Bill C-48 (Historical)

Protecting Canadians by Ending Sentence Discounts for Multiple Murders Act

An Act to amend the Criminal Code and to make consequential amendments to the National Defence Act

This enactment amends the Criminal Code with respect to the parole inadmissibility period for offenders convicted of multiple murders. It also makes consequential amendments to the National Defence Act.

Protecting Canadians by Ending Sentence Discounts for Multiple Murders Act

[Dan McTeague, Liberal, Pickering—Scarborough East, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I wish to salute the hon. member who just spoke, our colleague from Mississauga East—Cooksville. As an MP, she has spent a great deal of time considering this major issue that the House must address.

The hon. member from the Bloc may suggest that he has been a lawyer for 30 years, however it goes without saying that the hon. member's work in this area for 30 years, and certainly in the last 15 years or 16 years, has been vigilant and diligent. We on this side of the House, certainly in this party, salute her for her efforts, because it is time we had legislation that looks a lot more like this.

We can talk about window dressing in terms of the title, but the fundamental principle that has been enunciated by the member of Parliament is important. It is without avarice. It is certainly not partisan-based. It is in fact logically based.

I was with the hon. member at the section 745 hearings on Clifford Olson. There was a concern expressed by committees in the past about judicial discretion. Can the hon. member clarify that this legislation will, in fact, allow that in this circumstance?

[Albina Guarnieri, Liberal, Mississauga East—Cooksville, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to commend the hon. member for his support over the years. Certainly my colleague has championed victims and victims' rights. He was very instrumental in helping this bill get to the Senate in 2000. I want to commend him for his hard work.

I certainly hope that this bill will go to committee and get a fair hearing. I will leave it to the government to further highlight the judicial discretion element of this bill.

I think it is imperative to give the judges discretion. Currently the judges have no discretion when it comes to multiple murderers. I recall a renowned judge from Nova Scotia. In my haste I did not bring the quote, but I recall that Justice MacKeigan said that a judge in giving a concurrent sentence is not doing his duty.

I thank the hon. member for his hard work in this endeavour.

[Daniel Petit, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice]

Mr. Speaker, I have a question for the hon. member. For a decade or so, she has been working with her colleagues, and with us to move this bill foward. We have now reached the point where this bill will soon be up for consideration.

So that it is clear, I would like her to tell us whether we are meeting the wish she has been expressing for the past 10 years or so in her riding.

At present, the sentence for multiple murders, for an individual who has killed several people, is only 25 years. With this bill, that sentence could be extended by 10 or 15 years, depending on what the judge decides.

Bill S-6 from the Senate provides for the elimination of the faint hope clause for offenders who have committed multiple crimes because the victims did not get the chance to be heard. Is the hon. member in favour of removing the faint hope clause as set out in Bill S-6?

[Albina Guarnieri, Liberal, Mississauga East—Cooksville, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it is my fervent belief that there should not be disclaimers or fine print when it comes to the justice system. We should not have a judge proclaim himself or herself in court with one sentence and then suddenly find ourselves with a loophole and a way of circumventing what the judge has declared in court.

A judge hears the testimony, is there to witness the obscenity of the crime and is in a position to make a good determination about a fitting sentence.

[Marc Lemay, Bloc, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak to Bill C-48.

I also believe that this is a very important bill and that it is very difficult to play political football, as I call it, with this long-awaited bill. This is the reincarnation of Bill C-54, which died on the order paper in late 2009. We are now dealing with Bill C-48 which, when we first looked at it, seemed to be a very difficult bill. When I saw it for the first time, my initial comment was that it did not make sense and that, as usual, it was being sneaked in the back door by the Conservatives. I said that because I had read the first clause of the bill, which is the short title and which really does not make sense, “Protecting Canadians by Ending Sentence Discounts for Multiple Murders Act”. I can say that this first clause will obviously not get through committee.

