried to paint themselves as the great saviour, the only ones who could protect the people from this manufactured fear. However, all the empirical evidence shows us that the rate of crime, especially crimes of personal violence, et cetera, is way down statistically.

However, that did not stop the Conservatives from mailing ten percenters into my riding trying to whip up a frenzy of fear. I saw one of the ten percenters, back when MPs could actually mail ten percenters into other people's ridings, and it had a picture of a guy breaking through a window with his face shielded and with a knife raised above his shoulders as if he were going to break into our house and murder us in the night with a knife if we did not vote for the Conservatives to stop him from breaking in and killing us. That was the message, for all intents and purposes.

Even at a time when we are trying to calm people down and show them the actual statistics that the streets are safer than ever before, even in an area that experiences a great deal of property crime, et cetera, no one is at particular threat of being murdered in the night by this junky with a knife.

There is a dishonesty, a disingenuous aspect to this. The Conservatives are like a duck on a June bug when it comes to any issue associated with criminal justice issues, and their reaction is far disproportionate to the actual cause, need and demand.

In the context of Bill C-26, our party supports it with concerns that have been expressed by many of my colleagues.

[Questions Passed as Orders for Returns, April 23rd, 2012]

With regard to all payments made by the government to Campaign Research in the last five years, has the government, including the Prime Minister’s Office, all government departments and agencies, minister’s offices and crown corporations, made such payments, and, if yes: (a) what was the total amount paid in each of the last five years; (b) what was the amount paid by each department, agency and crown corporation in each of the last five years; and (c) for each payment, (i) who made the payment (e.g., the Prime Minister’s Office, a department or agency, a minister’s office, a crown corporation, etc.), (ii) on what date was the payment made, (iii) what services were procured through the payment?

[Questions Passed as Orders for Returns, April 23rd, 2012]

With regard to all payments made by the government to Responsive Marketing Group Inc. in the last five years, has the government, including the Prime Minister’s Office, all government departments and agencies, minister’s offices and crown corporations, made such payments, and, if yes: (a) what was the total amount paid in each the last five years; (b) what was the amount paid by each department, agency and crown corporation in each of the last five years; and (c) for each payment, (i) who made the payment (e.g. the Prime Minister’s Office, a department or agency, a minister’s office, a crown corporation, etc.), (ii) on what date was the payment made, (iii) what services were procured through the payment?

[Questions Passed as Orders for Returns, April 23rd, 2012]

With regard to all payments made by the government to RackNine Inc. and Matt Meier in the last five years, has the government, including the Prime Minister’s Office, all government departments and agencies, minister’s offices and crown corporations, made such payments, and, if yes: (a) what was the total amount paid in each of the last five years; (b) what was the amount paid by each department, agency and crown corporation in each of the last five years; and (c) for each payment, (i) who made the payment (e.g., the Prime Minister’s Office, a department or agency, a minister’s office, a crown corporation, etc.), (ii) on what date was the payment made, (iii) what services were procured through the payment?

[Safer Railways Act, April 5th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to add some of my points of view on this bill.

I already raised my sincere objections to the fact that the House of Commons is seized of an issue that originated in the unelected, undemocratic Senate. Senators have no mandate from the people to introduce legislation. Therefore, this bill itself is illegitimate, in my view.

Legislation should never originate in the other chamber. I raise this point to recognize and pay tribute to someone who has made this point many times in the House of Commons and who also is perhaps the single greatest champion of Canada's rail system. I am referring, Mr. Speaker, to the hon. Bill Blaikie who occupied your seat as a deputy Speaker in the most recent Parliament. Since then, he has become a cabinet minister for the NDP government of the Province of Manitoba.

Bill Blaikie represented an area from which his base of support was predominantly railway workers in and around Symington yard in the neighbourhood of Transcona in the city of Winnipeg. He regularly and faithfully would rise in this House and make the argument that,as a policy objective, Canada should get the freight off the trucks and put it back on the rail where it belongs for any number of good, compelling reasons, and that we should be expanding our railway system and not tearing it up.

I represent the inner city of Winnipeg. Members would not think that would be a big rail community but they would be wrong because the CPR marshalling and intermodal yard is right in the heart of the city of Winnipeg. It was put there in 1882 by terrible urban planning and design. The rail yards being in the middle of Winnipeg has created a tale of two cities where the much-storied north end of Winnipeg is a separate social entity because of the great divide of the CPR marshalling yard that divides our city. Growing up in Winnipeg, the Weston Shops and the CPR yard defined the socio and economic development of our city, so we have very strongly held views about the impact of any rail legislation and the shortfalls of this one.

