No. I am not arguing for capital punishment, as my colleague suggests. I might be getting there, as tempting as that may be for those like the Madoffs of the world who conspire to defraud seniors out of their heard earned pensions.
It is imperative and it is entirely appropriate that Parliament should condemn in the strongest possible terms these activities with new legislation that contemplates mandatory prison sentences for violators of this nature.
It is not often members hear an NDP member advocating mandatory prison sentences. In most cases we do not agree with that. We like to leave the choice whether to apply prison time to the judges. Our rationale for that is we do not believe the average street criminal is deterred by mandatory prison sentences and therefore it is not justified to take the discretion away from a judge.
In this case we believe white collar criminals will be deterred by the prospect that if they get caught in this type of Criminal Code violation, they are going to go to jail for a mandatory minimum sentence. They are not just going to have to hang their head in shame around the cocktail parties for a little while. They are going to actually go to prison. They are going to go to prison and they are going to serve hard time. It is not going to be hopefully some country club where they can bring their polo ponies with them and keep them in their own private stables.
That is why we can support the bill. It proposes fairly modest and simple amendments. This is not a long piece of legislation amending section 380 of the Criminal Code dealing with fraud affecting the public market. We think this same principle could be applied further and we would encourage the Minister of Justice to investigate other places this same reasoning and rationale could be applied. At least one example of where it could be applied would be to crimes regarding the environment.
We think mandatory minimum jail sentences for the board of directors and the CEO of a company that knowingly and willingly dumps PCBs into the Red River, for instance, should be introduced if we really want to deter that kind of heinous crime against large groups of people. That really perhaps sums up why this is justified as well. This type of crime is different from a break and enter into a house where someone's television set is stolen. These crimes by their nature and by their very design are intended to affect large numbers of people.
These Ponzi schemes suck in thousands, if not tens of thousands, of unsuspecting seniors who quite often are concerned about their retirement security. They hear an offer that sounds too good to be true, but they do not want to believe that cliché, so they buy into a Ponzi scheme that again is a hollow shell, or a shell game. It is not based on any substance.
I would argue that to a great extent, a lot of our financial marketplace is one big Ponzi scheme. When there is the type of trading that takes place on derivatives on the insurance against the losses of a company that has not even been set up yet, what is that if not a gigantic, complex Ponzi scheme? We have people investing in mines for which a shovel has not even been put in the ground and it is at three or four degrees of separation that people are investing. People are investing in the futures to offset the insurance based on a projection of earnings that might exist when they finally dig the hole. That is not security of any nature. People do not own a piece of a goldmine, but a piece of an insurance policy that someone else bought to protect themselves to hedge off the losses.
It is just incomprehensible gobbledygook and ordinary Canadians need someone to translate all this, because when it is translated, it turns out it is again some hollow shell game designed by a clever financial engineering student who put up a smokescreen so that they could loot people's goodwill and best interests. That is where we come full circle to the time-honoured poem that was used as a protest chant appropriately in the Commons in Westminster instead of the Commons in Ottawa:
The law locks up the man or the woman
Who steals the goose from off the common.
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from off the goose.
We have to put these things into perspective. I raised the fact that I understood why white-collar criminals were often sent off to country clubs instead of to real prisons: the real prison cells are full of some young aboriginal guys who have stolen a loaf of bread to feed their family, speaking figuratively. There is no room because of the appalling overrepresentation of aboriginal people in our prison system.
I recently read a book by Pierre Berton, about 1967, the last time Canada was happy. He talks about the Kingston Penitentiary, the women's penitentiary in your own riding of Kingston and the Islands, Mr. Speaker.
I challenge you, Mr. Speaker, to guess the percentage of inmates who were aboriginal women in the Kingston Penitentiary in the year 1967. Some might say 50%, which would be shocking, or 60%, but no, it was 100%. All of them, every single prisoner in that penitentiary was an aboriginal woman in that particular snapshot in time. When they represent 4% of the population, to have 100% of the prison full of aboriginal women means we have an appalling and embarrassing overrepresentation and we are punishing property crimes and even crimes that often are not violent with real prison time while we are letting white-collar criminals walk free. They get a hearty slap on the back and a handshake when they show these big rates of return to a privileged few, but they are actually ripping off thousands of Canadians. It is about time they went to prison, and they can rot there as far as I am concerned.