I concur with the hon. member who spoke before me; we will not play political football with this bill. The subject of this bill requires us to study it and vote in favour of it. The Bloc Québécois will vote in favour of this bill so that it can be studied in committee as quickly as possible. I am putting the House on notice that clause 1 of this bill is not acceptable. We are not going to do more advertising and say that we are concerned about the victims when that is not the case. That is not the intent of this bill. It is rather surprising, but its intent is rather heretical. Yes, there are mistakes. I respectfully affirm that there mistakes in the Criminal Code. A person who is found guilty or who pleads guilty today to two, three or four murders, will serve no more than 25 years. That is odd because it is one of the things not found in the Criminal Code. If someone pleads guilty to one, two, three or four break and enters or automobile thefts, the judge will generally say that he has understood nothing, that not only did he commit a break and enter, but that since he committed two, three or four, he should be given additional sentences.

If my memory serves correctly, in 1976, when the death penalty was abolished, the government said the most serious crime was murder. Since it is the toughest sentence, a mandatory minimum sentence of 25 years would be imposed and after that, if the individual is rehabilitated, the subsequent articles state he or she could return to society. Except that people forgot about—and this is what Bill C-48 aims to correct—repeat offenders and multiple murderers. Now, people have the nerve to call these sentence discounts. I do not believe they are sentence discounts, with all due respect to my Conservative colleagues who are completely on the wrong track. I believe that when section 745 was created—and I will quote it in a moment—something was overlooked. Perhaps it was not intentional. I was not here in 1976; I was arguing cases, so I do not know. I think it is a mistake that must be corrected today.

People need to understand what happens in a murder case. When an individual is found guilty of murder, his or her trial is generally held before a jury, and it is the jury that reaches a verdict and determines whether the accused is guilty of first or second degree murder.

First degree murder is premeditated murder. If someone plans a murder, he or she will be found guilty of first degree murder. Second degree murder is an unplanned murder. It might involve someone who, in a fit of anger, picks up a guns, shoots someone and kills that individual. I am summarizing quickly, but that is called second degree murder.

Subsection 745.21(1) of Bill C-48 is extremely interesting. It states:

Where a jury finds an accused guilty of murder and that accused has previously been convicted of murder, the judge presiding at the trial shall, before discharging the jury, put to them the following question:

You have found the accused guilty of murder. The law requires that I now pronounce a sentence of imprisonment for life against the accused.

Freeze the picture here. The judge is required to impose a minimum sentence of life in prison. If an individual is found guilty of murder, he will be imprisoned for life. The judge's question continues:

Do you wish to make any recommendation with respect to the period without eligibility for parole to be served for this murder consecutively to the period without eligibility for parole imposed for the previous murder?

That is the crux of the change, which has been requested by a number of jurisdictions over the past few years. I have an example of the sad case of a woman who made a suicide pact with her husband. They had two children and they decided to end their lives. It is sad, but so it goes. Unfortunately in life, things happen. The woman ingested the same drugs as her husband and two children. The three of them died, but unfortunately she survived and was convicted of a triple murder.

The interesting thing about this bill is that it does not provide additional automatic minimum sentences. It provides the judge with the possibility to ask the jury what it thinks. I am utterly convinced that a jury would never have asked a judge for an additional sentence. The woman has to serve 25 years because it was a premeditated murder. The jury will be consulted and the judge could impose an additional prison sentence. This bill is interesting because it focuses on the victims.

Regardless of what our Conservative friends, especially the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice—and I point the finger at him—might think, the Bloc Québécois is concerned about the victims and is voting in favour of this bill. I hope my dear colleagues and the parliamentary secretary are not going to phone Go Radio X FM in Abitibi to say that we are voting against Bill C-48, because they will be mocked, just as they were on Bill C-22.

That said, I suggest that they listen when we speak and that they listen in committee. We will vote in favour of this bill, except with respect to the short title in clause 1.

These things need to be said. When we are talking about someone who has committed multiple murders—think of Colonel Williams or Pickton or Olson—I think that even if this bill had been in force, they would still serve 25 years in prison. That seems highly improbable. That is what the Conservatives do not understand because they have never or rarely worked in criminal law. They have never made a request. They have never, especially not the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice, appeared before the National Parole Board. They have certainly never appeared before a Superior Court judge to request a sentence reduction in order to be able to apply.

