Wayne Marston

[Enhancing Royal Canadian Mounted Police Accountability Act, February 28th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, it is not often I am almost at a loss for words in this place, but this is one of them. The Liberal Party of Canada was the governing party for many years and lost the opportunity to address this problem.

At the committee our party made 18 proposals for amendments and his party made zero. The Liberals are in the House saying how things should be addressed when they were not even prepared to do their part in committee. I find that astounding.

[Enhancing Royal Canadian Mounted Police Accountability Act, February 28th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for Kootenay—Columbia for his service prior to coming here. Within the question he just put to me, I hear the sense of his loyalty, something I greatly respect.

In the context of vesting the power with the commissioner, he will have the responsibility of implementing whatever we do, but we can alter the RCMP Act. We can alter the regulations that are part of the act, which would give direction to the commissioner and other folks in the RCMP who would deal with this situation.

I recall that In 1974 women first took part in the RCMP. I was just beginning my career in the labour movement and I remember how proud my sisters at Bell Canada were of the fact that women were taking their places.

Women's service in the RCMP or in the military has evolved over the last 30 or 35 years in a way most people did not think was possible. The environment has changed. Equipment within the military and the RCMP has changed. However, it takes people with exceptional skills to deal with that life, not only during the day but when they go home.

As I said in my speech, education is the key to this situation: education of the folks who have created the problem, because obviously there is a place they have to go; education for the folks who are on the receiving end, with assistance, help, peer counselling; and the HR people who administer whatever the commissioner brings forward.

[Enhancing Royal Canadian Mounted Police Accountability Act, February 28th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, there are times in debates in this House that speak to times and periods in our own lives. I was pleased to hear from the member for Kootenay—Columbia, who is an RCMP officer and who can bring to this debate a very clear perspective from inside the organization.

In my lifetime, as a young boy growing up in a town called Plaster Rock, New Brunswick, RCMP officers enforced the law in our province. My family had occasion to deal with them. When I was very young, my sister died at the hands of a person or persons unknown. It turned out to be a very ill family member.

For a long time afterwards my father talked about the investigators from the RCMP who handled that investigation. Initially he was taken in for questioning, and he talked about how professionally he, a man who was broken-hearted, who had just lost a daughter, was handled. In fact, that particular incident would affect the rest of his life. He became an alcoholic.

Again my family would interact with RCMP officers, who would pick him up from time to time, as they should and as they needed to do, but there was always a sense that they handled my father with a kind of dignity that perhaps they might not have under other circumstances. I do not know.

For a young boy growing up, my ideal was to become an RCMP officer. Well, if members look at me, I am wearing glasses and I am too doggone short to be an RCMP officer, so I had to forgo that, but I had this great interest in the RCMP, and a great respect for them, for an awful long time.

I still respect the RCMP, although they have fallen on difficult times. There is a cultural change that has happened, at least in my view, over the last number of years, relative to how they treat one another. We have heard those reports.

I recall, I believe it was in the 1970s, a group that was referred to as the "dirty tricks" squad. There was an investigation, and as I understand it, that particular group was disbanded.

The warning signs were there for some time about things that would later become almost institutionalized within the RCMP. Going back to Justice O'Connor in the Maher Arar case, Justice O'Connor made some very significant recommendations to the RCMP at that time, things that they needed to address, things that the government needed to address. That has gone wanting, as far as I am concerned.

Members will recall Bill C-38 in the last Parliament. It started to address this issue, and of course it was lost to the election cycle, as so many things are.

Going back to my friend from Kootenay—Columbia, who brings to this place a particular view of this institution and perhaps of the problems and of some solutions, I am looking forward to listening to his commentary as the day unfolds.

In my previous life as a union leader, one of the things that we had to deal with quite often was harassment in the workplace. We would get together with the company and work on strategies for education of the members who were involved with such things.

Within the union movement itself, I can recall that in the 1980s we worked hard dealing with our own conferences and doing our own internal work on the respect that needed to be paid to one another.

The key to it, in both of those cases, was education. I have a little saying: “With knowledge comes responsibility”. We have the knowledge today of the accusations and abuses that it is suggested have happened within the RCMP. We have enough knowledge to know that something of significance has to be done.

