Scott Simms

[Prohibiting Cluster Munitions Act, May 29th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I thank all my hon. colleagues for allowing me this time, and as always, I thank my constituents for giving me the honour of speaking to this and other measures.

We have been talking for the past hour about cluster munitions. I just wanted to address the gravity of the situation, in addition to what was said by my hon. colleague from British Columbia, the leader of the Green Party.

Cluster munitions are a form of air-dropped or ground-launched explosive weapons that release or eject smaller submunitions. Commonly, a cluster bomb ejects explosive bomblets that are designed to kill personnel and destroy vehicles. Other cluster munitions are designed to destroy runways or electric power transmission lines, disperse chemical or biological weapons, or scatter land mines. Some submunition-based weapons can disperse non-munitions, such as leaflets. Of course, that is just a mild form.

As many people have said, over 95% of the victims, when it comes to cluster bombs, are civilians. For these cluster bombs, many would say, ratification has been a long-time coming. In this particular situation, and in all situations around the world, we must respect the spirit of the treaty that was signed.

Because cluster bombs release many small bomblets over a wide area, they pose risks to civilians both during attacks and afterwards.The weapons are prone to indiscriminate effects, especially in populated areas, the larger urban areas. Unexploded bomblets, and this is where it gets even worse, can kill or maim civilians and/or unintended targets long after a conflict has ended, and they are costly to locate and remove.

We draw the similarities between the work we did on the landmine treaty here in Ottawa and our ongoing efforts to defuse landmines around the world.

I am very grateful to have the opportunity to participate in the debate on Bill C-6. We worked hard to improve the bill while it was before the foreign affairs committee and have met with numerous organizations and individual Canadians who have shared their concerns with us about the legislation. I want to congratulate my colleague from Westmount—Ville-Marie, who was involved in that, for the hard work he accomplished.

Unfortunately, there was one improvement made to the bill, and only one, at committee. On balance, we find it still sorely lacking in terms of meeting Canada's commitments as a signatory to the Convention on Cluster Munitions.

Canada has long been a leader on humanitarian disarmament, most notably with the Liberal government's leadership in banning the use of landmines, and we must avoid undermining this Canadian tradition of international leadership.

The Convention on Cluster Munitions is an important convention, with an ability to reduce radically the number of cluster bombs and cluster bomb deaths and injuries around the world.

These are particularly heinous and indiscriminate weapons, as I mentioned earlier. Recent research indicates that more than 90% of reported cluster munition casualties are civilians, and about half of these are children, who often mistake these bombs and bomblets as harmless toys.

These are weapons that are hard to target. They are hard to control. Decades after the wars in Southeast Asia, hundreds of civilians continue to lose life and limb to those bombs in countries such as Laos and Vietnam. It not just a problem of the past. Cluster munitions continue to be used in the brutal war in Syria and will leave a legacy of death and injury in that country for years after the war ends.

Canada has a duty to ensure that we hold ourselves to the highest possible humanitarian standard in our international obligations. Leading the fight to ban these weapons would be consistent with that duty.

Bill C-6, Canada's ratification legislation in answer to the treaty, contains serious loopholes, in particular clause 11 of the bill, which has to do with joint operations with states that are not signatories to the Convention on Cluster Munitions.

The Conservative government has put in “exceptions” in this section of Bill C-6 that undermine the spirit and the objective of the convention and call into question Canada's commitment to ban cluster munitions.

Earlier I mentioned that we saw one improvement at committee stage. The government finally agreed to amend the wording of the legislation to indicate that Canada could not “use” cluster munitions. The practical effect of this change seems to mean that Canadian soldiers operating as part of joint military missions with non-signatory countries would be prohibited from dropping a cluster bomb.

However, as pointed out by the Mennonite Central Committee and other expert witnesses, Canadian Forces could still facilitate the ongoing use of these weapons in many instances, and here they are: directing or authorizing an activity that may involve the use, acquisition, possession, import, or export of a cluster munition; expressly requesting the use of a cluster munition; acquiring, possessing, or moving a cluster munition; transporting or engaging in an activity related to the transport of a cluster munition; aiding, abetting, or counselling another person to use, develop, make, acquire, possess, move, import, or export a cluster munition; conspiring with another person to use, develop, make, acquire, possess, move, import, or export a cluster munition; and finally, receiving, comforting, or assisting another person to use, develop, make, acquire, possess, move, import or export a cluster munition.

Including such major loopholes radically undermines the practical effects of the convention.