I will explain because I am sure that he does not understand. I will explain how it works. Someone who is found guilty of murder is sentenced to life in prison. End of story. The Conservatives, and especially the parliamentary secretary, should stop twisting words. The person is sentenced to life in prison and must serve at least 25 years. That is what the law currently says. After 17 years in prison, that individual may make a request to a judge, in the jurisdiction in which he was sentenced, to have the sentence reduced. That does not mean that it will be reduced. On the contrary. There are figures, and I will be able to share them in another speech, but it is clear: there are currently over 4,000 people imprisoned for murder in Canada, and of these 4,000, 146 have made a request and only 123 of those have been allowed to appear before the National Parole Board.

That is what my Conservative colleagues do not understand and, with all due respect, neither does the parliamentary secretary. Not just anyone can apply and Bill C-48 will not change that. It is not true. An eligible person will still be eligible, but the court, taking into consideration the horrible crime—because murder is always horrible—decides. Does someone who committed a double or triple murder deserve an additional prison sentence? That is up to the jury. Obviously we need to make a distinction between a hired assassin, a psychopath and a woman who, in a moment of acute distress, kills her husband and her two children. The Conservatives do not understand that. They will not understand it, but they need to.

That is exactly what Bill C-48 does, regardless of what our Conservative friends might say: it gives a jury that has found someone guilty of a second murder the possibility of recommending to a judge that the person serve an additional five or ten years. That means that the person serves 30, 35 or even 40 years instead of 25. Consequently, that person's chance of applying for parole could be pushed back. With all due respect for my colleagues across the way, there has never, through all these years, been an individual convicted of murder who has been released and then committed another murder. I hope that they understand that and that the people watching understand it as well.

That has never happened, whether my Conservative friends like it or not. We asked the parliamentary secretary about this, but he could not say anything about it. We asked the justice minister to provide us with the figures, but we obtained the figures from the parole board, because we are examining other related bills, including the famous Bill S-6. I hope the parliamentary secretary will have the nerve to rise to ask me about Bill S-6, because I will give him the answer.

I agree with my Liberal colleague, for whom I have a great deal of respect and whom I listened to carefully. I agree that we must not play petty politics with Bill C-48. I agree, we will not politicize it, except for clause 1. We will do so because that is what the Conservatives are doing. Clause 1 must be changed. I hope the real parliamentary secretary, not the one from the Quebec City region, but the other one whom I am not allowed to name—I can name him but I am not able to name his riding—understands that he must amend clause 1. The real title is “An Act to amend the Criminal Code and to make consequential amendments to the National Defence Act”. It is perfect; I have no problem with it.

However, the “Protecting Canadians by Ending Sentence Discounts for Multiple Murders Act” is inaccurate. I would like the government side to stop spreading these falsehoods. All the numbers we have show that no one has ever received a sentence discount for multiple murders. Yes, there is a mistake. Yes, under section 745, a person receives one 25-year sentence, but that is how the Criminal Code was drafted. That section still exists.

Neither the judge nor anyone can do anything about it. When the death sentence was abolished, no one noticed that this section allowed a murderer convicted of multiple murders to receive the equivalent of a 25-year sentence to serve. However, I can say that the National Parole Board has been monitoring this very closely and will continue to do so to ensure that murderers guilty of multiple murders, psychopaths like Colonel Williams and serial killers like Olson and Pickton will never be released, even if this bill is not passed quickly. I cannot even imagine that.

Obviously, if Bill C-48 is not passed during this session, it will come back in the next sessions and be passed before these people can be released. They will serve 25 years. I do not think that any parole board can release any of the three individuals I just mentioned before the allotted time, which is 25 years because a life sentence is a minimum of 25 years.

Regardless of what my Conservative colleagues, including the parliamentary secretary, might think, the average life sentence served in Canada is 28 years and 7 months, not 25 years. Criminals, especially murderers, stay in prison.

In closing, I would say that this bill fills a major gap in the Criminal Code, a gap that I think deserves our attention, especially in the case of multiple murderers—psychopaths and criminals who have committed more than one murder. Obviously, they might deserve additional sentences. The Bloc will vote in favour of this bill. It will be studied in committee, and quickly we hope.

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

Mr. Speaker, our colleague from Mississauga East—Cooksville talked about justice for victims and their families and friends. I do not know how we can talk about this without looking at what happens in other countries like our own.

