News | Invoking the Guillotine of Parliament on the Crime Bill Debate

I would like to place a slightly different emphasis in my remarks on the issues that are at stake in this bill. My colleagues have discussed the bill in many different substantive ways. They have addressed the issues of this bill's relationship, or lack thereof, to solving the issues of crime, crime prevention, rehabilitation and so on. There is another side to this.

To be sure, this bill is about crime. It is less about crime prevention than the government would purport it to be. In fact, it is very much about a weak and failing crime agenda, one whose failures will be proven in the not-too-distant future — in fact, are already beginning to be proven — and one for which failure will incur huge human costs. Those costs will be on the vulnerable and unsuspecting victims, as well on those whom the government sees purely as offenders in varying colour and varying degree of evil — offenders who themselves will in many ways become victims of this bill.

This bill is very much about more than simply crime and the crime agenda. It is very much about retribution and punishment versus forgiveness as ways and means of creating the healing process in those experiences that people have with respect to crime. In that context, in particular, it is about who we are and what we are as Canadians. Bill C-10 is about what we value; how we promote and reflect those values in our society; how we relate to one another; how we relate to the more vulnerable; and how we relate to people for whom, if we could only offer a little bit more understanding, we would actually solve their problems and create a stronger, more healthy, more giving and more compassionate society.

This bill is about reducing complex problems to very simplistic characterizations that simply will not be fixed by the even simpler "remedies" — and I use that word lightly — this bill and this government would apply to those kinds of complex problems. It is about the difference between understanding and accepting science, research and thoughtfulness versus being driven by an ideology that may percuss this government and its members at some emotional level, but absolutely will not solve the problems which they have identified. In many respects, of course, we agree on what the problems are, however, we certainly have a deep difference in our estimation of what the symptoms are.

Now, because of closure, this bill, in addition to being about democracy to the extent that it addresses directly issues of fairness and justice, is very much about democracy because closure is an assault on the democratic institutions that we work within. Closure is an assault on the democratic processes that give us and sustain our rights and freedoms that make Canada one of the most remarkable and envied, just and fair — at least to this point — societies on the very face of the earth. Therefore, this is not simply about crime and a crime agenda; this is now about democracy, the democratic process and the assault that this closure represents.

This closure is not simply an isolated incident. It is, in fact, part of a pattern of closure.

Senator Mercer: They are addicted to it.

Senator Mitchell: Talk about the need to deal with addiction.

This government has invoked closure 24 times since it became a majority government. I am not sure, but I will bet that is more than the previous government invoked in its entire 13 years in government.

I thought it was a record, but, when I was in the legislature in Alberta, one summer when we were sitting that government invoked closure 18 times. Probably per month, per day or per unit of time that was more, but this is certainly a record in volume.

It is not just that this closure today is part of a pattern of closure. It is part of an assault in many different respects on our democratic institutions, on our democratic processes and on the intensity with which people in this country are encouraged to or discouraged from day-to-day debate, action and involvement in democratic processes and democratic debate in this country and in our society.

We saw almost breathtaking examples that illustrate what I am saying on this issue. We saw, for the first time in the history of this country, the government ruled in contempt of Parliament. They can say that it is because of the configuration of Parliament at that time, but there have been many periods of minority government. Never before in the history of this country has a government been ruled in contempt of Parliament. The foundations for that ruling speak for themselves.

The fact of the matter is that this government was making decisions — in fact on this very bill — and asking for decisions to be made without ever providing the kinds of information that any properly functioning, democratic, parliamentary institution would be absolutely right to expect that a government should provide them.

Then, of course, there have been multiple examples of muzzling of free speech among our scientists. In the Department of the Environment, our scientists are noted internationally for their credible, world-class leading scientific research and peer-reviewed publishing. Those who are left, if not fired, have been systematically inhibited from speaking out about their work.

In relation to access to information, the program has been bogged down in a way that is unprecedented. People have never seen anything like this before. When information is finally revealed, or when the documents are finally presented, they are often heavily redacted and almost unusable in the context of access to information.

This is perhaps one of the most serious and revealing features of the character of this government. When confronted with groups that disagree with whatever it is this government wants to do, if the government was funding them, they stop funding them. We saw that with KAIROS. Not only did the government stop funding that organization the way they had, but they actually took it over in a surreptitious matter, to stifle debate, to stifle those groups that have opinions or positions that this government would disagree with. They have done the same with many women's groups that were funded and that provide a remarkably important process of representing and advocating for women's issues and on behalf of women in our society and in our government public policy process. They have cut funding to stifle that.

There has been a direct assault in many ways — beyond the question of closure — on how these institutions have been treated and how they work. For example, several years ago, while still a minority government, this government prepared a huge manual to instruct its members on how to inhibit the process and the work of parliamentary committees.

Senator Mercer: The dirty tricks handbook.

Senator Mitchell: There it is, one of the dirty tricks handbooks.

In more recent times, with their majority, they are now conspiring to put much of the work that has been done by parliamentary committees, as a matter of course and tradition and, of course, in honour of democratic openness and transparency, in camera — behind closed doors — so that Canadians cannot see what it is that they want to do.

We have seen more and more — and this is very disconcerting — intimidation, in various ways like cutting off of funding, as I just mentioned, of groups that simply want to participate, legally and responsibly, in the public policy process and debate in this country. There is a concerted strategy to intimidate. Most recently, there has been the effort to demonize environmental groups and to somehow stifle whatever they are saying before processes that were set up by government so that people can openly debate issues on both sides, for example, development and the environment. These groups are now being intimidated by the kind of initiative that has been undertaken by the government generally and furthered by a recent inquiry by a member of this Senate.

The government has specifically launched intimidating attacks on environmental groups, and I will speak more broadly and at greater length about that when I address that particular inquiry.

Then there is the assault on fairness in the electoral system. If all of the various assaults that I have just listed were bad, this perhaps elevates the nastiness of what this government is doing to democracy even further. Of course, I am referring to their guilty plea on the in and out strategy that was clearly cheating. Whether or not it ultimately meant that they had bought or stole an election, it certainly was intimidation and erosion of the democratic process.

Even more disconcerting, we now see the question of voter suppression. It has yet to be determined whether the government actually stole the election based on voter suppression, but I am saying that there were forces afoot that certainly underlined that the fairness of this electoral process has been absolutely eroded and undermined by this government. When they saw that it was happening during the election, they did nothing about it.

One of the most —

[each senator has 10 minutes for debate; Senator Mitchell's time has expired]