Mr. Speaker, Bill C-393 purports to amend the Criminal Code in several ways and to amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act, more commonly referred to as the parole act.
It has at its base with regard to the Criminal Code amendment the introduction of mandatory minimums, basically when the crime that has been committed involves a concealed weapon. We heard from the member for Leeds—Grenville about the horrendous experience that he and members of his family experienced as a result of the use of a concealed weapon.
It is generally the position of the NDP, policy-wise, that we are not supportive of mandatory minimums. We strongly believe in the use within the judiciary of judicial discretion so that the crime and punishment fit the individual facts, as opposed to applying across the board mandatory minimum sentences and taking away from the judiciary the right to apply appropriate sentences based on the facts that are before them, and as opposed to being compelled to impose a penalty no matter what the facts are.
As a political party, we certainly in the past have made exceptions to the rules. We are quite supportive of the use of mandatory minimums in a variety of ways with regard to impaired driving, where in fact their use has been successful. More recently, we have been supportive of the use of mandatory minimums with regard to the use of firearms in the commission of crimes, because in both of those cases we are faced with an epidemic of crime of crisis proportions.
We are able to show, perhaps not as fully as we would like, that the use of mandatory minimums, a more severe form of punishment and penalties, is successful when it is targeted and when we are dealing with a crime that is at a particular crisis level. It is effective there.
We are able to show, particularly by looking to the experience in the United States, where the use of mandatory minimums grew out of all proportion, that it did not have any particular impact on the reduction in crime in those states where it was used extensively. In fact, we are seeing a number of state governments in the United States now repealing mandatory minimum sentences because they have been shown not to be at all effective and in fact have been shown to be useless when they are used broadly.
To come back to Bill C-393, I think we all can appreciate and be concerned about the process that the member for Leeds—Grenville went through and understand his motivation in moving this bill before the House. Unfortunately, that is not the way law should be drafted. In particular, criminal law should not be drafted from that perspective. I do not want that to sound in any way critical of him, but it is simply an observation of the methodology that one should apply when one is creating criminal law.
I do want to be critical of the government and maybe the Conservative Party and its members. The government cannot continue to try to amend the Criminal Code piecemeal. This is another example of it.
If the government is really serious about widespread reform as the government sees it, or as changes to the Criminal Code and maybe to the ideology behind the Criminal Code, to the philosophy of sentencing and the philosophy of punishment as the government would see it, then it has to be government policy. We cannot be doing this ad hoc and piecemeal, one section of the code at a time. It is just simply not the way to have a criminal justice system that makes any sense.
The government is not doing that. I have stood in the House repeatedly over the last couple of years, since the Conservative government has been in place, and criticized it for not doing that. I have implored it, if it is serious about amending the Criminal Code, to do it in an omnibus way and bring in massive legislation.
The code is in terrible shape in many respects. It has contradictions in it. Penalties are too severe in some cases and not severe enough in others, when the crimes are juxtaposed with the resulting range of penalties that can be imposed. It needs to be updated in a number of ways because of the advance of technology. Rather than do this in a way that would be systematic and effective, the government has not done that. It has brought in a series of bills. In addition to that, private members have brought in a series of bills.
I do not have the number, but Parliament, since January of 2006, has to have been faced with at least 50 bills on crime, between the 10 to 20 that the government has brought forward and then at least the 30 to 40 more in the form of private members' bills. It is confusing. It is an erratic way to proceed with reform of our criminal justice system. It is just not the right way to do it, but the government continues.
I want to be clear. As individuals, there is always a free vote. However, members of the NDP always discuss it and we have not collectively come to a decision as to whether we will support the bill at second reading and send it to committee or vote against it second reading.
I want to express another concern about the bill. The very first major criminal law bill, an amendment to the Criminal Code, which the government introduced shortly after it was elected, was Bill C-9. That was back in the first session of the 39th Parliament. The bill went to the justice committee and was significantly altered in the committee. It dealt with conditional sentences. When it came back to the chamber and was finally passed, it expressed the will of Parliament, the significant majority of parliamentarians who were elected in the last election.
We made it very clear to the government that the use of conditional sentences was not to be cut way back as Bill C-9 originally proposed to do, again leaving to our judiciary the discretion as to when a conditional sentence was appropriate. That message was very clear. My estimation was that perhaps as many as 90% of the crimes that the government wanted to exclude from the purview of conditional sentences were in fact put back in by the justice committee in the amendments and then adopted by Parliament, by the expression of the will of a significant majority of parliamentarians.
This bill, and it is just a small part, would preclude the use of conditional sentences by introducing a mandatory minimum in these circumstances. It seems to me the bill is contrary to the intent of the spirit of the vote that we took under Bill C-9. I almost question whether the bill should have been allowed to proceed because we had a vote in the House. It was a government bill altered by the opposition parties quite significantly and I believe that vote would have precluded this bill from coming forward.
I believe it should never should have come forward to the House, given the rules. However, it has and it is before us, but it causes me great concern as to whether we should support the bill, given the vote that has already taken place in the House.