Does my colleague agree? Does he agree that Canada has the harshest sentences for murderers?

[Marc Lemay, Bloc, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

I thank my colleague for his question.

Whether my Conservative colleagues like it or not, the answer is that it is true. Canada is the country that imposes the longest sentences on its murderers. I am not saying that is a bad thing. That is not what I am saying. I hope the parliamentary secretary will not say that on GO RadioX FM. That is not what I just said.

What I am saying is that Canada currently sentences murderers to longer prison terms than Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain and even the United States. Maybe we should look at that more closely.

One thing is extremely important, and I thank my colleague for giving me a chance to point this out. Canada has an organization called the National Parole Board. If there is anyone in Canada who cares about victims, it is the National Parole Board.

Unless the Conservatives want to do away with it and replace it with something else, the National Parole Board must be maintained.

As others have said and as I have always said, people are shocked not by minimum sentences—which are not necessary—but by the fact that offenders do not serve their full sentence.

People are shocked when someone is sentenced to four years in prison and is released after eight months because the prison is full and because the penitentiary says he is a good guy who only defrauded people of $4 million and it was his first offence.

At present, there is a lengthy process to follow before the National Parole Board is asked to consider a case of murder. The murderer will first have to appear before a superior court judge and then convince a jury before going before the parole board.

I can say that not one criminal accused and convicted of murder who has been released has reoffended. There have been no such cases in Canada, and we have the figures to prove it.

[Marlene Jennings, Liberal, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my Bloc Québécois colleague for his passionate speech and for the points that he raised about this bill.

I have a question for him regarding the short title.

The member said that in my speech I said that the government should not attempt to play political football with this bill. That was a very accurate summary of what I said about this issue. I was talking about the content of this bill.

I appreciate the fact that he did not twist my words like the Conservative members have done many times.

I think the government is trying to gain political capital with the short title and is trying to mislead the public. It is trying to make the public think that this bill fixes something that it does not.

I would like to know what the member thinks about that. I know that the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights already removed the short title of Bill C-22 because it was a politicized title that had nothing to do with the content of the bill.

I would like to hear what the member has to say about that.

[Marc Lemay, Bloc, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for her question.

She is quite right. So that it will be clear to the member for Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, I will say it in French. The short title does not make sense. I hope he will convince his colleague, the other parliamentary secretary. The short title makes no sense, because it is false, misleading and does not convey the truth. It is false. Let them give me one scrap of evidence, just one to make me change my mind. They are talking about the Protecting Canadians by Ending Sentence Discounts for Multiple Murders Act. That is not true. That does not make sense. That is petty politics.

I have a great deal of respect for my colleague from Mississauga East—Cooksville who spoke earlier. She was quite right. We are not going to play political football with this bill. However, they must delete clause 1 because the bill is urgent. The rest is fine, and a number of parties want it. It is time to address an oversight, an omission, that allows some criminals who have committed more than one murder to receive a maximum sentence of 25 years and serve perhaps just a bit more. It is true that it does not make sense. Still, the title is just not right. There are no sentence discounts for murders. They must stop mocking people.

I hope that the Conservatives will realize that they will not gain popularity with that kind of title because it just does not make sense. I will tell them right now that I am convinced that on this side, the Liberal Party, the Bloc and the NDP will vote against the short title. Thus, it should be deleted immediately. We will waste less time and the bill will be studied more quickly. I read the rest of the bill with interest and I find that it makes sense, is well written, and meets the needs of 21st-century society.

[Brian Jean, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Transport]

Mr. Speaker, I have listened to this and I do not understand. To me, what is ridiculous here is that we are dealing with something so serious as murder, which usually involves greed or rape or something where an innocent person's life is extinguished, and the majority of the questions of the members opposite are about the title. They do not like the title. I just do not understand why they would not concentrate on the more important aspects, the substantive part of the bill, which is actually what it is all about. The member's argument is that it has never happened, therefore we should not change it. Even though I believe he is wrong, the reality is that we should be talking about the substantive part of the bill. We are trying to protect Canadians. We should be joining together. They should be coming across with hands open to support this bill, which is actually meant to protect Canadians and to punish those people who take another person's life as a result of greed or as a result of lust or something that they have no business being involved in, in the first place. Why do they not deal with that instead of the title? It is shameful.

