Bill C-9 (Historical)

An Act to amend the Criminal Code (conditional sentence of imprisonment)

This enactment amends section 742.1 of the Criminal Code to provide that a person convicted of a serious personal injury offence as defined in section 752 of that Act, a terrorism offence or a criminal organization offence prosecuted by way of indictment for which the maximum term of imprisonment is ten years or more is not eligible for a conditional sentence.

Ending Conditional Sentences for Property and other Serious Crimes Act

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

Mr. Speaker, I also rise to speak to this legislation from the perspective of the context in which we have to address it and the attempt by the government, in a very undemocratic fashion, to do an end run around a vote that took place in the House approximately three years ago on the precursor bill, Bill C-9, which the government brought in shortly after it was elected in 2006. It was the first crime bill that the Conservatives brought in.

In the 2006 election, both the Conservatives and the NDP ran their platform around the issue of eliminating the use of conditional sentences for serious violent crimes. That was the terminology, and it was almost identical in both party platforms.

Bill C-9 came forward, but that was not what it attempted to do. As so often happens with the Conservative Party, it was a huge over-reach.

Bill C-9 would have eliminated the use of conditional sentences for 40 or 45 sections of the Criminal Code. Were these sections all dealing with serious violent crime? We have to remember that the Conservatives promised Canadians in their platform to eliminate conditional sentences.

There were sections in there about altering data in a computer. That was an offence and the conditional sentence would no longer be used after that kind of conviction. There were sections about forging a testamentary document. It was the same thing. That is not a violent crime. There was a whole list of these.

Accurately, as was described by some members who spoke earlier, the combined opposition parties moved to bring the bill to committee. We in the NDP told Canadians that we would remove the use of conditional sentences for serious violent crimes, and we did that, and then we eliminated the other sections. We complied with what we had said to Canadians. We were quite happy to do that because it was what we had promised. We accomplished one of the promises we had made to the electorate.

Bill C-9 came back to the House and a substantial majority voted for it. I think the Conservatives might even have voted for it, but I cannot remember. I should have checked that. The bill went on to the Senate where it was approved and became law and is law to this day. That was a promise made and a promise kept, as opposed to what the Conservatives would have wanted to do.

Following the way of their straight partisan politics, the Conservatives have now decided to bring Bill C-42 forward, along with many other bills, and are attempting to convince the Canadian people that they are tough on crime. I would like to emphasize toughness not smartness.

It was interesting to note the evidence that came out in the course of the debate in committee on Bill C-9 and to a lesser degree when it came back to the House. I remember both the justice minister and the minister for public safety and national security appeared before committee. In both cases they were asked if they knew how many more people were going to be incarcerated and if they knew how much that was going to cost.

Let me digress on this point and explain how conditional sentences work. A judge has to determine that he or she would not sentence a person eligible for a conditional sentence to incarceration in an institution for more than two years. In effect, they would be sentenced, if they were going to be incarcerated, to a period of time of two years less a day. If anybody understands the system in this country, all of those sentences of two years less a day are served in provincial prisons.

Let me go back to the two questions of whether they knew how much it was going to cost and did they know how many were going to be put in? In both cases, the ministers did not know.

I and some of my colleagues from the other parties dug out that information regarding that long list of 45 offences that may no longer be eligible for conditional sentences. All those people would then go to jail for two years less a day. I want to be clear on this. This was information that came from within the Department of Justice. Let me repeat that. The source of this information in writing was the Department of Justice. It turns out that 5,000 more people would be put in provincial jails. Of course, the ministers did not have to worry about that, did they? Not a dime of that was coming out of the federal coffers. They were just dumping this problem of 5,000 more inmates on the provincial system.

Knowing how much it costs per year for an inmate, we estimated that those 5,000 additional inmates in our prisons at the provincial level would cost the provinces in the range of $250 million to $500 million a year. There are many provinces that would like to be able to spend that money.

Because there was no way that the provincial systems could accommodate 5,000 additional inmates with their existing number of beds, there would have to be additions built on to the existing provincial institutions or new ones built. The estimate of what it would cost for capital was in the order of $1.5 billion to $2 billion. Is the federal government going to contribute any of that? Were those two ministers going to have to take it out of their budgets? Absolutely not.

It is important to understand that context because we are faced with the same situation with this bill. If I asked the Minister of Justice or the Minister of Public Safety, who is responsible for corrections, they would not be able to tell me. They would not be able to give me an answer. I am absolutely convinced of that. In fact, last week in the Globe and Mail we saw the article and the editorial attacking the government for refusing to disclose what information it has and what analysis it has done.