Our party was concerned about this bill because we felt it did not go far enough. During the committee stage, we made proposals for changes to the bill. For instance, a change that is needed is to add mandatory harassment training for RCMP officers.

Every single individual who works with the public and who works under the kind of pressure that these officers work under needs to have that training.

Again reflecting back on my own life, there was a time I worked for the Canadian National Railway as a signal maintainer. In Niagara Falls there was a place called Thorold Stone Road that some members here will know of. Four people were killed there, struck by trains while driving through.

My point is that day in and day out, our RCMP, our police officers and our fire departments deal with the aftermath of horrific events. Today I read in the newspaper that there was a six-car pileup in Hamilton because of the storm. Quite often the first on the scene is a police officer, who has to deal with the pressures that come from those situations. If we consider that pressure for a moment, it does not justify harassment, but in some cases it might help to explain it. It might help us to understand what officers' lives are like and the problems that they take home with them.

In any situation in the workplace, we have to give employees the tools they need to deal with those situations. In the case of the RCMP, I and our party have stressed the need for mandatory training. We also believe there should be a civilian body involved, someone at arm's length. Often we are too close to issues and problems ourselves and keep repeating the same mistakes and not addressing them in a fashion that is helpful to the situation, whereas a civilian board at arm's length would have the capacity to bring a different perspective to the situation. It is really important that the government should pause and look at this idea and give serious consideration to implementing civilian oversight.

In our view, some of the human resources policies we see are overly dramatic and perhaps even draconian in what they offer, but I am not going to dig too far into that because I do not want this to become a bashing of the RCMP. My party and I have great respect for this organization, but part of our responsibility in this place is to do the right thing to help that organization make the corrections deemed necessary by the government.

The government has made an attempt with this bill to start a process, but we do not think it has gone far enough. Witnesses at the committee made recommendations that the government did not see fit to follow through on, any more than it did for things proposed by our party at committee.

As I recall, the bill was put forward in June 2012. It referred to enhancing trust and restoring accountability to the RCMP. Accountability will need the oversight that was talked about. It will need someone at arm's length.

There are proposals in the bill to give more power to the superintendent in charge. The number one officer is going to be given authority where what I would call due diligence should come into play.

I am a great believer in people's right to be heard. People in the workplace, whether they are RCMP officers or regular workers in a plant, make mistakes and do things wrong, and there may be an arbitrary situation in which an employer says, “You're fired”. I worked for Bell Canada, which many times, in my opinion, fired people too quickly. Bell did not even listen to the story in those days. Hopefully that has changed—it has been almost 20 years since I was there—but the reality was that workers would be called on the carpet, the accusation would be made, and they were fired. Then, along with the union, they had to prepare a case to come back to correct the accusation. It is very concerning when that kind of power is vested in one manager or one superintendent in a workplace.

When there is a situation like with the allegations about the RCMP, which talk about a systemic problem that has had to have developed over many years, I remind members again of the pressures that these individuals live under. I want everybody to pause and think about it. It does not justify misbehaviour on the part of workers or officers, but we need to have a trail of due diligence that allows people to look at and understand the situation and help the officers retain their position and correct the behaviour with which people have problems.

As I look through some of the statements from our party and our view of things that could happen, we need the minister to prioritize the issue of sexual harassment. This is the part of the story that has received a lot of media attention. In my experience, the media sometimes make a flashpoint of an issue in which other underlying related or cultural issues in an organization are overlooked because the focus is drawn so heatedly on that point. Sexual harassment in any form in any place, workplace or otherwise, is certainly not acceptable and must be addressed.

However, we can look at the existence of police officers in general and the military-style training they have. Again, I refer back to 1963-1964 when I was a sapper apprentice in the Canadian army. At that time hazing took place. It was considered part of becoming a soldier. We had to be tough enough to put up with whatever happened, whatever was done. Fortunately, the environment I was in did not contain any sexual harassment, but there were other forms of it. Over time, the military dealt with that.

My understanding is that the world today in the military is entirely different. In the military-style training that police officers receive, the environment for that kind of culture is there, and it is just a very short distance between harassment or the buddy-buddy system where people are harassed in good-natured fun.