Either Canada is for or against cluster munitions. By passing this legislation as it is currently formulated, the government appears to be engaged in what my former colleague, Bob Rae, called organized hypocrisy. We sign legislation that appears, but only appears, to ratify the convention , but we include major loopholes in fine print that mean that nothing would really change on the combat field, at least when we participate in joint operations with non-signatory countries, such as the United States, which is typical of most Canadian deployments.

The government replied that the realities of interoperability mean that we had no choice but to include these loopholes if we wished to continue participating in joint missions with the Americans. This is clearly not true. In fact, 20 NATO countries have signed this convention without including these kinds of loopholes in their ratifying legislation, and they continue to operate in joint missions with the United States.

Department of National Defence representatives noted that there is always recognition in a partnership such as NATO that each country has different rules, and there are no repercussions from those differences inside a coalition. In a case where a nation would not use a particular weapon, we would not eliminate them from the coalition. We would simply employ them in the coalition in such a way as to not cause them to violate a principle or a domestic law, which would have fit in our amendments.

Bill C-6 is also missing key positive obligations that are outlined in the convention, including stockpiling, destruction, transparency reports, working to universalize the convention and promote its norms, notifying allies of our convention obligations, and discouraging the use of cluster munitions. This ratification legislation does not adequately promote the stigmatization of the use of cluster bombs.

The government likes to talk a lot about how its foreign policy is based on principled stands and seems to imply that this is novel for Canadian governments. What is principled, though, about passing legislation that appears to ratify an international convention we signed onto but then including loopholes within that fine print? It is not the way we have proceeded in many treaties past.

Respectfully, I would suggest that Canada's previous leadership of banning land mines was a much better example of principled foreign policy. I very much regret that we are not able to improve the legislation significantly.

We would like to thank organizations such as Mines Action Canada and the Mennonite Central Committee that did all they could do to raise awareness about this issue. I would also like to thank the expert witnesses we heard in committee.

I am also very sorry for the thousands of people all over the world who have been injured or killed by these weapons, which we can all agree are the most devastating and most vicious weapons known to humankind.

[Prohibiting Cluster Munitions Act, May 29th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I have a quick question. The interoperability issue, which is in question in clause 11, deserves to be addressed here. In the past, we have addressed it by saying that we strictly believe that we will not involve our military and the members of the military in this type of exercise in other operations. However, in this particular example, this does not seem to be exercised.

I really do not understand the logic in not accepting what we consider to be reasonable amendments to help ameliorate the situation by instructing our personnel to not get involved in this type of activity.

[Prohibiting Cluster Munitions Act, May 29th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I commend my colleague on his speech. He has done a lot of work on this issue. I would just very briefly ask him about the fact that when it comes to clause 11, we are not following the spirit of what was done with the former treaty when we talked about land mines. Could he comment and further expand on that?

[Reform Act, 2014, May 27th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I first want to thank my colleague for bringing this forward. There has been a lot of discussion about this for quite some time, to say the least.

A lot of it is taking place electronically. A lot of it is taking place through many of the forums we see around here and outward. This is one of those issues where people say, “You guys only talk about this in the bubble of Ottawa”, but quite frankly, it has burst through the bubble and many people are talking about this across the country from coast to coast to coast.

I congratulate my colleague for bringing this discussion to the nation because, as he mentioned in his speech, each and every leader, dating back 50 or 60 years or more, has always talked about electoral reform and we have seen it managed at a snail's pace in many cases. What the member is attempting to do is say that some of the incremental changes that took place within legislation some time ago should be taken further; in other words, we have a choice.

Back in 1970, there was the requirement that, in order to have the party attached to one's name on a ballot, one had to have the signature of the party's leader. Anyone within this House and beyond who has ever run in a federal election, unless he or she is an independent, had to have that affixed next to his or her name or have a letter from the party's leader saying that he or she stands as the candidate. Candidates may have been elected through the electoral process within the party itself, by nomination as we normally call it, or by appointment for whatever reason. That is certainly within the ability of a party leader to do, because we must remember that what is required is the signature. Therefore, what my hon. colleague is doing is taking that and pushing it further to affect the two acts in question here.

Just to recap what was talked about thus far, the enactment would amend the Canada Elections Act. Nominations of contestants would be held by a party's electoral district association. Proof of the party's endorsement of prospective candidates would be provided by the nomination officer of the party's electoral district association, and now with other signatures, so there has been a slight change in that. I also commend the member for making that change based on a provincial designate.

There is a fundamental shift here in what we are looking at; that is, it would make it a local aspect of a nomination process. Originally, there was to be a nomination officer in each electoral district association. We have made a slight change. A lot of people are okay with that.

