Mr. Speaker, my colleague from Toronto Centre said that he is advising us not to support the bill, but we as Liberals will be voting against it on a basic premise, the premise being that Bill C-54, which is the non-criminally responsible reform act, would not achieve the desired result. Instead, it would cause more harm than good and further stigmatize the mentally ill at a time when the good work of the Mental Health Commission of Canada has begun to undo that misinformation with good evidence and is encouraging mentally ill people to seek the treatment and the early diagnosis that they need.
This is the most important thing that we want to stress here. This legislation would send mentally ill people back underground, because they will be terrified of being stigmatized in the way that they used to be in the past.
Liberals agree fully that the rights of the victims should be enhanced. We have no problem with that part of the bill. We agree that public safety is of the utmost importance and is a core part of the justice system. We have no problem with the issue of public safety, but our concern lies with the lack of balance in the bill.
The designation of high-risk offender for a person who is not criminally responsible would create a fear of the mentally ill. The point to remember is that only 0.2% of all criminal cases in the courts—any criminal case at all—is an NCR person, and only 10% of that 0.2% are violent offenders. We are talking about a very small number of people.
This is the kind of problem that we do not want to see, this knee-jerk reaction of creating legislation that would do more harm by trying to deal with a problem that has been dealt with already in a manner that has been shown to be successful with some tweaking.
We agree that the bill needs some enhancement. We would like to see an evidence-based approach that would incorporate the experience and the expertise of professionals in the field of mental health and justice. Our approach would enhance public safety by focusing on the prevention of violence by individuals with severe mental illness, and that means early diagnosis.
A lot of time should be spent in catching young offenders and diagnosing them before they offend. Many instances of NCR cases who commit violent crimes involve people who did not know they had a mental illness and suddenly had a crisis and became severely incapable of being criminally responsible. They became schizophrenic or they had an acute episode of manic depression or something that caused them to do that violent act.
Therefore, we would also like to see intervention and treatment as part of a good solid bill that would deal with this issue. Rather than adding to the stigmatization of the mentally ill by using a small number of high-profile cases to foster the impression that Canada is overrun with dangerous psychopaths, we would like to reduce the stigma. We would like to encourage Canadians suffering from severe mental illness to seek treatment. If we keep the stigma up, people with mental illness do not want to seek treatment.
That has been the whole problem over all the years, and it is why the Canadian Mental Health Commission has stepped in to deal with this issue. The government has repeated many times in the House that it wants to decrease stigmatization, but this legislation would do the exact opposite.
The mental health groups, all of whom claim that they have never been consulted by the government despite the minister saying that he had consulted them, feel very strongly about this issue.
I would like to quote the Mental Health Commission of Canada, which was created by the federal government. It says that in fact this bill
...paints an inaccurate picture of violence and mental illness. The more mental illness is stigmatized, the harder it is to get people to seek treatment and to stay in treatment. Yet treatment is the most effective preventive measure for the small number of people with mental illness who commit violent offenses.”
The Mental Health Commission of Canada, which the government has mentioned in many speeches, says that it did not necessarily approve of the bill.
Let us look at the evidence.
As I said earlier, non-criminally responsible offenders make up only 0.2% of all criminal cases, and only 10% of that 0.2%, which is 0.02%, are actually violent offenders, so we are talking about a very small group of people.
When appropriately treated, the recidivism rate of these offenders is actually 7%. However, if they are not appropriately treated in a mental institution, their recidivism rate becomes increasingly high, something like 63%.
I ask hon. members to think about it and compare 7% recidivism rate when properly treated and a 63% recidivism rate when put into the criminal justice system and imprisoned.
I want hon. members to look at what we can do, because the problem, and we have heard this said before by the Bar Association and by many people, is that if we force people who are mentally ill into this mandatory three year treatment in a hospital before they get any release leave, so lawyers tell their clients not to ask for an NCR designation. In other words, these people therefore will go to courts and they will be put into the criminal justice system, they will be put into prison and therefore we will see what damage is done and that recidivism rate will rise to 63%.
We are talking about a bill that can damage and can cause more harm than good, and I want to stress that.
The point is that the recidivism rate of all persons released from any kind of federal custody in terms of the criminal justice system and prisons is 46%. That means all people, not just people with violent crimes. The key is to recognize that NCR offenders, by being put into the appropriate criminal treatment facility as opposed to prison, will actually be able to achieve the kind of treatment they require, the ability then to go out and be rehabilitated.
I think this is the some of the problem that everyone wants to talk about, that in fact the public fear of people who have their NCR, who have been treated and are going through their actual community rehabilitation, are out on the street. This concerns people. It could be easily looked at, in spite of evidence, to ensure that every time this community rehabilitation occurs and the offenders are out in the community, that there is a custodian with them. They are actually with someone who is looking after them so they are not alone in the system. That would help to bring down the kind of public fear about which we are talking.
Let us look at the system currently. When offenders currently are NCR and they are put into the appropriate facility, which is a mental hospital, they have a yearly review. Every year they are reviewed and that is done by a review board. This has worked very well in the past. The review board has psychiatrists and other people who then decide whether the individuals have been cured and are ready for the next stage in rehabilitation, so the public safety is assured that they do not go out into the public until they are ready to go do so.
If people are concerned, we could tighten this. We could look at a judicial review instead of an ordinary review by psychiatrists only, as long as the judge who is reviewing someone is in fact learned in mental illness, how mental offenders are treated and the treatment facilities. We could live with that.
However, we do not want people to be sent to federal prison. When we demand that they have three years, a lot of people will not claim NCR and instead go into prison, and that could be a problem.
The other thing is that there are people currently in the system who may have been rehabilitated, are ready for community rehabilitation and to go back out into the system. This retroactivity in the bill would force them to stay for a further three years within the system. I do not know if this meets the charter challenge. I do not know if anyone looked at the constitutionality of that kind of mandatory incarceration of offenders for three years, regardless of whether they are ready to go out and regardless of whether people have said that they are ready to leave.
We would want to look at the bill. It does not have charter scrutiny. There are no prevention components in the bill. There is no early diagnosis of mental illness in the bill. There are no community institutional support systems in the bill. We heard this very clearly. Mr. Howard Sapers, a correctional investigator, had this to say:
My concern is that we may see an increased number of offenders going into penitentiaries who have known significant diagnosed mental illness including major psychosis, and the concerns around the capacity of the correctional service to deal with that [is a problem]
We would like to look at something else. In fact, my colleague, the hon. member for Mount Royal, had a bill when he was justice minister in our government, and it was excellent. The current Minister of Public Safety said that he thought it was a great bill. Therefore, why do we not look at that bill again? Why do we not bring it in, instead of something that would do more harm than good and stigmatize the mentally ill?
