Ujjal Dosanjh

[Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, February 5th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, that is a false question that is being set up by my hon. colleague.

When the evidence is far away, when the contents cannot be disclosed and when the agencies cannot be disclosed, we cannot prove those kinds of crimes beyond a reasonable doubt because most of them did not occur on Canadian soil. It is important that we become pragmatic and understand that in some instances we just do not want the people because we may not be able to put them behind bars.

[Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, February 5th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise to speak to this matter.

First, the presentation of the parliamentary secretary was fairly detailed on most of the technical issues. Therefore, I will not talk about what is contained in the bill. He has described the bill more than adequately.

I will address some questions before I get into some of the details of the legislation.

First, our country takes in over 250,000 immigrants and refugees every year. That is our lifeline. That immigration supplies human capital, skills and the talent we need on an ongoing basis.

When we have a country as open as Canada, there are elements who come to the country who do not belong here. They have committed crimes somewhere else or they may intend to commit crimes in our country. Most countries that deal with immigration expressly retain the right of removal from the country for aliens or non-citizens, whether they be permanent residents or just aliens in the country.

It is important for us to understand that the legislation is based on this assumption; Canada being an open country that invites and welcomes immigrants. Canada needs to have a mechanism in place where it does not have to go through rigmarole of proving beyond reasonable doubt all the crimes an individual may have committed before the individual could be deported out of the country or removed from the country.

This is an important concept for people to understand. Once we understand it and if we believe Canada ought to have that right in place, then I think everything else follows.

I have been a practising lawyer since 1977. I was called to the bar in 1977. Since then and before that, immigration legislation in Canada always has had clauses to deal with the inadmissibility of people who may want to come to Canada or may be in Canada as permanent residents or aliens. Therefore, this is nothing new. It is not as if suddenly we woke up one day and now imported into our legislation something that had not existed.

Security certificates have existed for the last several decades. They have been challenged in the past. They now have been challenged in the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court provided some instructions for the government and the government brought the legislation forward to meet the deadline of February 23.

If the Liberals had to introduce this legislation, we would have looked at the home grown model of the SIRC, the Security Intelligence Review Committee. We may have chosen the U.K. system with a special advocate, which the government chose, but we may have brought in amendments to that system. That system has been under a great deal of criticism in the United Kingdom itself.

Therefore, this is not ideal legislation. There are no ideal solutions when we try to deal with organized crime or terrorism and the difficult questions of proof, of issues, of actions and omissions that may have occurred away from our shores in other countries. It is not easy to bring that evidence forward to deal with those issues.

Let me give a case in point, the Air India case. I was the attorney general when it was being investigated and I was the premier when the two individuals, who were eventually acquitted, were arrested for that. I know from the briefings I received from the Crown that the evidence for the crime was in different parts of the world. This is why it took so long for the Crown and the investigators to gather that evidence. Even then, we were unsuccessful in prosecuting that matter.

That simply brings this into focus. If someone is an alien or a visitor trying to get into the country and we have evidence or sources, which sometimes cannot be disclosed without jeopardizing and compromising our contacts or informants, we need the kind of process in the security certificates to deal with those issues.

Then there is the question that always arises. Why do we not deal with these issues through the Criminal Code. Under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, we have always had this regime where we have dealt with people who were inadmissible. The proof required under the act is not one of beyond reasonable doubt. It is essentially on the balance of probabilities or on reasonable grounds. It is a quasi-judicial, quasi-criminal matter so the proof is not as onerous.

This is appropriate in cases where our country faces danger from people who may have committed crimes elsewhere, who cannot be advised of the information completely and who cannot be given all the names of the agencies and informants from which we received information. Under those circumstances, it is appropriate to use that lower threshold and not the Criminal Code threshold. The fact is the evidence may not be in our hands. It may be somewhere else thousands of miles away from our shores. This is why these kinds of cases cannot be dealt with on the Criminal Code basis.

