Madam Speaker, before I start on Bill S-12, as one of the openly gay members of this Parliament, I will make a brief mention of the events outside the House today.
I was very pleased to see that, in Ottawa, there was a large turnout of counter-demonstration against the wave of anti-trans and anti-2SLGBTIA hate that is sweeping this country. I am pleased to hear a commitment from the government to work with us on a motion that will condemn hatred and the destruction of public events and public institutions, such as school boards, on very misinformed and hateful grounds. I look forward to working on that. However, one of the things it requires is for the justice committee to meet.
One of the pieces of urgency here, obviously, is Bill S-12. However, I have to say that I am a little disappointed that we have had no meetings of the justice committee this week. I would urge leaders of all parties in the House to come together, get the justice committee reconstituted and get it operating as quickly as possible. We not only have Bill S-12, but we also have my motion, which deals with the wave of hate; I would like to get it dealt with in committee.
Turning to the bill itself, we have had lots of comments about why the bill was late getting here. I share the concerns that the bill could have been here earlier, although there is one piece that I will give the Liberals some credit for. People are asking why it went to the Senate first. Actually, that was an attempt by the government to move more quickly by having the Senate do some of this work and get the bill to us. When we are finished with the bill, it will already have been passed in the Senate, and therefore, we can get things going very quickly. However, this requires that we not have what I think a member referred to before, which is a lot of people giving the same speech over and over in support of the same bill. We have some important work to do at committee, and I hope that all parties will make sure that we can get the bill to committee as soon as possible and do that work.
Now, there are two things in the bill. Again, some members have talked about only one part of the bill in their speeches. However, there are two parts, and the part that is most important to me looks at victims of sexual offences and making sure that we change the law to restore agency to those victims, so that publication bans are not imposed on cases against the wishes of the victim.
Publication bans sometimes serve a very important purpose, and some victims will want to have them imposed. However, to me, publication bans are a relic of old thinking that somehow sexual assault victims have done something wrong, and therefore, their names should not be exposed to the public. Nothing could be further from the truth. However, what is more important is what we heard from the My Voice, My Choice group. Often, victims of crime actually want to help prevent there being more victims, and they feel that publication bans end up inadvertently protecting the perpetrators and keeping important information from other members of the community about who might be a perpetrator.
In one of my questions, I made reference to the case in 2021 in Ontario, where a victim of sexual assault was actually prosecuted for violating the publication ban and received a fine of $2,000 and a victim impact surcharge of $600. What did she do? She was assaulted by a friend or family member, as happens in 80% of cases, and she felt that other members of her friend group and her family should know who the perpetrator was. She said the names, against the publication ban, of herself as the victim and of the perpetrator, to help protect other people in the community. Bill S-12 would correct that fault in our law and restore agency to victims of sexual assault. To me, that is the very most important thing in the bill.
I salute the members of My Voice, My Choice who came to the justice committee when we were doing our study on victims of crime. They very bravely retold their stories and, in many ways, retraumatized themselves in order to be of service to other victims.
When we talk to victims of crime, and I know this from my experience in the criminal justice field, the most important thing for almost all victims is that what happened to them not happen to someone else. Their first response is not always what members of another party in the House tend to say, which is to demand punishment. They demand prevention and education so that this does not happen to someone else. The lifting of publication bans will help prevent there being other victims of sexual offences. Once again, to me, that is the most important part of the bill.
The other half of this bill is the part that results from the Supreme Court decision about the sex offender registry. Let me say the obvious: We all support the operation of the registry. However, the court found that, in many cases, we are overly broad in the automatic registration of offenders. While any kind of sexual offender is not a popular person to talk about, there were some cases where people with intellectual disabilities or people who were neurodiverse, who failed to understand the rules of social conduct and properly read social cues, ended up convicted of sexual offences. I know of two such cases in my own community.
I am not going to say it was through no fault of their own, because I do not wish to put it that way. However, it was through a lack of understanding. They are very unlikely to reoffend or to repeat their behaviour, yet they ended up registered as sex offenders for life. What did it mean in those cases? It meant they could not live in social housing and could not get lots of the social supports they needed, because they were registered sex offenders.
What this bill would do is restore the discretion of judges in a very limited number of cases to not register those people permanently as sex offenders. The analysis of this bill that was done by the justice department says that over 90% of the people who are registered now will continue to be automatically registered. Perhaps as many as 10% will be able to apply to a judge and argue why they should not be registered, but 90% will still automatically be registered.
We are preventing an injustice to those who may have intellectual or other challenges preventing them from understanding their behaviour; however, we are also making sure that the resources that the sex offender registry uses are concentrated on those who are most likely to reoffend. That, to me, is a very strong reason for parties in the House to support this bill.
If we do not get this work done and the sex offender registry ceases to function, that is a big problem. While, yes, I will join in saying I wish this had gotten here sooner, I will also point out that the report on victims of crime, which included the material from My Voice, My Choice, was only tabled in the House last December. The material that came forward in that report from committee was taken by the government and incorporated into this bill.
Some of this work was done fairly fast and was done at the request of victims, so we have an obligation now not to spend a lot of time on it. I know I am not going to get the full amount of time today, but that is okay, because we in the New Democratic Party support this bill. We think it is an important bill, and we want to get it to committee without delay.
There are other things we must do. The report from the justice committee on better support for victims of crime has not really been acted on. I think we should all take seriously the recommendations that are there. The federal ombudsperson for victims of crime has also suggested that we can improve support for victims of crime; this bill is one of the ways we can do that.
I urge all members to support this bill and get it to committee without delay, and I urge those on the justice committee to make this bill a priority in our dealings. However, going back to the leadership of the House from all parties, we have missed all our meetings this week. Could we get the justice committee constituted and meeting?
