Randall Garrison

[Respecting Families of Murdered and Brutalized Persons Act, June 2nd, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, given that this is probably one of the last debates we are going to be having on criminal justice matters, I am going to take a somewhat broader approach to this bill. In this 41st Parliament, in this whole series of public safety bills that have been brought forward by the Conservatives, both government bills and private member's bills, we have had a tale of two different agendas: the Conservative tough-on-crime agenda up against the NDP approach of building safer communities

The Conservatives have been relentless in putting forward their tough-on-crime ideas, whether in the raft of government of bills or in private member's bills, which actually should be called “government bills masquerading as private member's bills”, as this one really is. Instead of a comprehensive review of the Criminal Code, what we have are dozens of one-off measures, quite often ripped from the sensational headlines around a single case and presented as a private member's bill, again, alongside government bills that deal with the same issues.

There is, I believe, a fundamental problem with this one-off approach. It is both the problem that it is easy to run into overlap and unintended consequences when we change the Criminal Code and the criminal justice system bit by bit and the problem that before they have any chance to see if the reform is working, they are off changing some other element of the system in ways that may or may not be complementary.

We have heard much in the debate tonight about families that are forced to appear at parole hearings every two years, except that we have already changed that in another private member's bill before the House to an interval of up to four years. Here we are attacking the same problem with two different bills in two different places.

There is also the problem that amendments to criminal justice legislation in private member's bills do not go through the justice ministry, where they would be screened for compliance with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. No matter how low the Conservative justice minister sets the bar for probable compliance, bills would still be examined from that angle. I believe that Bill C-587 is one that could have used that scrutiny with regard to its conflict with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

There is a related problem with bills like this one that suggest changes to sentencing and parole provisions, which are actually quite complex in practice. I often doubt that the drafters have the expertise they need in real-world criminal justice. In Bill C-587, it says that it will apply to someone convicted of a series of offences connected to the same incident, such as kidnapping, sexual assault, and murder. What we find in the real world is that, in fact, prosecutors rarely prosecute included offences when they have murder on the table.

When in committee it was asked how many offenders this would actually apply to and what the big problem was we were attacking here, the answer given was that it would apply to one person or perhaps two people a year.

Let me come back to the contrast in approaches between the Conservatives and the New Democrats when it comes to public safety and start by looking at what the components of the Conservatives' tough-on-crime agenda are.

One of those is concern for the rights of victims, and that is a concern that we on this side of the House share and that almost all Canadians, I would say, share. There is a recognition that more needs to be done to support victims in their encounters with the justice system and to make sure that their voices are heard. We have supported measures like the Victims Bill of Rights in order to bring about positive changes. However, we have opposed other measures put forward that claim to be enhancements of victims' rights when they are sure to have negative impacts on public safety down the road and sometimes, in fact, risk creating more victims in the future.

Surely concern for victims also means listening to what most victims cite as their first concern: that there should not be more victims in the future. That means investing in crime prevention and looking at what really works when it comes to rehabilitation. That is one of the ways in which we respect the rights of victims. It is by making sure that there are fewer of them in the future.

The second element of the Conservatives' tough on crime agenda is tougher sentences. It is sometimes difficult to know if Conservatives intend tougher sentences to act as deterrents or if they simply feel that vengeance should be part of the sentencing process in Canada. What is clear is that all the evidence in criminal justice shows that if we are thinking about deterrence, then using tougher sentences clearly does not work. Those people who engage in crime do so out of addiction, mental illness, or rash actions. They do not sit down and thumb through the Criminal Code to see what the penalties are. Few people charged with offences actually have any idea what the possible penalties for their offences are.

There is a kind of deterrence that actually works and this is clearly shown in the research on criminal justice. Deterrence takes place when possible offenders fear the certainty of being caught and prosecuted. The question of whether they will be caught and prosecuted is clearly a question of resources. All those who consciously plot their crimes think that they are the smartest criminals in the world and they will never be caught and if they are caught, they will not be prosecuted. Putting resources into policing and prosecution actually does reduce the incidence of crime.

However, since 2012, the government has cut resources to the RCMP and Corrections and no one should be fooled by the small increases that are in this year's budget. Both the RCMP and Corrections will still have fewer resources now than they had in 2012.

The question of the deterrence that works, the certainty of being caught and prosecuted, is what makes it so important to know when the promised 100 additional RCMP officers for Surrey will actually be on the ground. It is one of the ways we can contribute to public safety in a community that is plagued by gang, drug and gun violence.

The third element in the Conservatives tough on crime agenda seems to be to make sure more people are incarcerated. We have seen that with the vast expansion of mandatory minimum penalties. New Democrats agree that mandatory minimums are appropriate for the most serious and most violent crimes like murder. We have expanded mandatory minimums to a whole range of crimes. The result is that we end up with more people whose crimes are the result of addiction problems or mental illness in our prison system and we certainly end up with more aboriginal people incarcerated despite the Gladue principle.