When women are introduced into the force, their sensibilities relative to what men consider jokes are often greatly different, in most instances. What a man may think is very humourous may tragically hurt a woman. Women live in an environment where the males in the environment have the perceived power in many instances, and they perceive themselves as not having the power to push back. If we listen to the accounts that have been made public by women officers in the RCMP, we hear that is exactly what they have felt happened. They were marginalized, troubled by what happened to them. When they went to superiors for assistance, they felt they did not receive the respect they deserved.

However, I go back to the question of whether the people they went to really had the training, understanding and development of sensitivity for what the women faced. Did they really and truly understand? It is easy to say that they neglected and ignored, but maybe they did not have a true understanding of the damage being done.

We have to go back to education and to changing the system that has evolved in such a negative way. We have to give the tools to the RCMP as a whole to begin to address this problem. We cannot fix these things from the outside. We can start doctoring and putting band-aids on it, but the culture needs to evolve itself. Again, we need sensitivity training of relationships between men and women in the workplace, and as well visible minorities, because that is another new thing within the RCMP. All of these things are added to the day-to-day pressures that these good officers live under and the culture that has sadly reached the point it has, a point where we have lawsuits and individuals going very public with their stories.

From my own experiences as a representative in the trade union movement, the last thing harassed people want to do is to make that public. In their minds, they look at it just like bullying in a schoolyard and the people will do it again, or they will lose the respect of their co-workers. All of those things need to be addressed.

When the bill went before the committee, the NDP went to committee in good faith. We understood that the situation had to addressed. We cannot support the bill in its present form because it does not go far enough.

The government has the idea that power can be vested in one person, that person being the head of the RCMP. The government believes that individual will create the environment. That individual is going to need exterior help, such as experts who deal with harassment situations and training experts to assist the people in charge of individual departments. A comprehensive training cycle has to be put in place or this will not work.

It has taken many years for this to evolve. We never heard stories like this before, and it is not because people were silent. We never heard about it because it was not happening. The pressure on modern-day police forces is beyond anything.

Being a child of the fifties, I am from the days when we did not lock our houses or our cars. Police officers in those days very rarely faced somebody with a firearm. The environment we lived in was different. Again, I want to stress that I am not justifying what has happened, but stress has to be part of the equation so we can understand what is happening to these officers and the spillover effect of that evolving negative culture. It totally is out of hand.

Many women RCMP officers have come forward, and I encourage all of them to come forward. They need to understand that there are people who sincerely want to see change. We want to correct the tarnished record of the RCMP. We also want those in charge of the RCMP to have the tools they need to create and sustain a healthy workplace, and I cannot stress that enough.

Members can probably tell that I speak with a great deal of sadness and that is because, as I said earlier, I wanted to become an RCMP officer, but that was a long time ago. I am talking the fifties.

The NDP went to committee in a sincere attempt to make the bill better. We can do better for our RCMP so that we can remain proud of the people who work so hard for us and put their lives at risk, but work in a difficult environment. There is a culture in the RCMP that has been tainted, and we have to do everything we can to fix that.

[Petitions, February 27th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, I will not read the entire petition, but it is also about the levels of water in the Great Lakes. Petitioners are very concerned about the north channel of Manitoulin Island and Georgian Bay. Those lakes around the Great Lakes basin have lost significant water levels in the last number of years, and petitioners are frightened about what this will do to tourism, the cottage industry and boating in general.

[Taxation, February 14th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, in just three short years, Senator Pamela Wallin has claimed well over $300,000 for “other travel”. According to one senior Conservative senator, this spending is very unusual.

Let us put the spending of these tax dollars into perspective. This could have paid for one year of old age security for 57 seniors. It took the combined taxes of 28 hard-working Canadian families to pay for this person's “other travel”. Think about it: Every single dime in taxes for 28 Canadian families just to cover this senator's “other travel”.

Instead of hanging their heads in shame, Conservatives have defended it. The good news for Canadians is that the New Democrats are here fighting for them. While Conservatives choose to defend their unelected and unaccountable senators, the NDP is proudly defending Canadian taxpayers.

[Safer Witnesses Act, February 12th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, I want to say to the member that it is refreshing to have people in the House who have worked in the correctional facilities, have worked out there one-on-one with those situations we are talking about. It brings a certain gravitas to what we are doing here on a day-to-day basis.

