Mr. Speaker, it is a great pleasure to address the House on Bill C-10, an act to amend the Criminal Code or, more specifically, an act to implement minimum penalties for offences involving firearms.
I would like to say at the outset that this bill does not allow judges to impose stiffer penalties. The maximums are still the same. For serious offences, the same maximums can be imposed on criminals by judges and they will continue to impose maximums in serious cases.
I would like to remind people that we have a committee system. When a proposal comes to Parliament we have a committee meeting. A number of members from each party go to the meeting to hear expert witnesses in the field. We look at bill after bill day in and day out and obviously members of Parliament cannot be experts on all of them. Therefore, we bring people who have spent their careers in these fields before committee and, based on their knowledge, expertise and input, we wisely make our decisions.
I do not think, in this particular case, a single committee member would not admit that the overwhelming evidence from a vast majority of experts indicates that mandatory minimums do not work. I am sure it would be self-condemnation of the cognitive abilities of any member to actually suggest that was not the case from the expert witnesses that came before committee.
It is in true conscience, using the system as it is meant to be used, that one could take the expertise and overwhelming advice in this particular case. Quite often in committees there is a lot of conflicting advice from both sides but in this case there was some on the other side but very little.
I agree with the Minister of Justice that this is a non-partisan issue and I will be doing that in my speech today. In order to be non-partisan, I will only refer to things that witnesses before committee have said. I will put their testimony on the record so that other members of Parliament can hear what some of the people who have devoted their lives to this type of work have said.
First, I will present some comments from the Canadian Bar Association, a national association that represents 37,000 jurists, including notaries, law teachers and students across Canada. The association's primary objectives include improvement of the law and the administration of justice. In fact, I believe the government's justice minister would have been a member of this association in his previous life.
The CBA consistently opposes the use of minimum penalties. It supports measures to deter the illegal use of firearms but stresses that such measures must be consistent with the fundamental sentencing principles in the Criminal Code with constitutional guarantees and following the well-established guidance offered by Canada's common law. This is the position of the CBA, representing 37,000 individuals. It is opposed to this legislation. Surely. it must have good reasons and information for making such an important decision.
The CBA's opposition can be summed up in four points. First, unlike what many people may think on the surface:
Mandatory minimum penalties do not advance the goal of deterrence. International social science research has made this clear. Canada's own government has stated that:
The evidence shows that long periods served in prison increase the chance that the offender will reoffend again...In the end, public security is diminished, rather than increased, if we “throw away the key”.
Basically, this law would make society more dangerous. I know that is not what appears to be what happens on the surface but, as the social science experts and the government's own report suggests, this would make society more dangerous.
The second reason the Bar Association brings forward is:
Mandatory minimum penalties do not target the most egregious or dangerous offenders, who will already be subject to very stiff sentences precisely because of the nature of the crimes they have committed. More often, the less culpable offenders are caught by mandatory sentences and subjected to extremely lengthy terms of imprisonment.
What happens is that these serious offenders are already given long sentences and the people who should not have long sentences because of the circumstances are the ones who are unfairly caught by these minimums once discretion is taken away from the judge.
The third reason the Bar Association provided is:
Mandatory minimum penalties have a disproportionate impact on those minority groups who already suffer from poverty and deprivation. In Canada, this will affect aboriginal communities, a population already grossly over represented in penitentiaries, most harshly.
The fourth reason the Canadian Bar Association provided is:
Mandatory minimum penalties subvert important aspects of Canada's sentencing regime, including the principles of proportionality and individualization, and reliance on judges to impose a just sentence after hearing all facts in the individual case.
Another important criticism from the CBA comes from its interpretation of section 718.1 of the Criminal Code. CBA states:
Section 718.1 of the Criminal Code states that the fundamental principle of sentence is proportionality, requiring that a “sentence must be proportionate to the gravity of the offence and the degree of responsibility of the offender”.
Bill C-10 would require the same mandatory minimum sentence to apply to all offenders, even though offences and the degrees of responsibility vary significantly. I think anyone would agree that that would not be fair.
