Foreign Affairs committee  Let me add my thanks to the honourable member for preserving me from the hot seat. We did look at the question of investment when we were developing the legislation. There were a number of concerns, not so much with the mental element that has just been raised by the honourable

Foreign Affairs committee  That would require some careful consideration on our part. But the framing of the legislation as it is covers any kind of aiding or abetting. It's not limited to investment. In other words there are a number of ways that I could aid or abet. For example, the making of a cluster m

Foreign Affairs committee  I'll defer to my colleague from Foreign Affairs in a second, but essentially, in its application in Canada, the convention applies to Canada in terms, for example, of the destruction of cluster munitions. In international law, as a state we are obliged to comply with those requir

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you, Minister. I think there are two stages, to answer the original question that you posed. There are reasons for one treaty being drafted differently from the other, and those have to do with international negotiations.

Foreign Affairs committee  But in terms of implementing the Convention on Cluster Munitions, what we have attempted to do is to criminalize the specific actions the convention calls on us to criminalize in, I think, clauses 6(a) through 6(d) of the bill,. Then the following paragraphs of the clause incorpo

Foreign Affairs committee  We certainly did take a look at it. Again, the convention doesn't require us to put investment, per se, into a criminal offence, which would have been very difficult. The way it's crafted now, there are 120 years of case law concerning what constitutes aiding and abetting and c

Foreign Affairs committee  Nothing is impossible, but if you framed a bill—and we didn't do detailed advice on this—with an offence that included “investment”, you would have to do a federal-provincial analysis, for example, because property and civil rights are provincial concerns. The criminal law is a f

Foreign Affairs committee  In a situation like that, it doesn't depend as much on what the company does as on what it knows and what it intends. It's the mental element, the mens rea of the crime. It doesn't matter if it's a company, an organization, or an individual, a person like you or me, in Canada; if

Foreign Affairs committee  I would just add very quickly that the legislation also has a delegated authority. I believe it's for Governor in Council to make regulations in the event that it does happen, so it doesn't have to go back to Parliament. If a Canadian company decides to go into the business of

Foreign Affairs committee  I wouldn't describe it, I don't think, as a constitutional requirement per se, but if Canada as a state enters into an agreement in international law and agrees to ratify a treaty, it would presume on the supremacy of Parliament to do that if it required legislation. Canada would

Foreign Affairs committee  I'll be very brief, Mr. Chairman. I would just point out that the critical article for the purposes of the bill is actually article 9 of the convention, which is the obligation to implement some of what's in the convention using the criminal law. All that's in the bill is what C

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'll be quick. The actus reus of the offences that would be created if this were enacted would be using a cluster munition; developing, making, acquiring, possessing a cluster munition; and moving a cluster munition—“moving” is the transposed version of

Foreign Affairs committee  I was just going to add that, again bearing in mind the criminal law nature of the bill, the legislation doesn't permit anything. It just defines certain pieces of hardware. It creates some offences and then it specifies when those offences don't apply.

Foreign Affairs committee  The first thing regarding investment is that the convention itself doesn't require states parties to criminalize investment and a number of states parties probably would have had concerns if that had been suggested in the negotiation. “Investment” is not a term that is all that

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'll try to focus on the actual construction of the bill, my colleagues having examined the underlying policy. The Oslo Convention on Cluster Munitions will impose a range of obligations on Canada as a state party, but only one of the obligations in the