It is important to recognize that to come into Canada is a privilege. It is not a right for anyone in the world to come into the country except people who are Canadian citizens. Canada ought to reserve the right to deal with these individuals in a way that is appropriate, that is in keeping with our traditions of due process and the like.

Some of these crimes are often committed elsewhere. The information and evidence is elsewhere. It is important for us to protect those agencies and informants. They may have provided us with that information. Therefore, it is important we continue to have the mechanism in the immigration legislation.

When making the decision in the Charkaoui case, the court examined various models. I have said this before in the House. It is unfortunate the government chose this model. The government could have chosen a security intelligence review committee model, which is a home-grown, home developed model in Canada. It is more adversarial in nature and provides for better disclosure of the evidence. It also has provided in the past couple of decades a mechanism where the evidence can be scrutinized in the presence of counsel. I do not believe there ever have been any violations of security with respect to that process. Therefore, this was an appropriate model to adopt, but it was not.

The court also looked at the Arar case, how Mr. Justice O'Connor dealt with the issues of confidentiality, how he provided and facilitated the provision of information to the counsel for Mr. Arar, with all the security precautions intact. The government could have looked at that.

The court also addressed the issue with respect to the Evidence Act and how the attorney general of Canada could deal with the need for non-disclosure in certain cases. The government did not look at that. The government went to the United Kingdom model, which was not necessarily the best model. However, that is what we have and that is what we have tried to improve by bringing forth the amendments about which my colleague, the parliamentary secretary, talked.

Could this legislation have been better? Definitely. Could it have been different? Definitely. However, there is no question in my mind that the legislation is a necessary evil, so to speak. Ultimately, if we are interested in protecting our country from those who wish to do harm to it, it is important to keep in reserve, within the hands of the government, mechanisms that keep the country secure and safe. It is very important in the context of that to look at the due process, which has been provided in the legislation.

I believe the amendments, which deal with how one appoints an advocate, have enhanced the legislation. The legislation would give the public safety minister appropriate instructions for preparing a roster of security cleared advocates from independent, qualified members of the bar from across the country who would be provided with adequate resources to independently function when acting in the interests of the accused and in no one else's interests.

The choice of counsel is a cherished principle in our laws and in our centuries old conventions and I believe that choice has been preserved in the bill for the detainee. A detainee would have the right to choose from the independent roster and the judge would then appoint that particular advocate for the detainee barring circumstances where that might jeopardize either national security or may bring the individual into conflict.

There is also the issue of privilege. When the bill was presented in its initial form, it had no privilege. The detainee enjoyed no solicitor-client privilege at all, which exposed the detainee and the advocate and any communications with each other to disclosure. Therefore, it was seen fit by the committee to re-import the notion of solicitor-client privilege to the extent of protecting those communications.

The most important amendment in my mind is the amendment that the committee pushed through on the issue of torture. It clearly prohibits evidence that may have been derived, either primarily or secondarily, from torture. Any evidence that is tainted by torture would not be admissible in the proceedings with respect to the detainee.

Those four amendments have actually enhanced the bill. The bill could have been a lot better but this is the bill we were given and it is the one we are working with. The deadline is looming and we want to ensure this is dealt with expeditiously so that on February 23 a certain legal regime will be in place to deal with the existing certificates and a mechanism is available to issue others if needed. Of course, that is being done sparingly. As we know, over the last decade only 28 security certificates have been issued.

These are not easy issues. We need to balance national security interests with the interests of due process in our conventions and our laws. These decisions are not made lightly. I understand that some colleagues may have difficulty with these issues but when one is in the business of governing sometimes tough decisions need to be madeand we need to deal with balances that may not always be the way we would like them to be.

[Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, January 31st, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, the member is saying that he did not ask the question, but I understood the thrust of his remarks.

Those are very important issues he raised, but as parliamentarians, as members of the government and members of the responsible opposition, we have to sometimes work with haste expeditiously to meet the deadlines that may have been imposed by the court. We must also try to create as appropriate a balance between individual rights and national security, as are possible under the circumstances. This is not the most ideal piece of legislation and is not what I would have done, but we need to move with some haste.

[Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, January 31st, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, let me first thank Lorne Waldman. I believe it was his evidence and that of others like him that enabled all of us to make the improvements that we were actually able to make to this legislation. I want to publicly thank him and others for making the contributions they did.

On the question of the shortage of applicants, I do not know whether the number 50 means that there is a shortage of applicants with respect to the role of special advocate. Everyone knows that the special advocates have to be in the vicinity of Ottawa or Toronto, mostly for these matters. Everyone that knows the requisites in this particular case, knows that one needs to be experienced in areas of constitutional, immigration and criminal law.

There are very few lawyers in this country who are equally familiar with all those three areas of law. Therefore, I think there could be a shortage of applications for that reason.

Also, I was talking to a very learned Queen's counsel in British Columbia the other day and he told me that in British Columbia they are finding it hard to find senior counsel who can do ad hoc criminal work, prosecutions. That tells me that lawyers are not necessarily going into certain areas of specialization as they ought to, in numbers as they used to.

[Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, January 31st, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, this is obviously a very important piece of legislation. I want to say at the outset that were we in government in response to the position expressed by the court, we would have definitely presented a different piece of legislation.

This is a piece of legislation that during the committee we have tried to actually improve partly or fully because we believe that the court deadline is very important, and the issue of national and public security is very important for the country. In a way, it is a non-partisan issue. It goes beyond political partisanship.

The fact is that this security certificate regime has been in existence since 1977. The court obviously had the opportunity to review this matter and review it in the context of the Charkaoui case and provide us with its judgment.

The fact is that the government could have chosen any of the three or four models, that the court looked at, without expressing approval for any one of those models.

In fact, one of the models the government could have actually adopted, as I said earlier when I spoke to this matter, was the SIRC model, the Security Intelligence Review Committee model, where there was much fuller disclosure available, where SIRC actually set up an adversarial process, and where SIRC was able to set up essentially a courtroom type procedure to deal with these issues and deal with the security issues prior to the security certificate regime coming into being.

The other particular model that the court referred to was the process under the Canada Evidence Act which handles the balance between the protection of sensitive information and the procedural rights of individuals. The Attorney General of Canada of course has a role with respect to that matter about the potential disclosure of important national security information.

Then in fact the court looked at the Arar case, where the commissioner devised a process to deal with sensitive information in a way that as much disclosure as was possible could be provided to Mr. Arar and/or his counsel.

Finally, the court also examined the special advocate regime that is presently in existence in the United Kingdom. It has been criticized in the United Kingdom. It is a scheme that even if the government wanted to bring this scheme into our legislation, it could have been improved much more than it actually attempted to.

I want to say briefly that our committees, both of the Senate and the House, had made several recommendations to deal with the anti-terrorism legislation. Some of those recommendations were directed to the security certificate regime. Both of the reports of the committees found that there was a need for some form of adversarial challenge to the governmental claims that the secrecy was necessary. Both committees concluded that the affected party be entitled to select a special advocate from a roster of security cleared counsels who would be funded by the government but independent of government.

It should also be noted that both reports also provided several other recommendations for changes to be made to this particular legislation beyond just the issue of how to achieve the correct balance. One of the issues that they had dealt with was the faster process and dealing with the issue of the torture evidence.

When we looked at this legislation and looked at it in light of the fact that there was a court imposed deadline and we needed to proceed expeditiously to deal with the issue, we felt that there were some areas of the legislation we could at least quickly improve upon.

The Liberal members on the select standing committee were able to make four amendments. Let me just go through those amendments. They are very significant because they deal with the rights of the detainee with respect to these matters and enhancing the rights of the detainee.

First, we were able to actually specify in the legislation, through the amendment, that there ought to be specific criteria for the minister when creating the roster of potential special advocates to ensure that they are duly qualified, that they are independent, and that they have adequate resources, which means that they are funded by the government in an adequate fashion but they are independent of the government.