Proportionality reflects the delicate balance that must be achieved in fashioning a sentence. Common sense and fairness require an individualized proportional sentence. The Canadian Bar Association believes this is why minimum sentences have been severely criticized in many important studies, including Canada's own sentencing commission report.
Further, the Criminal Code contains a statutory acknowledgment of the principle of restraint, stating that the purpose of sentencing is to separate offenders from society where necessary.
I will now quote the final words of the address from the Canadian Bar Association. It says:
The mandatory minimum sentences proposed by the Bill would focus on denunciation and deterrence to the exclusion of other legitimate sentencing principles, and too often lead to injustice. Ultimately, it is unlikely to enhance public safety, but likely to instead further erode the public's confidence in the fairness and the efficacy of the Canadian justice system.
I will now quote some other witnesses we had before the committee who also provided evidence and the expertise from years of experience in this field as to why this is flawed legislation, and by flawed I mean flawed in the view of the expert witnesses who came before committee.
One of the witnesses, Paul Chartrand, a professor of law at the University of Saskatchewan, told us that if we wish to “promote a just and tolerant Canada...then, with respect to Bill C-10, is minimum mandatory sentencing a legitimate means to address the problem? My answer is no.”
Professor Chartrand went on to ask, “Will mandatory sentencing work? Once again the answer is no.” In his opinion, the way to combat crime is to combat the root causes of crime: assist children through children's benefits; assist families through community services, recreation and so on.
Professor Chartrand also told us that the federal government could not do it alone. He said that it would need to work not only with the provinces and territories, but with municipal governments as well.
Another witness, Mr. Alan Borovoy, general counsel, Canadian Civil Liberties Association, told us about the flaw within Bill C-10. This is taken from the minutes of our justice committee meeting on November 29, 2006. He said:
I have another case to illustrate the nature of the injustices this is capable of producing. In 1994 the Ontario Court of Appeal reduced the jail sentence of a prisoner who had been convicted of discharging a firearm with intent to cause harm. They reduced this sentence from 12 months to six months because in the opinion of the court he had an exemplary record previously and he was acting in a situation of high stress that required split-second decision-making. The prisoner, it turns out, was a police officer. The person at whom he unloaded his firearm was a burglar he was chasing. He grazed his arm.
If that man had come up for sentencing today under the provisions of Bill C-10 he would serve no less than four years, and I am certain that the Conservative Party is definitely in support of our police officers and would not let such an egregious offence against justice occur. There would be all sorts of other situations when the conditions would mandate a sentence that is different from a minimum sentence.
As I said, the maximum sentences are not changed here. Very stiff penalties are available in the justice system. They are not increased in the bill and are still there for the judge to use under this particular bill.
Thanks to the grace of Bill C-10, this police officer, who was doing the best he could, might have had to serve five years. I find it inconceivable that even the most ardent proponents of mandatory minimum sentences would wish that kind of outcome on that police officer.
How does that happen? It is because simplistic solutions like mandatory sentences inevitably encounter a complex reality. We cannot always make them fit. That is why this bill is such an abomination.
Once again, those words were from testimony before the justice committee on Bill C-10 by Mr. Alan Borovoy, general counsel for the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.
Let us go on to another witness so that members do not think this is about just one or two people, although we have had the reference from an organization that represents 37,000 people in the legal community in Canada.
We will go on to Mr. Graham Stewart, the executive director of the John Howard Society of Canada. He left us with the following message to mull over:
Respect for the criminal justice system will never be achieved by measures that breed distrust of our judiciary. Measures that would eliminate the discretion of the court and replace it with one that is inherently arbitrary cannot generate public confidence in either the judicial or the political systems.
Mr. Stewart also outlined this grim reality, an offshoot of Bill C-10:
Harsh penalties encourage greater recidivism. When the impact of Bill C-10 runs its course, the same number of gun offenders will be released each year from prison as is the case today. Having served longer sentences, those being released from our prisons will likely be much more difficult to reintegrate into society. We will have fewer resources to either prevent crime or rehabilitate offenders. They will be more likely to offend again.