Yes, the world has changed. I tried to stress that during my speech. Regarding longstanding organized crime, we tend to think of the Mafia, but it has changed dramatically. In fact, in the city of Montreal we see that the old guard is being assassinated. There is all kinds of turmoil. It indicates that there may well be a coordinated effort of other criminal organizations coming together in a way that is really troubling, and we will need to protect people who come forward as witnesses dealing with those cases simply because of the extreme level of violence it seems to generate.

[Safer Witnesses Act, February 12th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, in my community of Hamilton East—Stoney Creek I have a fairly large South Asian population and, to be quite frank, they were very discouraged over the length of time the Air India inquiry took. I think all Canadians were troubled by that.

I would like to go back to the comments the member made about the RCMP. The only thing I would raise relative to the RCMP that is a little concerning is that, when an organization has to work within its own budget and there is going to be a change in what is administered but it does not get an increase in its budget, that opens the door to a problem. We are asking it to take more witnesses in, and I would hate to think that a lack of funds would cause the organization to decline people who needed protection.

[Safer Witnesses Act, February 12th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, I want to start by saying that I will be sharing my time with the member for Sherbrooke. I am looking forward to his remarks. He has been asking very pointed questions so far, so I am very interested in what he has to say.

Mr. Speaker, you will know this very well, because I know that you were involved in some of the activities that were happening in 2007 relative to the witness protection program.

Since 2007, people from the NDP and perhaps even the Liberals have been calling for the government to expand the eligibility for the witness protection programs, to ensure the safety of all Canadians who are in potential danger because they have taken up their duties as responsible citizens. They have stood up and put themselves in jeopardy at times, and we have what I would call a valuable program to help protect them.

However, we have specifically called for better coordination of federal and provincial programs and better overall funding for the program. That is an area members will hear more about further on in my remarks.

That call that went out in 2007 for coordination and an improvement in coordination was echoed in 2009 and again in 2012.

Notwithstanding the fact that the NDP supports the government's attempt with Bill C-51 to improve the witness protection program, we remain concerned that the Conservative government has not committed any new dollars to the system to support an increase in use.

The world has changed very much in the last 10 years—for example, the situation around street gangs and the young people who get caught up in them. Getting them back out of that very concerning behaviour oftentimes only comes about when they are put before the justice system and we have the opportunity to use their evidence in court. However, they are reluctant unless they have the protection of our government.

We are also concerned that the RCMP and local police departments are quite unreasonably being asked to work within their existing budgets. Clearly, that is unrealistic. It should be obvious that it would clearly impede any substantial increase in participation in the program. I believed that part of the purpose was to open the doors wider to the program. However, if it is not funded how can that be accomplished?

We are satisfied with Bill C-51 overall and that it would extend the period of emergency protection and clear up some of the technical problems that have been brought before both the Liberal government before this and the current government. However, we believe that for it to be effective, Bill C-51 should include provisions for an independent agency to operate the program. That was recommended in the report that came out of the Air India inquiry. We are quite surprised that it was not included in Bill C-51. As a result, the RCMP would continue to be responsible for the program, and I will leave this point with the House: that would put the RCMP in a conflict of interest by being the agency both investigating the case and then deciding who would get protection.

Even though I have raised some of Bill C-51's shortcomings and the fact that the Conservatives were late to respond, in fairness to them, they have not been the only ones who have been late. I would go as far as to say that the previous government was even negligent in this.

The New Democrats are pleased that the government has finally listened to our proposals. It has been said that within the committee there was a collaborative effort to try to get to the right place on this. However, I cannot stress enough that, if the Conservative government truly wants to improve the witness protection program, it must also commit the necessary funding. It is required to ensure that those improvements have a chance of working, especially in that new area relative to street gangs. As a society, we cannot put ourselves in the position of telling young people that we want to take them out of the gangs and use their evidence in court but that we would leave them high and dry afterwards, because we know that some of those gangs can be particularly vicious in how they respond to anyone who stands up and tries to do the right thing.

All members of the House on both sides are concerned with making our communities as safe as possible. I believe the witness protection program in particular is one of the more important tools in fighting street gangs. I have talked a bit on that already.

I would remind government members that the federal witness protection program has long been criticized because of its very narrow eligibility criteria. Again, the Speaker and others have raised these concerns previously. There have been continuing complaints of poor coordination with provincial programs and of the low number of witnesses who actually get access to the program.