[Marc Lemay, Bloc, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

Mr. Speaker, hold on tight, you are in for quite a surprise.

My hon. colleague is the one playing petty politics. If you are so clever, get rid of it right away. I do not want to talk about clause 1, on the contrary. My speech was about section 745.21, which is found in clause 4. Read your bill carefully. You will see that we are in favour of it. We are not the ones playing petty politics or introducing government bills; you are. Get rid of the clause right away. You will see that it will not take long for this bill to get through the legislative process. Before you know it, it will be Christmas and it will be through.

However, we know what you are trying to do with the short title. You are continuing the political games. I do not even want to talk about it. I was not the one who started talking about it; that was you. Out of the 20 minutes of my speech, I spent 18 minutes talking about the fundamentals of the bill, and we agree on the fundamentals. But get rid of clause 1. It is urgent.

[The Deputy Speaker, Conservative, Andrew Scheer]

I must ask all of the members to address comments through the Chair, not to other members directly.

Resuming debate, the hon. member for Windsor—Tecumseh.

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

Mr. Speaker, like the other parties in the House, subject to the short title, we are prepared at second reading to support the bill. However, I want to be very clear that we are doing so because we believe, to counter some of the misinformation that the government party puts out on these issues and some of the hyperbole we have heard both in the House and around this bill, it is extremely important to get it to the justice committee so that there is at least some public education about the reality of this area of the law and the practice that has developed around it since we have moved into the use of the faint hope clause in particular and the use of concurrent sentences, which are long standing in our jurisprudence.

When we are looking at this area of law, what does society do, and we as the legislature in this society, to build a fair, equitable criminal justice system to deal with the most heinous crime that a person could commit, which is taking the life of another person within our society? It is very fundamental. It is fundamental to the criminal justice system, it is fundamental to the Criminal Code, and in many respects it is fundamental to our role as legislators since it seems to me always that our primary role is to protect society. People have elected us to come here, and in many ways, to provide protection. It is the fundamental arrangement we have in a democracy.

So when we are looking at this area, the obvious question is what principles guide us in determining whether we are going to change the law as is being proposed by the government or leave it alone. It seems to me that when we look at those principles, there are subsets of them, but there are basically four. The primary one, as I have already said, is public safety, the protection of society as a whole. That has to be our driving principle.

Unfortunately, that lends itself to a lot of demagoguery, which we see in this bill in the form of the short title, and I am not going to spend any more time on that other than agreeing with my colleague from the Bloc that it is really a demeaning title. I do not know of any judges in this country at the trial level or at the appeal level who see themselves giving out discounts when they are sentencing people for murder, whether it be first degree or second degree, or even manslaughter. The title is a gross insult to our judiciary. There is not one judge in this country who would ever see, at the sentencing process, himself or herself giving discounts.

Coming back to the issue of public safety, yes, it is the guiding principle, no question, and how do we achieve that to the maximum potential? So we look at other principles.

Clearly when it comes to murder we look at the whole issue of denunciation, and included in that, the concept of punishment.

The third principle that we look at is one of deterrence. The denunciation and the punishment, along with deterrence, are very closely tied together. We look within the deterrence area subset at both general deterrence and specific deterrence to the individual who has now been convicted of the crime.

As well, we look at rehabilitation, because we have all sorts of evidence that in many cases deterrence is of no use at all as a guiding principle because it does not work in the vast majority of cases, whether specific or general.

We do know that to maximize the protection we are going to provide to society, if we rehabilitate these individuals while we have them within our custody, while they are incarcerated, the chances of them being a risk to society of committing more violent crime, committing murder, is dramatically reduced.

I know there are members of the government who do not believe that but that is the fact. Since we have instituted the faint hope clause provision which, if the bill goes through will substantially undermine it, plus what is being done in another bill and that goes through, if the Liberals do not get their backbone up and oppose it, we will lose that system.

The system, as it is today, works this way in terms of its consequence: not one murder but two serious crimes. We do not have enough facts to know whether they actually involve violence, but no second degree murder, no first degree murder and no manslaughter, and we believe, the little we know of the two serious offences, that they did not involve violence in the sense of anybody being injured.