Second, we were able to make an amendment to the effect that the detainee, foreign national or permanent residence, who is the subject of the hearing, be allowed to choose his or her own special advocate from the roster and that advocate in cases would be appointed by the judge.

Third, and in fact very important, there was the absence of the solicitor-client relationship altogether in the legislation, and we were able to reinstate the solicitor-client privilege for the detainee to the extent of the information that the detainee may have given to the special advocate, so the special advocate is barred from sharing that information with anybody else other than the detainee himself. Therefore, that provides a degree of solicitor-client privilege which we believe was appropriate in the circumstances.

Fourth, and most important of all, we were actually able to successfully make a very broad amendment that dealt with the issue of evidence that may be the product of torture, whether it is the primary evidence or derivative evidence. Based on the amendment, if the judge that might be hearing the case believes, on reasonable grounds, that the evidence may be the product of torture, directly or indirectly, that evidence would not admissible in the proceedings before the judge with respect to the particular detainee.

I believe that we have been able to make improvements. Let me just go back and recap, and say that if we were the government, this would not be the piece of legislation. The government could have done a much better job. The government could have actually adopted and built upon the homegrown concept and the process that the SIRC model uses. It did not do that. That would have been much better.

Therefore, we will be monitoring this. We will be attempting to make as many changes or improvements as possible over the next number of months and years, but it is important that the legislation pass. We have a deadline upon us and that is the deadline of February 23. It is important that we show some degree of responsibility, so that the court deadline that has been imposed upon us does not go by. We want to have a system in place before that happens.

[Afghanistan, January 31st, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, we know the government will never admit the truth. We know that and Canadians know that. The government has never levelled with Canadians on the transfer of detainees.

I will turn to the Minister of Public Safety and ask him a question. We know Canadian Forces conduct joint operations with Afghan soldiers. There are prisoners detained by those Afghan soldiers. Do Correctional Service Canada officials have access to and the ability to inspect those detainees?

[Afghanistan, January 31st, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, Canadians continue to learn the truth about the situation in Afghanistan from the newspapers because the government will not tell them the truth.

The government's attempt to circumvent the military's decision to stop detainee transfers is absolutely troubling.

Will the Prime Minister finally come clean with Canadians and admit that it was his government that issued this new policy to circumvent the detainee ban?

[Food and Drugs Act, November 27th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to rise in support of Bill C-378, An Act to amend the Food and Drugs Act and the Food and Drug Regulations (drug export restrictions).

This is a very important issue. I wrestled with it in my previous incarnation as the minister of health and introduced similar legislation. However, we did not have time to deal with it successfully.

Canada has a regime that has been developed to protect, at reasonable prices, the supply of drugs for the needs of Canadians. The instrument we have used for that is the Patented Medicine Prices Review Board. I believe the review board has stood us in good stead over the last number of years and has kept the supply of patented drugs available to Canadians at reasonable prices.

Because the prices are reasonable and because the politicians in the U.S. refuse to use similar kinds of devices to control the prices in the U.S., they are busy trying to devise plans in many states and, in fact nationally to try to legalize and legislate the wholesale imports of drugs from Canada. If they are successful in continuing to take bulk exports of drugs from Canada, I am afraid it may endanger the very supply of drugs at reasonable prices for Canadians. In that sense, this legislation is very important for all Canadians.

I want to commend the member, my colleague, for bringing the legislation forward in the House. When we dealt with this last, the sale of drugs at reasonable prices from Canada into the United States had gone into hundreds of millions of dollars and had increased.

I know those sales have gone down as the dollar has gone up. However, Canada faces a very real threat from legislators in the United States. They are attempting, in different ways, to deal with this issue and allow the continued importation of these drugs from Canada into the United States.

There are other aspects to this matter that bear scrutiny. For instance, we have a number of doctors who are engaged in prescribing medication to clients or “patients of their's” without examining the patients, or speaking with them, or physically touching the patients in examining them. That has been held to be unethical for some doctors by doctors' bodies across the country.