We have some very disturbing studies showing that the Gladue principle, which says that the whole circumstances of aboriginal people need to be taken into consideration in sentencing, is not being observed certainly in many provinces. Given today's announcements by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the experience that many aboriginal people had at residential schools, it is critically important that we take into account the Gladue principle in sentencing of aboriginal offenders and not just focus on getting more people incarcerated.

The Conservatives will say that the increase in prisons has not happened. It certainly has not happened at the rates that some predicted, but there has been a steady increase in Canadian institutions since the Conservatives came to power and many of them appear to believe that this is a good thing.

The fourth element of the tough on crime agenda tends to be to restrict parole and give less access to parole and to give access to parole only later on in sentencing. We have had this appear in many bills like the one before us today. What the Conservatives seem to be arguing here is that what will keep us safer is keeping people off the streets. Again, the evidence shows that is clearly not the case. Most of the people in the system are coming out of prison and the best way for them to do that is in gradual supervised release back into the community. That is what works.

Instead, what we have under the government is increasing numbers of people being released with shorter supervision periods or with no supervision period at all in parole and not getting any community support that they need. The government has failed to support things like halfway houses and circles of support and accountability, mentioned in an earlier speech, which helped work with sex offenders.

The bill fails to understand another factor and that is the role of possible parole as a factor in rehabilitation and good behaviour within prisons. Those with little or nothing left to lose become a great threat to corrections officers' safety. In contrast, the NDP's public safety agenda is focused on trying to address the real problems that we have, in particular, drug, gang and gun violence in urban areas, violence against women and especially the question of missing and murdered aboriginal women.

The NDP is committed to building safer communities for everyone, not through the government's tough on crime strategy, but instead through a renewed commitment to victims services, crime prevention, effective law enforcement and effective rehabilitation of offenders. We need to help victims of crime get their lives back on track by making sure the necessary services are available to them, including a full range of services from mental health services to legal services. In this area, the Conservatives have clearly failed victims. We need to tackle the causes of crime like poverty, addiction and youth gangs. Again, Conservatives have failed to provide the resources we need to attack these causes of crime.

We need to make sure that law enforcement courts have the resources they need and put a priority on resources directed to fighting violent crime and its consequences. Again, the Conservatives have failed to provide the resources needed for this.

We also need to reduce our reliance on incarceration and increase our funding for community support and rehabilitation programs. This bill contributes nothing to building safer communities. I am surprised to see the Liberals supporting a bill like this, especially when it affects so few people.

I just want to say in my last statement that, if there is any danger of some of the people we are talking about getting released, we have provisions on the books to make sure they would not be released.

On this side, we will be opposing Bill C-587.

[National Defence, June 2nd, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, veterans and their families deserve fair treatment now, just like LGBT members in the Canadian Forces deserved better than the discriminatory treatment they faced in the past; treatment that saw hundreds hunted down and driven out of the Canadian Forces.

Will the Minister of National Defence help right this historic injustice by issuing an official apology and by ensuring that those who were discharged solely on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity have their records revised to reflect their honourable service on behalf of all Canadians?

[Public Safety, June 1st, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, the recommendations on what needs to be done have been around since Mayerthorpe, more than a decade ago.

There is no excuse for inaction, just as with the issue of sexual harassment in the RCMP. The situation has become so bad that nearly 400 female RCMP officers and civilian staff are joining a class action lawsuit against the RCMP. We are talking about allegations ranging from threats and bullying to sexual assault, all behaviours that have no place in any public organization.

How will the government support these victims and make sure that the RCMP action plan is fully implemented?

[Public Safety, June 1st, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, the government has a real problem delivering for communities. Unfortunately, this includes front-line RCMP officers.

The horrific incident in New Brunswick last year, which took the lives of three officers, underlined how dangerously unprepared the RCMP had left many officers, without the right firearms and without appropriate training.

The situation is so bad that the RCMP has been charged under the Canada Labour Code. However, officers on the ground are still saying that necessary changes have not been made.

What will it take to get this minister to act?

[Business of Supply, June 1st, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, what we have in front of us today is pay-to-pay fees. However, as I said a bit earlier, we also have transaction fees, mortgage discharge fees, all kinds of fees. The point of the motion is that there needs to be a mandatory financial code of conduct to protect consumers and we need to end this idea that banks will somehow grow a heart overnight and treat consumers fairly and with care. History shows they will not do that.

[Business of Supply, June 1st, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, the member for Winnipeg North raises exactly the point. Consumers, especially in the lower-income groups, have very good uses for that money, much better uses than increasing bank profits.