In 2012, only 30 out of 108 applications considered were actually accepted. I would suggest that very much undermines the program's value. We had 78 witnesses who put themselves at risk but did not get the follow-up protection that was believed to be their right and for which it was worthy of applying. To my mind, that is very concerning.

Changes to the witness protection program have been called for by the NDP since its very inception in 1996. There were glaring omissions in it. Majority Liberal governments and subsequently this government to date have done little. However, I must add the proviso that with Bill C-51, the Conservatives have made some fairly reasonable moves, but there have been few bills over that long period of time that actually got introduced into this House. One was way back in 1999, which was Bill C-223, regarding witness protection during domestic violence cases. I would add, because it is quite often said in this place that the NDP does not support the government's crime bills, that back in 1999 we supported that bill to protect people in domestic violence cases.

The overarching issues of eligibility, coordination and funding still have not been significantly addressed. The NDP is on record for repeatedly asking the government to address these three key issues, and the previous speaker spoke to that to some degree. The criteria for eligibility must be expanded even further. The co-operation that has been criticized between the provinces and the federal government has to be addressed. Of course, the underpinning of the whole process, like every other government program, is based on funding, and if that funding does not increase it is not going to be effective.

In 2012, the member for Trinity—Spadina called for more support for the federal witness protection program. That member pointed to the difficulty Toronto police were having in trying to convince witnesses of the summer's mass shooting at a block party in Danzig Street, which we all heard about, to come forward.

I would reiterate that some aspects of the bill we do support, and because of those aspects, we support the bill overall. It is not as comprehensive and does not go as far as we would like, but it is a reasonable effort, and I acknowledge that.

We are pleased that the bill modestly—and I stress the word “modestly”—expands the eligibility, which was at the direct request of the RCMP. I am quite satisfied that when the government gets advice from organizations like the RCMP, it gives credence to it.

Going back one more time to street gangs, it is good that street gangs were included in the bill. It is a new group of people giving assistance to us. We do not think of street gangs as giving assistance, but within them are some young people who have made mistakes. They have recognized those mistakes, have stood up and have tried to make amends in their own way, and we do need to support that.

Federal departments and agencies with a mandate relating to national security, national defence or public safety would now be able to refer witnesses to the program. I am curious about the words “refer witnesses to the program”. I would like to see stronger words such as “recommend them to the program”. Hopefully we are opening the door for sustained use of the program, which will be of value in that particular area of national security.

I mentioned earlier the emergency protection and the clear-up of some technical problems of coordinating with the provinces.

For emergency protection, we are talking about situations where we are saying people must give evidence in support of a case that is going to help the courts deal with very negative situations, situations of violence. Emergency coverage for those people is really essential.

I see my time has run out, so I will wrap up. I have much more to say, but this time I will leave it to the next speaker.

[Employment Insurance, February 8th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, almost half of all Canadian jobs are created by small businesses. Most of them are family businesses. They are now finding out that employment insurance is not there for them.

Tariq Anwar worked for 14 years in his family restaurant. The family sold the restaurant and he found himself out of work. He has been told that he is ineligible for EI, after paying into it all those years. He is ineligible because he is related to the owner.

Is that fair? Rather than cutting EI why not try administering it fairly, or at the very least competently?

[Human Rights, February 8th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, I recently met with a delegation of the Canadian's Christian community and representatives of the Canadian Tibetan and Chinese Uyghur communities, along with officials from the Federation for a Democratic China. This diverse delegation shared one major concern, the Conservative government's new-found relationship with China.

Canadians were not only concerned when the Prime Minister gave the go-ahead for the Chinese state-owned company, CNOOC, basically a corporate extension of the Chinese Communist Party, to purchase Canadian oil and gas giant Nexen, but they were equally concerned about the secretive Canada-China foreign investment protection agreement.

As the NDP's critic for human rights, I am troubled by the human rights record of China but also of CNOOC itself. CNOOC has been implicated in a number of very concerning human rights violations of Tibetans and Uyghur, of supporting torture and imprisonment of Falun Gong members, as well as directly abusing workers in Burma.

Just how repressive must a regime be before the government will refuse to do business with it?