We also talked about some of the other changes the member would make, such as the ability of the caucus to eject a leader or to call for the vote on a leader. We also have that juxtaposed to the fact my hon. colleague pointed out, which is that in this country the process of selecting the leader of a party or ejecting a leader from that position would now also involve the caucus in a much more proactive way. That is something we have to address within this debate as well.

What I hope to do here today is present some of the facts and further this debate. I will not leave members in animated suspense, because I have not yet decided how I am going to vote, because I believe in debate in this House. I do believe I am leaning in one certain direction—God forbid that I tell anybody—but what I want to hear during this debate is this. In a private member's bill there is what we call a five-minute rebuttal that the mover of the bill gets to do. What I am planning on doing is being specific, which was started by my colleague from Quebec, and talk about some of the concerns that were brought about during our discussions not only within our caucus but within the structure itself of the Liberal Party of Canada. We are talking about some of the concerns around imposing the same rules by a single law to all parties and caucuses. The fact is that the parties are free to adapt and change the rules. With this bill, they would not be able to do that anymore.

It would be a precedent to allow Parliament, the party that holds the majority, to decide internal democratic rules for all parties. A majority of MPs may vote for the current provisions of the bill against the will of the majority of a specific caucus. For example, a caucus within the House may contain members from an entire region, not just one province, of the country. Therefore, that voice would get weighted in a certain direction for one particular reason.

Propositions for reform, trying to convince parties to implement it, the Liberal Party made specific changes about nomination processes in the past. The Conservatives are welcome to adopt these changes for themselves. This is why I think the colleague from Alberta asked the question about leaving it to the party itself to decide these rules and not make it institutionalized within Canadian law. There are concerns about how we police that once we break the law.

Leaders are chosen by caucuses alone in some places. While they also have the power to take them out of that leadership, and that has been the case in countries around the world, it is not the case in our country. Then there is the process of allowing caucus to play a major role in removing a leader from his or her position when, at the genesis of that, it did not play a role in selecting that leader. Many people within parties would certainly have that concern.

On the positive side, there are a few things I would like to talk about, and I am reflecting my own personal view. I want to return to the nomination process. I think the member is on to a fundamental concept of allowing local democracy to select the candidate of their choice.

There are mechanisms within parties. We have one called the green light committee, which decides whether a candidate is eligible to run for the party. There are certain things about candidates, whether they are passed or whether they support the principles of the party. These kinds of measures have to be analyzed by every party in the House. It is no good for one of us to condemn another party for having a stringent process, saying that it is against democracy. It is not. Otherwise, we would have candidates in all political parties, no matter what their ideology, who would run madly off on all directions on whatever issue they chose.

The member is infusing an element of local democracy that to me shows promise, especially when he made changes before tabling the bill. That was also a good thing to do.

Let us go back to caucus chairs. We currently select democratically our caucus chair and so forth, but to eject someone from caucus, we go back to the principles that my colleague from Saint-Laurent—Cartierville mentioned earlier. We can apply the same sort of misgivings about that.

I hope when we return for debate, my hon. colleague gets a chance to rebut some of those concerns we have. I know he has done it personally, but I would like to see him do it within the House as well.

However, I want to commend him for all the work he has done on this. Over the course of this debate, I hope we all reflect on what we have done over the past while as politicians, as representatives. I hope we can say that we believe in a local democracy and we believe that people living within the boundaries of our riding or province should have the fundamental say over who the candidate should be. Then there is whether the party should be the decider of who that person represents it in that riding. If that is the way we feel, then we all need to personally reflect upon that.

This is the long way of saying that we need to have a good think when it comes to this legislation. I certainly look forward to having more debate on it. Unfortunately, we are confined as to the time we have. I know a lot of my colleagues would say that I should send it to committee. That requires me to say yes in principle, and therein lies the debate.

Do we say yes in principle to this, that we want democratic reform, or does it currently go too far within legislation to confine parties on how they operate in the House, and by extension govern the country?

Again, I congratulate the member and I look forward to the following debate.

[Committees of the House, May 26th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, where does one begin?

The hon. member has brought up a valid point, as we discussed earlier. As a matter of fact, my colleague from Saint-Léonard—Saint-Michel made a good point. He said he was surprised this is not in the budget implementation bill as well.

It is a valid point, because we are seeing everything here being encapsulated. There were omnibus bills in the years before the Conservatives took power in 2006, but there was a general theme around this omnibus legislation. Now there seems to be the bill currently known as “madly off in all directions”, because it is everything that the Conservatives see and most of it was not even in their campaign promises.

