Hon. Yoine Goldstein:

Honourable senators, Senator Meighen has given us a splendid overview of Bill C-12 and its history, and I thank him for his very kind and thoroughly unjustified words. I would like to hope that he would have occasion to repeat them to my wife.

Honourable senators, I do not intend to repeat any of what Honourable Senator Meighen has said so very eloquently, nor do I intend to speak for more than just a few minutes. Because of the very important nature of this legislation, I hope that there will be a motion today to refer the bill to committee so that the Standing Senate Committee on Banking, Trade and Commerce, under the supervision, guidance and the presidency of Senator Angus, can give it the study it deserves and move it along. It has been long delayed, and it is time that Canada's bankruptcy legislation were updated.

Before I enter into the few remarks that I intend to make, I want to state for the record that, as Senator Meighen has suggested, I was very active in another life in bankruptcy and insolvency matters. I remain loosely associated with a law firm that handles bankruptcy and insolvency matters. I am occasionally asked questions — not that I have all the answers — about bankruptcy and insolvency, and I answer them.

I say this because I would like to assume and hope that no one in this chamber will think that I am dealing with this legislation, either here or in the committee, in a way suitable to my interests and not suitable to the interests of the people of Canada. My sole interest is to have excellent legislation for the excellent people of Canada.

Honourable senators, bankruptcy law is framework legislation. It is essential to have an updated bankruptcy law for the commercial welfare of Canada. Trade is increasingly cross border or borderless, and unless Canada has a modern and efficient bankruptcy and insolvency system, we cannot be players in this competitive commercial world of ours.

However, independent of commercial insolvency, there remains a generically different type of insolvency, one that directly affects almost a quarter of a million Canadians each and every year. I am talking about personal bankruptcy and insolvency. Honourable senators, almost a hundred thousand Canadians go into bankruptcy each and every year. Many of them — perhaps most of them — have spouses. Many of them have children. All of them obviously have creditors. The net result is that personal insolvency touches, directly and immediately, well over a quarter of a million different Canadians each and every year.

It is therefore essential that the provisions dealing with personal insolvency be fair, humane, equitable, and achieve a reasonable balance between the interests and the needs of creditors who advance credit on the one hand and individual debtors who are unable to cope with the credit system upon which our entire economy relies.

Honourable senators, we faced a dilemma, as almost all of you will recall, in November of 2005. On the one hand, everyone was very anxious to pass the Wage Earner Protection Program. On the other hand, that plan was not readily severable from the rest of the bill, and the rest of the bill contained numerous failings. Many of them were technical failures, but some of them were quite substantive. I do not intend to deal with all of them because that would be lengthy, and I do not intend to touch upon the ones with which Honourable Senator Meighen has already dealt.

However, I do want to point out, as the honourable senator has done, that the current legislation effectively precludes students from declaring bankruptcy any earlier than ten years from the date that they finish their studies. That is inhuman and is unknown in the entire Western world. That provision for ten years in the desert was put into the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act in 1998 without notice or the knowledge of anyone at the behest of, I suppose, certain stakeholders who had a particular interest in so doing. It has wrought untold misery to many students in this country, those who are unfortunate enough to not be able to get the jobs which would allow them to repay their indebtedness.

There is presently pending before this honourable chamber a private member's bill — modesty prevents me from telling you who the sponsor is — that seeks the possibility of students making an application to a court of competent jurisdiction, where there is significant and terrible hardship in the repayment of a student loan, to allow that student to repay only part of that loan, or perhaps none of it, depending on the circumstances and depending on the discretion of the judge and the explanations of that student. I would like to hope that that aspect, which is covered by the bill, will receive further study by the committee.

Another matter which is incomplete is with respect to businesses that are undergoing reorganization and need to borrow money. That is called, for a variety of reasons, "DIP financing." In other words, debtor-in-possession financing. DIP financing is covered by the bill, but incompletely so, in the minds of some stakeholders, and therefore some stakeholders who will be appearing before the committee will be seeking amendments to that clause.

Certain other matters require consideration, and I hope the Standing Senate Committee on Banking, Trade and Commerce will be able to provide legislation to address them as quickly as possible.

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