In that respect, we have built a system that works. It works because we trust, which we have every right to do, our judges and our juries to come to the proper solution.

I want to take some issue with the member for Mississauga East—Cooksville when she was speaking about justice. If the bill goes through and we destroy at the same time the faint hope clause, we are really slapping in the face our juries and our judges.

The way the system works now, if a person applies for early release, which this bill would completely eliminate, along with eliminating the faint hope clause, there is an initial, interim application. A senior judge of the region where the crime was committed needs to make a preliminary decision as to whether there is any merit to allowing the application for early release to go ahead after 15 years of incarceration. If the person passes that test, and a good number of people do not from the figures we have, we then move on to the judge and jury reviewing the current situation. Is this person to be released? All of the evidence that was available at the time of the trial, how serious the crime was, how vicious it was, how heinous it was, all of that evidence goes before the jury, and they are the ones who make a recommendation as to whether that person will be released early. That is the system we are talking about destroying with this bill in combination with Bill S-6, which is getting rid of the faint hope clause.

We come back to what is justice. How do we determine what is justice? Is that not the best way, to let our judge and jury combined make the decision? They make the decision at the time the person is convicted. Has the person in fact committed this crime beyond a reasonable doubt? They make that decision and then the judge makes the decision as to penalties. If the person is to get out early, we go back to the judge and jury. They make the decision deciding the facts as they are at that time. It is a workable system and it has worked.

The other point that has to be made with regard to the way the system has functioned is the length of time that people spend incarcerated for murder, both second and first degree, in Canada. Those applications to get out early, in spite of the fact that people can make them when they have served 15 years, the reality is that just this past year they have served 25 years. That was the average amount of years people spent in custody before they got out under the faint hope clause.

In spite of the fact that we have this legislation that lets them at least potentially apply to get out early, the reality is that last year the average worked out to be exactly 25 years. We also have figures, all of which came out, not because of anything the government did because it does not want these facts out, it does not want the truth and the reality out.

However, the reality is that over the last five to seven years the average number of years has been running between 23 and 25 years that people are released under the faint hope clause. As well, many people never apply for parole in the 25th year when they can first apply for parole under our existing legislation. We have all sorts of people who do not apply and do not get out. Again, that would be done away with if this bill goes through and judges can impose sentences that are consecutive rather than concurrent.

Although we have heard the figure repeatedly here today that the average time a convicted murderer spends in custody in Canada is 28.5 years, I believe the numbers are now higher than that and that it is closer to 30 years.

Also interesting is the average age of people who commit murder, which is close to 45 years old. If we take that and then add on either the 28.5 years or the 30 years, we are talking about people getting out of custody, if they ever get out, and a number of them do not, when they are 75 to 80 years of age. This goes back to the point that I raised at the beginning of my address today about public safety. They would no longer be a risk to public safety in this country at that age.

I will go back to the issue of justice because that is really what we are talking about. What is justice? I have a feeling I may start quoting Shakespeare here. If we really want to achieve some of the justice as perceived by the government, we would need to bring back the death penalty. It is the only way we can avoid having victims face the potential of an application for early release under the faint hope clause or applications under the Parole Act for parole after 25 years.

We also ask the question of how we came to this position where a number of victims, but not all from my experience, and the families of victims have come to the conclusion that we can use propagandized, politicized terms like “discount” of sentences to murder. How did we come to that? The average family member of a victim does not think of that. It is politicians who came up with those words and that concept.

We give life sentences and we give them for every murder. Whether a person was the first murdered or the second murdered by the murderer, both lives are treated equally. The penalties that we impose in this country is the same. There is no injustice there. That is a contrived plot that is completely out of reality with how it functions in this country.

Murder victim one, two and three are all treated the same in terms of us as a society and our criminal justice system meting out a penalty and that penalty is always life. Whether the time spent incarcerated is 25 years, 30 years or, in some cases, for the rest of natural life, it is the same. There is no discrimination here. One murder victim is treated no differently from the subsequent ones. That is a fallacy that is being perpetrated here and it is being perpetrated by some members in the opposition but it is not true.