My colleague is right in that sense, because at what point do they practise what they used to preach, especially for the period from 2000 to 2005? When I arrived here in 2004, there were some solid arguments as to why bills should be split and dealt with on an individual basis as stand-alone legislation.

Being from Atlantic Canada, the Minister of Justice argued vehemently to take the provisions and changes in the Atlantic accord out of the budget bill because they deserved to be in stand-alone legislation. All of his colleagues in Atlantic Canada mentioned that, but at least that provision in the Atlantic accord shared thematically with the budget, because it was about equalization.

Now we find things sandwiched into this legislation. It is the Neapolitan ice cream of legislation-making. Every flavour is in there. Every little element is in here, and for some reason we have to accept one part and then deny the other, even though they are vehemently opposed to each other.

There is a very important issue in the first part of the motion, so I support the motion simply because it is the responsible and right thing to do. It could be handled very quickly given the situation, the headlines, the editorials that we have witnessed over the past two years. If this is not responsible legislation-making, then I really do not know what is.

The right thing to do is split this legislation. The right thing to do is deal with this very important issue up front, right now, before we get to other matters, including privacy.

[Committees of the House, May 26th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I remember that episode quite well. We have seen backlash before. I have been here 10 years now and I have seen protests against certain measures, but not against bills before they are passed or while they are being debated in the House.

That one certainly caused a ruckus, and it did so electronically. I remember the campaign that was waged through social media at the time about snooping into people's private information. It was absolutely incredible. I had not seen anything like that in the House, and at that point I had been here for nine years.

I recall my colleague asked the question about how to handle situations in the House when the first part of bill looked at necessary matters that needed to be done very quickly and which would receive, if not unanimous, near unanimous consent of the House.

This is something for which they have argued. I remember that when I came here, we were in government and the Conservatives were in opposition. This is something that they pushed toward as a responsible way of creating legislation. They pushed toward taking out parts of the bill that could be passed quickly and could receive consent, things that had to be done in a timely fashion such as this, then go back and look at elements of the bill regarding privacy and the like. That way, we could engage in that and go clause by clause very quickly over elements of cyberbullying that we felt were necessary.

I find it very irresponsible for the Conservatives to behave this way when this is the type of legislation making that they professed to want before they became government.

[Committees of the House, May 26th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I apologize that I did not see the editorial in question, but I believe what the member is saying is that we need to be responsible. A responsible way of dealing with the bill is to take out the part that can be passed very quickly, which will achieve the consent within the House, given the issue and the timeliness of it.

I remember back in 2005 when the Conservatives were in opposition. It begged, pleaded and demanded in the House that we remove provisions of the budget dealing with the Atlantic accord because it had received unanimous consent in the House. Therefore, let us put that forward.

The Conservatives also argued for issues dealing with the veterans back when the accord was put out. They wanted to peel that part out and put it through as well. I can only assume that they would probably want to do this again. I feel that by supporting this motion to have the cyberbullying aspect removed from the legislation and pushed through very quickly would certainly be a responsible thing for the entire House to do.

[Committees of the House, May 26th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleagues for allowing me the time to do this. I also want to thank my colleague, the Liberal member of Parliament for Charlottetown, who did an extensive amount of work on this, as well as the member of Parliament for Malpeque and the member of Parliament for Mount Royal.

The enactment would amend the Criminal Code to provide most notably for a new offence of non-consensual distribution of intimate images. As well, there would complementary amendments to authorize the removal of such images from the Internet and the recovery of the expenses incurred to obtain the removal of images, the forfeiture of property used in the commission of the offence, a recognizance order to be issued to prevent the distribution of such images, and restriction of the use of a computer or the Internet by a convicted offender.

We are talking about the power to make preservation demands and orders to compel the preservation of electronic evidence, new production orders to compel the production of data relating to the transmission of communications and the location of transactions, individuals or things.

A warrant that would extend the current investigative power for data associated with telephones to transmission data relating to all means of telecommunications, or warrants that would be associated with telephones and the like, as I mentioned, a streamlined process of obtaining warrants and orders related to an authorization to intercept private communications by ensuring that those warrants and orders could be issued by a judge who would issue the authorization and by specifying that all documents relating to a request for a related warrant or order would be automatically subject to the same rules respecting confidentiality as the request for authorization.

Last, it would also amend the Competition Act to make applicable for the purpose of enforcing certain provisions of the act the new provisions being added to the Criminal Code respecting demands and orders for the preservation of computer data and orders for the production of documents related to the transmission or communications of financial data.