However, there is one thing we tend to miss when we talk about this transition to a cashless society. I just looked at a study this morning. It showed that this was increasingly true for those in the top third of the income ranks, people who tend to pay everything electronically online. However, for those in the bottom third of income ranks, close to two-thirds of people do not actually pay things electronically. This includes a lot of seniors and other low-income people.

When we talk about a cashless society, we have to be careful that we are not only talking about the privileged sectors of our society, which have the luxury of Internet connections and the ability to do all their banking online.

[Business of Supply, June 1st, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to rise today to speak on the opposition motion. I will be sharing my time with the member for Newton—North Delta.

I think the motion before the House is very important for most ordinary Canadians. It calls on the government to ban all pay-to-pay practices by banks through the enactment of a mandatory financial code of conduct to protect consumers.

Let us take a minute to think about who we are talking about. We have seven nationally chartered banks but only five really big banks. Just so we understand their financial position, let me quickly review that for hon. members.

The Royal Bank of Canada has assets of $655 billion; Toronto-Dominion has $557 billion; Scotiabank has $496 billion; the Bank of Montreal has $236 billion; and CIBC has $336 billion.

In the first two quarters of this year alone, the banks turned a profit of $15 billion. That is only halfway through the year, so these companies are not struggling to make ends meet.

These are companies with enormous assets, built on the deposits of Canadians. If we run through the big banks, we see that the Royal Bank holds nearly $400 billion of our money, the Toronto-Dominion Bank $391 billion, Scotiabank $350 billion, the Bank of Montreal $236 billion, and CIBC $336 billion, so scrambling to extract every last fee out of Canadians is not something they have to do to stay afloat.

They are remarkably stable banks, and I give them credit for the good job they have done in achieving that stability through rough economic times.

I also want to acknowledge that these banks have more than 250,000 employees who provide, by and large, excellent service to consumers and also contribute a lot to their local communities in terms of charitable activities and fundraising for those charities.

In particular I want to acknowledge the employees of the Toronto-Dominion Bank. As the LGBTQ spokesperson of the NDP, I know the Toronto-Dominion Bank has been very generous in supporting Pride activities across the country and encouraging the end of homophobia in the workplace, both as it affects their employees and as it affects their customers, so I am not saying that banks never do anything good. They quite often do. However, what I am saying is what we are saying in this motion: there is no need for the banks to extract $180 million a year in pay-to-pay fees.

We are standing in the House now with the government saying it is in favour of the motion. That is very interesting. If the Conservatives had just put this measure in the budget, Canadians would already be saving $180 million. Did they simply forget, or did they just discover they are in favour?

I say “forget” quite seriously, because in their throne speech in 2013, they promised to end pay-to-pay fees in federal jurisdiction, and they actually did so. However, when they did, they ended the fees only for telecommunications companies, not the banks. The banks were exempted. Either there was some lobbying going on or the Conservatives forgot their promise to end pay-to-pay fees in the public sector.

The Liberals are also saying they are in favour, but I have to remind the Liberals that they are the ones who brought in all the voluntary financial codes of conduct for banks. They were not mandatory codes of conduct, but voluntary ones, and we have seen again and again that voluntary codes of conduct for financial institutions do not work.

I want to cast back to another example, one that is very important to some of my constituents, and that is what happens when we have a dispute with a bank. In 1996, to their credit, the Liberals set up what was called the Ombudsman for Banking Services and Investment. That was way back in 1996. If an individual had a dispute with the bank, that person could go to an independent, non-profit organization and get mediation of that dispute and some help in taking on the big banks.

Over time, the banks began to not like the decisions of the non-profit, neutral, and independent mediator, so in 2008 the Royal Bank of Canada pulled out. Why? It was because the Liberal legislation was not mandatory. It was voluntary. When the Royal Bank pulled out and got away with it, the Toronto-Dominion Bank watched very closely, and in 2011 the Toronto-Dominion Bank pulled out.

There was some question then raised again in the House by the NDP about whether they could actually get out of having this independent mediation service. This issue was clarified by the Conservatives in 2012, but they clarified it this way: they said banks are required to have a third party dispute resolution mechanism, but they did not specify it had to be the independent, non-profit Ombudsman for Banking Services and Investment.

What did the Royal Bank do and what did TD do? They hired companies to provide the independent third party mediation services.

If a client of one of the banks has a dispute, how would that person feel about taking the dispute to someone the bank has hired for an answer? I think most Canadians would see it as lacking the basic independence that would create confidence in decisions of that third party.

In summary, the government had a chance to bring the banks back under the Ombudsman for Banking Services and Investment but did not do so, and the Liberals have been remarkably silent on this issue of dispute resolution with the banks.

Is it just pay-to-pay fees? I heard some people asking why the NDP was picking on such a minor thing. That question does not take into account that it is not a minor thing for most people, and when the totals add up to $180 million taken from Canadians for paying to pay, it is actually a large thing for most consumers.

