Trade  Speaker, as we get closer to Halloween, I would like to tell a scary story. Like all good tales of ghosts and zombies, the trans-Pacific partnership is another tale that appeared dead, but apparently is not. Despite an overwhelming percentage of Canadians who want it gone, the Liberal government just keeps bringing it back to life.

Justice committee  By the way, I just wanted to note this for the witnesses. People were suggesting that additional zombie laws should be attacked in this law, and I just want you to understand that it would be unreceivable for us to simply add new provisions that weren't mentioned in the original bill. Much as maybe we would like to include some, we as a committee cannot.

Justice committee  Of course, as my colleague said, any actions that are motivated by hate, prejudice, or extreme ideology can be adequately dealt with as an aggravating factor on sentencing, and they already are. The only people who are really upset about removing those zombie laws and outdated laws are law professors, who are going to have one less funny story to tell their students about outdated and absurd Criminal Code sections. It's good that those are being repealed.

Justice committee  Our brief does go through one of those programs, RESTORE, at length, so I won't discuss that any further now due to the limited time. I'd also like to very quickly touch on the eradication of these so-called “zombie laws”. In my view, this is in line and consistent with modernizing our Criminal Code with principles of clarity and consistency. With respect to section 176, again this is covered by more general application sections of the code, and crimes motivated by religious intolerance will be treated as aggravated in any event.

Criminal Code  The current Liberal government must not choose to ignore that essential element in protecting victims. This legislation also includes the removal of some so-called zombie laws. Those laws, which have become redundant because of other laws that cover the same subject or because they have been overturned by the courts, are an interesting collection. As a former mayor, I know that there are many municipalities with zombie bylaws that need cleaning up as well.

Justice committee  I held a press conference with Bret McCann in December calling on the government to move forward to remove zombie laws, unconstitutional provisions. To your credit, you did introduce Bill C-39 on March 8, and seven months later, it remains stuck at first reading. What is the delay on Bill C-39?

Industry committee  Lawford and Ms. Lau. When we looked at the legislation in the past, there were bot spams, zombie computers, and a whole series of things that were done at that time. In fact, we had the first Facebooks at that time. We had to rely on U.S. prosecution at that time. If we reverse this and take that empowerment from the CRTC, do we then have to rely upon other prosecution for fines and penalties?

Justice  Fortunately, there is something that the government can do to prevent the serious miscarriage of justice that the McCann family endured from happening again. The government can introduce legislation to repeal zombie sections of the Criminal Code. It is time for the government act. It is time for the government to repeal zombie laws.

Criminal Code  Many of these provisions are like time capsules, chronicling other times, but they certainly do not belong in our Criminal Code any longer. These are often referred to as zombie provisions. Legal scholars have been calling for a very long time for them to be removed from the Criminal Code, and it is past time for Parliament to act. However, this housecleaning bill is not the government's first.

Justice  Madam Speaker, last fall, Travis Vader's conviction of two counts of second degree murder of Lyle and Marie McCann was vacated after the trial judge based his conviction on a zombie section of the Criminal Code. Zombie laws are booby traps for the unwitting, with the potential for costs, delays, mistrials, appeals, and like what happened to the McCann family, miscarriages of justice.

Status of Women committee  The third section dealt with section 159, which has been deemed unconstitutional, and is the subject of legislation that will remove what I called a “zombie law” from the books. The coordinating amendment in clause 6 seeks to do the same thing in a different and perhaps more complicated way. It becomes unnecessary because section 159 is no longer part of the section dealing with written reasons after Liberal amendment number three was passed.

Status of Women committee  There's a bill before the House to actually remove it from the Criminal Code. This is simply to erase from the books a zombie law that has been deemed unconstitutional. I don't anticipate that will be a problem, but I'll leave it to the members of the committee to object if they see one. The second theme of this amendment is in new proposed subsection 278.92(5) and is also with respect to the word “judge” as opposed to “court” under part (a) under the proposed section 278.92.

Justice committee  It has taken 18 months to get bills forward on marijuana legalization, on impaired driving laws, and the zombie provisions of the Criminal Code. I have to ask myself what the cabinet, particularly the Minister of Justice, has been doing all that time, because there are some very important bills sitting on the Order Paper that have not yet come to second reading debate.

Status of Women committee  When you're writing it down, you might also recognize that it's very inappropriate. We have also heard of zombie laws occurring, so I think any time a judge is making a statement or putting something in as a decision, that is a good way of making sure the sources are correct. Can you continue a bit more about the written part?

International Trade committee  A lot of these people in my classes—this is executive MBAs—are in the Chinese private sector and they are very dynamic and they're very quick and they're bilingual, etc., but it's in the SOEs, in the state-owned enterprise sector, where they have a lot of problems. They have a lot of zombie corporations where they're essentially bankrupt, and the Chinese government keeps promising to reform the SOE sector and introduce market reforms, but they do not. They're claiming to, but what they're doing is consolidating a lot of the smaller and mid-sized SOEs into bigger SOEs, which makes me more pessimistic, not less pessimistic, because it's harder to privatize a big company than it is a small or a medium-sized—