I have never met a judge who has treated a murder victim any differently because the victim happened to have been killed later in the consecutive order. Not one judge thinks that way in this country. I think we can all believe, knowing our colleagues in society generally, that there would not be a member of the jury who would think any differently. Every one of those victims are to be treated identically.

That fallacy should be put to rest.

This goes back to what is justice and how we determine what is appropriate sentencing. Every society that I have looked at, and there are all sorts of reports and statistics on this, treats first degree murder much less severely than we do in this country. Again, they treat multiple murderers the same way. The period of incarceration is as much as half and, in some cases, even less than half of what our incarceration rate is for first degree and second degree murder.

Are we to say that those societies, basically all the rest of the democratic societies that are similar to ours, treat their murder victims less justly than we do? If we were to listen to the government, the answer to that would be yes, that those societies are all wrong, that they do not treat their people fairly, that they do not care about their people enough and that they are soft on crime. That would be true about every other country in the world that has governments and a criminal justice system similar to ours.

Do we, as Canadians and as parliamentarians, have the arrogance to say that we are absolutely right and everyone else is wrong? That is what the bill is saying.

A good deal of it, I think, when I listen to some of my Conservative colleagues, is based on their lack of knowledge of how the system really works, driven oftentimes by ideology rather than by the facts.

I want to touch on one more point because it has been irritating me for some time. A couple of months ago, the Minister of Public Safety, dealing with one of the government's many crime bills, was asked a question about whether we as a society within our criminal justice system should have a concept of forgiveness. We need to accept that people can be rehabilitated and that there should be a redemption type of concept within our system, which I believe exists within our system. The emphasis that we have placed over the years on rehabilitation has been the proper one and it does have an element of forgiveness.

The minister's response at that time was that it was okay for the churches, for organized religion and for people of faith. However, the concept that he came across with in his response was that the concept of redemption and forgiveness should have no role to play in a criminal justice system.

I want to say for the record, for Hansard, that I totally reject that type of an approach.

I want to be clear that we in the NDP are supporting the bill to go to committee. The main reason for that is that we have a saving grace in it of leaving this decision to the judge and, to a much lesser degree, to juries as to what the ultimate penalties will be. However, I want to investigate that much more extensively before I and my party will be prepared to vote for this legislation at third reading.

[Larry Bagnell, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

Mr. Speaker, I have two questions for the member.

The member made an excellent point on redemption and rehabilitation. I think the government forgets the fact that virtually everyone gets out but if they are not redeemed or rehabilitated, the government is making society a far more dangerous place through those policies and that attitude.

The member raised the point about respect for judges and that role, and the fact that they are very carefully chosen, they hear all the evidence, they have a lifetime of experience, they have guidelines that they have to follow in sentencing, they are the experts and they can give the best decision as to what will be in the interest of safety for society, including rehabilitation.

Does the member think the government has respect for the judges, in spite of the fact that it has been constantly limiting their powers through bills, limiting their pay rates and limiting the way in which they are chosen?

Could the member comment on either of those items?

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I will try to be quick and answer both questions.

As I said earlier, a large number of people convicted of murder, first degree murder in particular, are going to get out when they are in their mid to late seventies, assuming they serve 30 years. Just because it is logical and real, we have to assume they will no longer be a risk.

There are others who commit murder at a young age, in their twenties, who may very well be eligible to get out when they are younger. We want to be sure that when they get out that they have been rehabilitated.

Taking this kind of an approach, where we say they have to stay in for 50 years, which is probably the logical extension of this bill, there is any number of cases where that is not appropriate.

I want to be very clear that this is why I was prepared to recommend that this bill go to committee to be looked at further.

If we consider Clifford Olson, and if I place myself in the role of the judge, I may very well say that for murdering 10 young people the person in front of me is never going to be rehabilitated. I may very well say that I want to be sure that guy never gets out, or if he does he is going to be so old that he is no longer a risk. There may be one, two or three cases every few years where we may want that. However, if we are going to do that, it seems to me that this bill has to be tightened up in that regard.

On the second point of judicial discretion, obviously I am a strong supporter of the quality of judges we have in this country. We know from any number of things that members of the government, from the Prime Minister on down to backbenchers, have said that those members do not trust the judicial system in Canada. They do not have respect for the judicial system. It is kind of strange that the government is doing this bill in that regard.