There we are hearing the same message that we have heard before. When we put people in prison for longer sentences, especially when under the circumstances those sentences are not just, offenders actually tend to reoffend. Our criminal justice system has actually failed in that respect. Most of the crimes in society are not first offences, so the way to stop them, as the witnesses said, is to first of all deal with the root causes and, second, with the treatment in the jails, or alternative sentencing, which another bill tried to eliminate a lot of, but fortunately Parliament would not allow that to occur.
That is why I was somewhat apprehensive when the justice minister said in his speech that there is much more to come after these bills.
Another witness explained that when we put people in jail for a longer time, in that university of criminals, they come out worse. They come out more likely to reoffend and then society's recidivism problem is worse. Thus, we are going to increase crime in society because people are more likely to offend when they come out. Once we get caught up on the years, we are going to have the same number of people being released.
People have to remember that all these criminals get released. Everyone we are dealing with under the bill gets released. There are a few dangerous offenders, but there is another bill that keeps them in forever. Under this bill, everyone gets out.
If we want to do justice to the victims in our society, if we want to do justice to innocent people so they are not re-victimized or are not victimized for the first time, we want society to be safer. We want people who are coming out of prison to be less likely to reoffend because they are the ones who actually create most of the crimes.
How are they going to be less likely to offend? The statistics, the social scientists and the experts who came to committee showed that the actual facts are that they are less likely to reoffend if they have had shorter sentences and the appropriate treatment.
Mr. Stewart also asked this key question, which no one on the government side could respond to, when he said:
The introduction of new mandatory penalties will be increasingly difficult to control. If mandatory minimums work for one offence, why not all offences?
I would like to go on to yet another witness who came before the committee. I guess people listening at home and the many members of Parliament here are beginning to understand why the public perceptions on crime are different from what we might have thought. I think that is one of the reasons why the committee system serves Parliament well. People thought that in general crime was going up, but violent crime is going down.
In fact, I have to commend the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. In about two weeks, it will have a session specifically on crime, on the fact that violent crime is going down, and on what the role of the media is to ensure that people get the right perception.
Similarly, a number of people coming to committee would have thought that on the surface this type of bill is common sense. That is why I think the testimony from so many witnesses, who were called to the committee by all parties, changed the minds and the understanding of a number of people in regard to what is a very complex situation. It has to be complex or we would have solved it long ago and obviously we have not.
I will go to the second last witness I want to speak about and that is Ms. Debra Parkes, member of the board of directors of the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies, which of course has tremendous experience in this area. She said:
--we're seeing a moving away from this approach [of harsher sentences] by other jurisdictions that have taken this approach in a very concerted effort. A number of American states, as well as jurisdictions in Australia, are starting to move away from imposing mandatory minimum sentences, precisely because they come at great human and fiscal cost, as well as not delivering on the promise of deterrence.
Once again, although we would not think it, intuitively it turns that yet another witness has explained that this approach is not a deterrent.
Also, Kim Pate, executive director of the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies, summed up the association's position by saying:
--the public would be best served by the withdrawal of this bill and not proceeding any further with mandatory minimum sentences provisions of this nature.
As I mentioned at the start of my speech, these were the people who appeared before the justice committee hearings on Bill C-10.. The overwhelming majority of witnesses advised the government not to proceed with this legislation, reminding the government that the vast majority of information and their extensive experience indicate this policy will not succeed, and the government would best serve the interest of Canadians by directing its attention at other and more successful ways of deterring crime.
In conclusion, I think it is the objective of all members of the House of Commons to reduce crime. I think members of the House are very good listeners in their role. Hopefully they will listen very carefully to the evidence, to the facts and to the experts as they search their hearts in making their final decision on what is actually best and what will make Canada safer, and hopefully they will take into consideration the years of expert testimony that I have just presented for the members of the House of Commons.
