Pat Martin

[Business of Supply, February 2nd, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, I can tell my colleague that the phone in my office is ringing off the hook with concerned senior citizens. In the absence of any concrete details from the Prime Minister, just this law, this scattergun comment that leaves all possibilities open, there is serious concern throughout the land. It is a reckless and irresponsible way to introduce a subject regarding social policy.

We have a right to know what is in the mind of the Prime Minister. First, we have a right to know the scale and the scope of the problem as the government sees it and if there is any evidence that there is in fact an actuarial emergency, as it would have us believe. Second, we have a right to know what measures and what concrete steps it is proposing so we can do our due diligence and represent the people who elected us to ensure this is done in such a way that it does not impact people negatively.

[Business of Supply, February 2nd, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, I am very proud of the connection my family has to Stanley Knowles. My grandfather was a dean of theology who taught Stanley Knowles at what was then called Manitoba College, where he received his divinity degree. My grandfather married Stanley Knowles and his wife Vida Cruikshank. Stanley was a pallbearer at my grandfather's funeral. He was a regular and frequent visitor at the dinner table of my grandfather's home.

Stanley Knowles, and his long-standing belief that the Senate should be abolished, would understand completely when someone denounces the irresponsible, reckless, destructive, outrageous comments of a Tory hack who has no business being over there to begin with and has no business commenting on criminal justice issues when he is supposed to be a public servant. It is irresponsible to counsel people to commit suicide on the week before National Suicide Prevention Week.

I used a great deal of restraint in my reaction to his comments.

[Business of Supply, February 2nd, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Terrebonne—Blainville for sharing her time with me and for an excellent speech. There were good points, it was well argued and it was an important message from our new generation of NDP MPs.

It is useful, as we enter into a debate on the old age security regime in this country, to pause and reflect on some of the steps that got us to the position we are in. I am very proud, as an NDP member of Parliament, to take up the cause of defending the integrity of our old age security system, as has been our function and role throughout much of the last century.

I represent the riding of Winnipeg Centre, which is home to two of the greatest champions of social justice, I might say, that this country has ever known. In 1921, the Government of Canada wanted to send J.S. Woodsworth to prison for his role as the leader of the 1919 general strike but the good people of Winnipeg Centre sent him to Parliament in Ottawa instead and he stayed there until his untimely death in 1942.

I raise that subject because, only three years after J.S. Woodsworth arrived in Parliament, the prime minister of the day, William Lyon Mackenzie King, was in trouble. He was going to lose his government and needed the coalition support of what J.S. Woodsworth called the ginger group at the time, the Independent Labour Party. Woodsworth negotiated with Mackenzie King a deal, a condition, a compact, a coalition so to speak. The very art of politics is forming compacts, coalitions and agreements. Woodsworth went to Mackenzie King and said, “If you agree to introduce an old age security regime, I will support your government”. That was the birth of the Canadian old age security system. We have that letter on file at NDP headquarters. It took Mackenzie King a long time to live up to his promise but he indeed did introduce old age security.

When J.S. Woodsworth passed away, he was replaced by the man who is known as the father of the Canadian pension plan, Stanley Knowles. Stanley Knowles represented my riding from 1942 until his stroke in 1984 made it impossible for him to continue. He served continuously, except for the Diefenbaker sweep of 1957. During that time, he was not only the undisputed champion of the Canadian pension plan but he fought and fought to introduce it and the old age security system. There are famous speeches on record that people published in their entirety and circulated across the country as this movement gained momentum. He did not stop fighting until he managed to have the old age security pension indexed to inflation as a secondary objective. This took his entire career but it was his proudest achievement and perhaps one of the most proud achievements of the NDP.

It always seems to fall to us to defend the integrity of the pension system, which has been under continuous assault by successive Conservative governments that do not fundamentally believe in this type of universality of old age security systems.

We can trace what is going on today with the terrible notion that the Prime Minister of Canada would announce fundamental social policy changes in a speech in a foreign country. We can trace it back, or I do at least, to the musings of the unofficial prime minister of Canada at the time, Thomas d'Aquino, the chief executive officer of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives. Mr. d'Aquino had a checklist of things he thought Canada needed to do that consisted of 10 or 15 items. One by one he was checking them all off and one of them was, which he announced quite publicly, that Canada had to get out from under the crippling legacy costs.