I have heard speaker after speaker make fairly complimentary noises about the contents of this bill and the need to amend the Railway Safety Act. I know that various incarnations of this bill have shown up in previous Parliaments. However, they are not saying anything about what is most necessary about our rail system and that is not so much a rail safety review but a rail costing review. Prairie farmers are being consistently gouged by the same robber barons that gouged them in the 1920s and 1930s. They are paying approximately 30% more for freight on a tonne of grain than they should be when the rail costing reviews used to control the gouging and the rip-offs of the robber barons of the railroads.

I will tell members what is compelling about rail rationalization. We have these two ribbons of steel going across the country, the CPR and the CNR. Only rarely do they share and co-operate on their tracks. It is imperative that more rail rationalization take place but all we see is tearing up of tracks in rural economy, much to the detriment of small town rural Canada. The rail lines, the spur lines, are being torn up willy-nilly by the thousands of kilometres.

We are trying to get the CPR marshalling yard torn up in the inner city of Winnipeg. We had a town hall meeting. When Lloyd Axworthy was the senior minister and Jean-Luc Pépin was the minister of transportation, we came very close to tearing up those tracks. However, the vice-president of the CPR came to the town hall meeting where we had 200 people, including the mayor, city councillors and senior cabinet ministers, and he said that it would take 12 years to tear up the marshalling yard. A friend of mine, who is an MLA in Manitoba, stood up and said, “You built the entire CPR from Thunder Bay to Victoria in three years in 1880, including blasting your way through the Rocky Mountains and building trellises that defy engineering. You did all that in three years and you're telling us it's going to take you twelve years to tear up a little bit of track in the inner city of Winnipeg. Don't try and sell us that bill of goods”.

There are a number of compelling reasons for the CPR marshalling yard to be torn up. It has been the place of incredible explosions and spills. It is an incredible bottleneck for the whole transportation system across Canada. It was outdated in 1900 and this is 2012. It was put in place 1882.

However, the most compelling reason is that there is significant business case. As Manitoba seeks to take full advantage of its geographic advantage at the heart of the continent, we are creating what will be the largest inland port in North America called centreport. This will be an intermodal port, a state of the art shipping container port. It is not at the ocean, but will in fact take advantage of our geographic location by tearing up the tracks and relocating those to the new centreport. It will be tied in with air, rail and trucking to take the shipping containers, empty them, add value to them and then send them on their way all over the North American market.

[Safer Railways Act, April 5th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, would my colleague agree with me that it offends the sensibilities of anyone who cares about democracy for us in the House of Commons, the elected chamber, to be dealing with a piece of legislation that was not put forward by the elected representatives of the people but comes to us from the Senate?

Is it not true that any time a bill comes to this chamber beginning with the letter “S” it should be condemned in the strongest possible terms regardless of the merit of the legislation, because of the fact that senators have no right to introduce legislation, they have no mandate from the Canadian people to introduce legislation? They are a bunch of hacks and flacks, failed candidates and bagmen. They should not be introducing legislation into this chamber. We should condemn it at every possible opportunity.

[Petitions, April 5th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, I am proud to introduce a petition signed by literally tens of thousands of Canadians who call upon the House of Commons to take note that asbestos is the greatest industrial killer that the world has ever known. They point out that more Canadians now die from asbestos than all other industrial and occupational causes combined and yet Canada remains one of the largest producers and exporters of asbestos in the world. They also point out that Canada spends millions of dollars subsidizing the asbestos industry and blocking international efforts to curb its use.

Therefore, the petitioners call upon Parliament to ban asbestos in all of its forms and institute a just transition program for asbestos workers and the communities in which they live, to end all government subsidies of asbestos, both in Canada and abroad, and finally, to stop blocking international health and safety conventions designed to protect workers from asbestos, such as the United Nations Rotterdam Convention.

[Safer Railways Act, April 5th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, I just have one brief question for my colleague from Davenport. Would he not agree, notwithstanding the relative merits of the bill, that it offends the sensibility of anyone who calls themself a democrat to be debating a bill in this chamber that began in the unelected, undemocratic chamber of the Senate?

Should we not condemn in the strongest possible terms that the House of Commons is now seized of an issue that originated elsewhere, in the unelected, undemocratic chamber of the Senate, and that we should send a clear message to the government that if it wants to introduce legislation, it should do it in the democratically elected chamber of the House of Commons, not the other place.

[Financial Statement of Minister of Finance, April 3rd, 2012]

Nice name.