It is the same with the pharmacists. Pharmacists then fill those prescriptions, dozens and hundreds every day, knowing that they are signed by the same doctor or same number of doctors across the country. We believe some of those practices are unethical.

Some disciplinary bodies have been crying out for reform by and assistance from the federal government so they do not have to deal with the issues. They do not have the resources to investigate those kinds of unethical practices, and there are many, and then successfully discipline their members who may be involved in these questionable practices.

The way to deal with this issue is for the government to support the legislation so we can then prevent this danger becoming real, if does become real.

Many attempts have been made to make bulk imports into the U.S. legitimate, and we are familiar with those. Many of the U.S. presidential candidates have proposed and dozens of U.S. jurisdictions at state and local levels continue to introduce measures designed to help local citizens, government employees, retirees and others to buy Canadian prescription drugs.

Any of these measures could trigger the unanticipated shortages in Canadian supplies. Some of these programs include: developing websites that recommend Canadian Internet pharmacies for local citizens, employees and retirees and their families to purchase from; certification of Canadian based pharmacies as “qualified” for use by drug benefit program members or by local citizens; and the review of city/state drug benefit programs with a view to hiring Canadian firms to supply those programs with prescription drugs.

On October 31, the U.S. Senate adopted U.S. Senator David Vitter's drug reimportation amendment to the U.S. Senate labour, health and human services and education department appropriations bill. As he stated, “This provision prevents HHS officials from blocking hard working Americans from bringing back prescribed medication from Canada and will help bring more affordable prescription drugs to residents”.

In fact, in the House of Representatives, the agriculture appropriations bill was amended to include language that prevented the FDA from enforcing importation laws on prescription drugs from anywhere, including Canada. This legislation may be stuck in the appropriations process for other reasons and may roll into next year, but the language remains a serious concern as do the consequences that flow from this language.

These bills in the Congress followed legislation passed and signed by the President on October 4, 2006. The bill effectively created an open border for individual Americans to fill their prescription drug needs from Canada's national supply. A key provision of the new legislation prohibits the U.S. customs services from intercepting personal use quantities of prescription drugs at the border through foot traffic.

There are many other examples of what the U.S. governmental bodies, including state legislatures, have been trying to do, and that is to undermine the Canadian supply of drugs available to Canadians at reasonable prices.

It is open to the U.S. legislators and politicians to do exactly what we have done wisely for Canadians. We have protected the supply of drugs for Canadians at reasonable rates by using devices such as the Patented Medicine Prices Review Board. It is open to the U.S. to do the same. Why the Americans are not doing that beats me. I fail to understand why they are not taking the steps within their power to deal with controlling and regulating patented drug prices in their own country.

When I visited the United States of America as minister of health, David Vitter told me that he was interested in dismantling the regime we had in place for controlling and regulating the prices at reasonable rates for drugs for Canadians. That is the real intent behind the fact that they do not want to do anything within the U.S., but they want to undermine our supply and our devices that we use to control our prices at reasonable rates for Canadians.

Therefore, I suggest we support this bill, which would protect the supply of drugs for Canadians at reasonable rates.

[Royal Canadian Mounted Police, November 19th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, instead of explaining the CBSA's role, the Minister of Public Safety complained over the weekend that compared to the Dziekanski tragedy, the public does not show enough outrage over the damage done by drunk drivers.

While drunk driving is a serious issue, why is the minister detracting from what happened to Mr. Dziekanski? Why is he questioning the legitimacy of Canadians' concerns, and why has he not initiated an independent, national, public and comprehensive review on the use of tasers in Canada?

[Royal Canadian Mounted Police, November 19th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, there continue to be many unanswered questions about the tragic death of Robert Dziekanski. He arrived in Vancouver around 4 p.m. on October 13, but for some unknown reason, he did not clear customs until after midnight. He waited for hours without assistance.

How did this happen? Why has the Canada Border Services Agency been silent on this matter?