Nobody really paid too much attention because the term “legacy costs” did not ring any bells. What he meant was pensions. Sure enough, the right wing think tanks started to fall in line and also blame pensions for all of our economic woes. There was no mention of the fact that corporate tax cuts had taken over $100 billion worth of fiscal capacity in the two last governments, the Martin regime and this one.

Even when General Motors and the big auto companies ran into trouble, nobody said that maybe people were not buying their cars because they were making models nobody wanted. Immediately they said that the reason they could not function was because their legacy costs were too great, that they had to get out from under their pensions.

With this notion of never let a good crisis go to waste, they started to segue from the real root cause of their industrial woes and blamed it on this notion that we deserved to retire in some dignity and that we could take seniors out of poverty.

We have three pillars to our old age security system. One is personal savings, whatever one can save and invest during one's working life. Second, hopefully one has a pension through one's workplace, although that is becoming a rarity because of this full frontal assault by the right on the very notion that workplace pensions are possible. Third, is a robust universal government-sponsored pension plan.

The government would have us believe that there is something luxurious and comfortable about the pension system as we know it, the OAS and GIS. In actual fact, when compared with other countries, the replacement of earnings in retirement does not come anywhere close to a lot of western developed nations. It is really quite a modest system.

We have seen this assault on pensions and on the notion of pensions gaining validators and momentum, or currency. In fact, some experts in the field challenge whether it is an emergency at all. Yes, there is a demographic blip, but we would have had the fiscal capacity to provide were it not for the choices made by successive Liberal and Conservative governments to hollow out that fiscal capacity. However, we seem to be able to find money to spend in corporate tax cuts. Let us not kid ourselves. When $6 billion in corporate tax cuts is granted, that is spending money. We argue that is wasteful spending of money, and we believe that has been validated.

The logic was that if we gave those tax cuts to corporations, they would spend that money in the economy, create more jobs and a virtuous cycle would begin. In actual fact, they have been hoarding that money away. Our worst fears are realized. They are stacking it up and stockpiling it like Scrooge McDuck in the comic books, rolling around in their piles of dough but they are not reinvesting. There is no empirical evidence to prove it.

Not a single study in the world has ever proven that a tax cut equals more jobs. The only predictable and verifiable outcome of a tax cut given to companies is that they will have more money and greater profits. That is what was done. It was a transfer of wealth.

In the richest and most powerful civilization in the history of the world, the government cannot tell me that we cannot afford to lift every senior citizen out of poverty.

Our former leader, Jack Layton, costed this out and we ran on that as a platform. Instead of the $6 billion for corporate tax cuts, we could spend $1 billion of that and all 250,000 seniors, who are currently below the poverty line, would at least get to the poverty line. They would not be wealthy, rich or even comfortable. They would still be poor, but out of the depths of abject poverty. That is the cost and it is achievable, yet we go in the opposite direction.

Again, in the spirit of never let a good crisis go to waste, the Conservatives are cutting, hacking and slashing upon ideological lines just as we predicted they would. They are coming up with these dummy saving accounts to offset it. Bill C-25, the bill we were forced to vote on yesterday, is nothing but a 401(k). The only ones who will get rich on that are the stock brokers who will charge a commission every time that money is moved around. It is a 401(k), the Americanization of our pension regime.

We are here to defend the integrity of the old age security in the spirit of Woodsworth and Stanley Knowles. The NDP is proud to present this motion today to flush out the enemies of the public pension system, to denounce them and hold them to account so they will not get away with this. There will be a blue rinse revolution in this land if they proceed in this way.

[Asbestos, February 2nd, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, this government's position on asbestos is morally and ethically reprehensible.

This spring, the parties to the Rotterdam Convention will meet once again, and my question is simple. If the government does not have the courage to ban asbestos in all of its forms like other developed nations have, will it at least stop sabotaging the Rotterdam Convention?

All that convention does is to require that asbestos be listed as a product requiring informed prior consent, so that the people we sell it to at least have a fighting chance to protect themselves from this made-in-Canada epidemic.