However, it is not the only area in which the NDP has been active in trying to point out that the voluntary codes of conduct on fees simply do not work. In 2012, we did a campaign to point out the enormous amount of money being collected by the banks on transaction fees. These are fees charged for putting people's money into their own accounts or taking money out of their accounts. It is their money in and their money out, but the banks charge fees to do that. The banks say there is a cost to these transactions, so they have to charge people for them.

Our consumer affairs critic worked very hard to discover the actual cost to banks. We know what they charge: they charge between $1.50 and $3 for every transaction for people to put their money into their own account or to take it out, unless they are under a special plan. Then the banks give a few transactions for free, because otherwise there would be a total consumer revolt.

What is the real cost? It is 36¢ per transaction.

However, when the NDP put forward a motion in the House to cap those bank transaction fees at 50¢, still allowing a nice profit to the banks, neither the Liberals nor the Conservatives supported it. They said that under these voluntary codes of conduct, it is up to the banks to decide if their fees are appropriate or not.

Once again, consumers are left with very little recourse, because when we check and compare bank fees, we find that these fees are almost all the same, so if consumers are unhappy with one the big five and go to one of the others, they find the same conditions.

I want to raise another thing that we have not addressed today in this motion. That is the question of mortgage discharge fees. What we have seen increasingly in Canada is that when people pay off their mortgage and are finally free of the bank and own their own house free and clear, the bank charges them for paying off that mortgage.

Initially what we had in Canada what was called a mortgage discharge fee. I checked today, and in the big five banks, mortgage discharge fees range between $200 and $400. I grant that there are some paperwork costs, but the banks have been making a profit off the mortgage for 25 or 30 years. They are not loaning the money for free. They are charging interest, but when it comes time to pay off that mortgage, people have to pay to pay.

What we have seen in the last five years, however, is a proliferation of fees. Now there is not just the mortgage discharge fee; sometimes we are also charged an e-registration fee. In Ontario, that runs to $70. We pay the bank to pay off the mortgage, and then we pay to register land titles stating that we paid off the mortgage, so we are paying to pay and then we are paying to tell people we paid.

Some people are also charged what is called a reinvestment fee. The banks have decided that if people pay off their mortgage and go somewhere else and the bank has to find a new borrower, we should pay the cost of that. A reinvestment fee of $300 is charged by most of the banks to reinvest the money we just paid them back. Essentially, we have to find them a new client. As well, there is a reassignment fee of $260 if we change banks, and of course all of the banks charge very large fees for prepaying a mortgage.

I have a lot more to say about the practices of banks, but in conclusion I want to say that I am not attacking the employees of banks. For the most part, employees are like the rest of ordinary Canadians. The problem they have is that they face the wrath of consumers at the wicket or in the office when it comes to paying these fees, and I do have some sympathy for them.

What we heard today is that all parties are in favour of ending these pay-to-pay fees. I look forward to this bill perhaps passing unanimously in the House, and when it does, I would also like to see some action. I hope we are not in the situation we saw with removing the tampon tax or with other things the Conservatives have voted in favour of, when they simply did not take the action they could have taken to save consumers money right away.

[Public Safety, May 27th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, let us be clear. The same government that is forcing successful law enforcement programs like Project Condor to shut down, and the same government that is taking resources away from financial and organized crime investigations, is refusing to protect Canadians' personal information from unprecedented online surveillance.

Instead, it is pushing Bill C-51, a bill so flawed that our allies in the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe think that it violates the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

When will the minister stop pushing this bad bill and focus on real measures to keep Canadians safe?

[Public Safety, May 26th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, it turns out the Conservatives have also been hiding the facts when it comes to security issues.

The minister has repeatedly insisted that the Security Intelligence Review Committee has a mandate to fully oversee CSIS, but it turns out this is not the case.

Yesterday, the head of the Security Intelligence Review Committee said it cannot follow information once shared with other departments, yet this is exactly the power being dramatically expanded by the Conservatives.

Can the minister explain why he has once again been caught misleading Canadians on Bill C-51?

[Common Sense Firearms Licensing Act, May 25th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, I will leave checking the irony to the hon. member.

I want to go back to the previous question from the member for Dauphin—Swan River—Marquette. He did mention his offence at the use of the term gun lobby. I said it clearly in my speech, and I have said it many times; the gun lobby is a narrow group. It is not all gun owners in Canada. It is the hon. member who is trying to change the definition of gun lobby.

The gun lobby is those who work here, who are paid lobbyists, and those who work for the manufacturers as paid lobbyists, those who make their living off lobbying for gun changes.

It is not every gun owner or hunter in the country. Most of those people have no idea what has been proposed by the extremists who have been represented by the gun lobby here in Ottawa.