It would also amend the Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Act to make some of the new investigative powers being added to the Criminal Code available to Canadian authorities executing incoming requests for assistance and to allow the Commissioner of Competition to execute search warrants under the Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Act that I spoke of earlier.

There are some messages that we would like to put out there regarding this. This has been a long time coming. It was first introduced in the House on November 20, 2013. Cyberbullying is a scourge upon our society, as we all know, and has been evidenced certainly in the last two or three years. This is a problem not just in Canada but around the world. The party is supportive, in principle, of legislative measures that would provide law enforcement with additional tools to combat cyberbullying.

This is an area where the Criminal Code urgently needs to be updated to reflect the realities of modern technologies.

We believe, however, that legislative measures alone are insufficient to combat cyberbullying and we urge the government to commit to a broader, more holistic strategy to deal with cyberbullying that would also include public awareness resources for both parents and kids to allow them to see the signs of cyberbullying which they probably would not recognize under normal circumstances.

We introduced cyberbullying legislation last session that would have modified some Criminal Code offences to cover modern technology, as is done in C-13, which the Conservatives and the NDP voted down. The Liberals introduced legislation that would have addressed new technologies back in 2005.

The Conservative government is only figuring out now that police forces need these tools to keep up with technologies that are increasingly a part of today's crime.

We believe that a balance must be struck between civil liberties and public safety, particularly when it comes to warrants that may be intrusive and overboard. We do not support the measures that were in Bill C-30, which even the government had to withdraw because of the outrage some time ago.

Some of the bill would duplicate the rejected Bill C-30, such as word for word reproductions of the changes, subsection 487.3(1) of the Criminal Code and all but one word changes to subsection 492.1 and subsection 492 regarding warrants.

We are very concerned about efforts to reintroduce lawful access, which the Conservatives promised was dead at the time. That is not necessarily the case now.

Though the title is the protecting Canadians from online crime act, nobody is actually protected under this act. In typical fashion, this is all about punishment rather than prevention. Complex problems like cyberbullying require more than blunt editions to the Criminal Code. This omnibus bill touches everything from terrorism to telemarketing, cable stealing to hate speech, and is an affront to both democracy and the legislative process in the omnibus form that has been in going on in for quite some time.

We have seen that through the budget bills and a lot of the legislation that has passed through the House, so we can only assume that this type of pattern will continue with this legislation. Therefore, we support the motion to have the bill split and the provisions relating to cyberbullying be contained in a stand-alone bill at committee.

We are proposing two amendments.

The first is an amendment that would provide for a statutory review of elements of the bill, including the voluntary disclosure provisions. The sunset clause is a part of a law statute and we can repeal the law part over a specified time period.

The second is an amendment that would require an actual basis a report by telecoms detailing the volume of information being disclosed without a warrant.

As we mentioned earlier, we talked about the splitting of this bill, and we certainly feel this is a way to go. This would be the most responsible thing to do in light of the omnibus nature of this legislation. I believe that by doing this, we would be taking a principled and responsible approach.

Again, I go back to our original message of cyberbullying, which is a scourge on our society. What we can do in the House is reflect by looking at stand-alone legislation dealing with that. Basically, by making this a stand-alone provision, it would go a long way in enhancing the debate. Given the fact that we have had so much debate in the past, so much opposition and that there has been so much talk in the public realm about this legislation, this is something we can support.

[Extension of Sitting Hours, May 26th, 2014]

Will the real House leader please stand up.

[Business of Supply, May 15th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, yes, absolutely I do. I thank the member for Parkdale—High Park for the question. I used to live in her riding and I know a lot of CBC employees live there as well. I was in private broadcasting, I was part of the MétéoMédia/The Weather Network, which is regulated but private. When I would go and do stories and be associated with the CBC, I found the people very respectful of the journalistic standards put out there.

I will give an example. The Senate is doing a study on the CBC and requested that its anchor, Peter Mansbridge, appear, and the president wrote back to say, “We must decline your invitation to Mr. Mansbridge. It is not appropriate for journalists, whose job includes reporting on the activities of Senators, to be questioned by those same Senators at a Parliamentary Committee.” This is a good thing. It is proof that the CBC does live up to those journalistic standards and ethics, and if it does not, we have the ombudsman to go through and act as a mechanism by which that can be rectified.

However, recent debates do alarm me. In response to the Senate demand of getting Mr. Mansbridge in, it proves that there has to be that separation in place and we must not micromanage in this particular area.