[Asbestos, February 2nd, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, this country's position on asbestos is morally and ethically reprehensible.

This spring--

[Citizen's Arrest and Self-defence Act, December 15th, 2011]

Madam Speaker, I take my colleague's question very seriously. I would be willing to entertain any measures that actually had the desired results. We know from empirical evidence that the best results to give us safer streets come from more money spent on crime prevention and rehabilitation, and substance abuse treatment centres.

I will give one example. A young woman, a sex trade worker, walked into my office not two months ago. She plies her trade right in front of my office in Winnipeg and she is clearly addicted to crack cocaine. She said she wanted to get off the street, she wanted to change her life. So we started phoning around and finally found a treatment centre that could take her in six weeks. We cannot tell a junky to come back in six weeks. When people are willing to make a change in their life, they need those supports and that help now.

I do not say this in criticism of this government or the provincial government. I am just saying that more attention needs to be put to crime prevention than to crime punishment and we would have safer streets.

[Citizen's Arrest and Self-defence Act, December 15th, 2011]

Madam Speaker, our complaint with this bill is similar to that with previous pieces of legislation, that it has not fully matured yet. It has not gestated into a finished product. It is like a cake in the oven that is not yet baked. It still needs work and we are not doing anyone a service by going ahead with incomplete legislation that we would be stuck with for a long time. It is unlikely that these clauses of the Criminal Code will be reopened again in our generation. So it is incumbent on us to get it right.

I point out that sections 34 and 35 of the Criminal Code, which deal with the right to self-defence, have inherent ambiguities that have caused difficulty in the jurisprudence since 1892 and it is only now that we are addressing them in the Parliament of the latter days of 2011.

What we do today has a lasting impact. We want to get it right because it does a great disservice to ordinary Canadians like Mr. David Chen if we do not get it right. Imagine the confusion of a new Canadian, proud to be a small businessman in his chosen country, when this kind of crazy thing happens to him and he winds up being the one accused of wrongdoing when all he is trying to do is protect himself.

We do not want that to ever happen again. We want to ensure that the language we incorporate in the context of this bill precludes that from ever happening again to any Canadian.

[Citizen's Arrest and Self-defence Act, December 15th, 2011]

Well maybe I will carry on. Unanimous consent, perhaps, would be a consideration if I do have more things to say than time permits.

As we approach the end of this parliamentary session of the 41st Parliament, I appreciate the tone and the content of the debate we are having in the House of Commons today. It has actually been a meaningful exchange for the most part on a very thorny question, a question that deserves the attention of Parliament.

Let me begin by recognizing and acknowledging Mr. David Chen, the owner of the Lucky Moose Foodmart in Toronto, which I suppose was the catalyst for the whole debate that we are having today. A hard-working new Canadian running a small corner grocery store was being repeatedly victimized by shoplifters and thieves, et cetera, and in a moment of frustration took action into his own hands, and apprehended and detained one of those who was knowingly and repeatedly stealing from him.

It is a matter of competing rights that we are wrestling with today. I will confess that I am not a lawyer. I have been somewhat of a bunkhouse lawyer over the years as a union leader on job sites where I have had to perhaps wrestle with this matter of competing rights, but I am glad to hear and I am glad to see that there are very competent and knowledgeable members of Parliament present today who are intervening with meaningful contributions to this debate. As I say, by and large, it has been civil, it has been interesting, and it has been meaningful.

I also confess some bias in my own personal experience. I had occasion to catch two people breaking into my home one time as I came home from work. I found two teenagers, who had just broken into the house next door and drank all the booze, who were now breaking into the rear lower windows of my house. As I pulled into the driveway, my headlights shone on these kids kicking in my window.

I tried to stop them and apprehended one, but while I was doing that, the other one grabbed my four-year-old son by the hair and started dragging him down the street, and told me he would trade me my kid for the kid I was holding.

As any parent would, I saw red. I dropped the one youth and sprinted after the one who had kidnapped my son, and ended up giving him a fairly sound thumping, which I thought was well-deserved at the time. My wife participated as well. If you have ever tried to wrestle down a 15-year-old, Madam Speaker, all hopped up on hooch, it is not as easy as it might look, even if you are a fit carpenter

To make a long story short in what little time I have, I ended up in court for the next six months for assaulting this young man who was trying to break into my house. It took six months of legal appearances and an awful lot of time and energy for the crown prosecutors to finally drop the charges against my wife and me, and apply the charges where they belonged, to the break and enter.

I confess to a bias that I am sympathetic to the bill, and I also want to acknowledge and pay tribute to the member for Trinity—Spadina, who is the member of Parliament who represents the neighbourhood where the Lucky Moose Foodmart resides. I believe she has done a good job in advocating on behalf of her constituent, whom I believe the law did not serve well.

The crown dropped the charges for kidnapping and carrying a dangerous weapon, which turned out to be a box cutter that any store owner would normally carry with him anyway, but charges were proceeded with against Mr. Chen of forcible confinement and assault for apprehending this thief who was stealing from his store

When he went to court months later, after the great cost and expense of having to defend himself, these charges were dropped, but it pointed to the inconsistencies, ambiguities and overlapping provisions in the Criminal Code to deal with these two competing rights. That is always the difficulty.

I should share with the House that whenever I canvass and survey the constituents of my riding as to what their top of mind concerns are, overwhelmingly, by a factor of four to one, the number one top of mind concern is crime and safety on their streets. People have a right to walk their streets without fear of being assaulted or molested. They take that very seriously in the inner city of Winnipeg where, I am not proud to say, crime and safety are often legitimate concerns.

They also want more steps taken to get guns off the streets. There are families in my riding that will not sleep in the outside rooms of their houses for fear of the gun play that occurs every night. They are afraid of stray bullets going through their homes. They want guns off the street. They want tougher measures and controls on crime and safety issues. They want less guns in their communities, and fairness in the administration and application of justice.

There are times, especially in an area that is plagued by a disproportionate amount of crime and violence, when homeowners have to take things into their own hands to protect themselves and their families. They should not be arrested and prosecuted for what is, by any reasonable objective third party's point of view, legitimate self-defence and defence of their property.

If people tuned in to watch the proceedings of the House of Commons today, this is the kind of bill that Canadians would agree Parliament should be seized with and it is the tone, content and type of debate they would be pleased we are having. My only criticism is that it is highly unlikely any amendments will be contemplated or tolerated during the consideration of this bill. I can say this with some certainty because in the entire 41st Parliament, the government has never accepted a single amendment on a single piece of legislation since May 2 when Parliament began.

Any reasonable person would have to concede that some of these issues are not straightforward. Some of them need careful deliberation and would benefit from a healthy, robust debate, exchange, and legitimate points of view put forward by members from the opposition. No one has a monopoly on good ideas in the House of Commons or in Parliament. In fact, the way to test the strength of arguments is to subject them to rigorous and robust debate. That tests the merits of the positions people hold.

I believe that this balance is not as it should be yet. There are recommendations for amendments that New Democrats would like in this bill. We support half of the bill at least because much of its origins are from a private member's bill put forward by my colleague from Trinity—Spadina. There are further elements of the bill that give us great concern. There are recommendations from the NDP justice critic, who is a well-respected lawyer and has given both professional and personal considerations to the issues we are dealing with today. They should be treated seriously and incorporated into the bill, so that it will stand the test of time, and stand up to challenges in court and serve Canadians well.

[Citizen's Arrest and Self-defence Act, December 15th, 2011]

Madam Speaker, I can barely introduce what I want to say in 10 minutes, but at least I will try to make the most of what little time I have.

[Citizen's Arrest and Self-defence Act, December 15th, 2011]

Madam Speaker, I am still concerned with elements of this bill. I appreciate the efforts by my colleague from York South—Weston to explain the inconsistencies inherent in the Criminal Code associated with the right to self-defence. I am interested in his personal experience in trying to detain someone in the act of a crime, or the rights of an individual.

I am particularly concerned with the legal interpretation. When there is ambiguity, one has to look at the intent of Parliament when that clause was crafted. Chief Justice Lamer pointed out that Parliament must have intended section 34 to be limited to unprovoked assaults because it went on to enact section 35 to deal specifically with situations where the accused was the initial aggressor.

Can my colleague bring any clarity to the intent then and the intent of Parliament now as expressed in Bill C-26?