I want to be very clear. The analysis that the Minister of Public Safety has done has not taken into account the drug bill that has gone through the House and is sitting in the other place waiting for passage. If that bill and this one pass, he has not done an analysis of how many more inmates there would be. He has not done that.

In spite of the fact that we hear constantly from the Minister of Justice that he keeps being reassured by the Minister of Public Safety that we have lots of space in our federal prisons, it does not matter. He is wrong, by the way, and I am going to come back to that in a second. It does not matter because these people, under Bill C-42, are all going to go into the provincial system.

It was interesting to hear two of my colleagues, one from my party in Quebec and one from the Liberal Party in New Brunswick in the last couple of days tell me that the judges at the provincial level have been told not to send people to jail for weekends because the provincial institutions no longer have space for any of them. They have to put them on probation. That is the reality of what we are faced with at the provincial level and it is true in every single province and territory in this country.

We have signed international protocols that require us to have one inmate per cell. We are breaching that international protocol as much as 50% of the time, particularly at the provincial level but also at the federal level.

Let us go back to the federal system and the assurances—I wanted to use a term that is unparliamentary and I am looking for a synonym—that lack credibility from the Minister of Public Safety.

The head of Correctional Service of Canada, Mr. Don Head, has made it very clear at committee hearings and in the public press in the last month that we do not have the capacity at the federal level, that we are regularly double-bunking, and triple-bunking in some cases, per cell. We are not meeting our international requirements and promises we have made. We do not have that capacity.

Last week the Globe and Mail attacked the minister and the government, because the minister is refusing to disclose the analysis he had done and how much it will cost. That does not take into account these two bills, the one that is before us today and the drug bill that is before the other place right now.

Because of the information we do have up to this point and we will get more, and with the support of the Liberals the bill will obviously go to committee, we will be voting against it. I am quite comfortable in saying that we will see similar numbers, 5,000-plus inmates being incarcerated in our prisons, if this legislation and the drug bill go through. Let me repeat that it will cost the provinces hundreds of millions of dollars a year. It will cost the provinces a huge amount of capital dollars.

It will depend on what our judges do with it. They may say that they cannot send convicts to provincial jails any more, so they may move the sentence up to two years plus a day, or two and a half years or three years and they would then go into the federal system. That would severely impact on the number of inmates at the federal level. It is a realistic possibility, if not a probability, that our judges will start to do that.

I want to make one more point about the cost issue. We always hear from the Conservatives, which is partly why the Liberals run scared on it, that we are soft on crime. I want to use an example in the United States. I think we could argue that most of the states, and Texas and a couple of other southern states in the U.S. may be ahead of them, but California has led the way in throwing people into prison in huge numbers.

Just so we are clear on that, our incarceration rate in Canada is about one-seventh of what it is in the United States. However, it is also the highest of the western democracies after the United States. Japan has an incarceration rate of roughly 60 per 100,000 population. Ours right now is running at about 110 to 120, in those ratios, which is almost double that of Japan. Western democracies in Europe, Australia and New Zealand are running 80 to 90 per 100,000. The United States is running 700-plus per 100,000.

California was one of the states that led the way in getting tough on crime, with the right-wing Reagan-Bush type of agenda, followed very closely by the Conservative Party in this country. In the last few months, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Governor of California, that person who is really soft on crime, has been compelled to begin to release--he is doing it himself; he has to sign each one of them--thousands of inmates on early parole, including a large number who had been convicted and were serving time for serious violent crime, because the state can no longer afford to pay for it. The prison costs in California exceed what the state spends on post-secondary education. It is part of the bankruptcy with which that state is confronted right now. In order to deal with that, he is having to release thousands of inmates on early parole.

That is a very clear model of what would happen if we follow the agenda followed by the United States and the State of California, which the governing party wants us to follow. I want to juxtapose that with the use of conditional sentences. What came out very clearly in the review of Bill C-9 two and a half years ago was that it is working.

The Conservatives come up with these individual cases where our courts clearly can be said to have overused the conditional sentence. We can always find those cases.

I am a great defender of our judiciary. Having practised law all those years, having analyzed our judges and having analyzed judges in a whole bunch of other countries, I firmly believe that we have the best judges in the world. However, they are human. They make mistakes. We should not be deriving from those mistakes principles that guide us on how we are going to pass legislation around convictions, around sentencing. That should not be the way we do it.

What we should do is look at what has happened since we brought in conditional sentences. It was very clear from the evidence that we took in the review of Bill C-9 that it is working. The recidivism rate is about one-third what it is versus those we incarcerate, 30-plus per cent of those we incarcerate, down around 10% and in some cases, depending on what the charges are and what the convictions are for, as low as 8% and up to 12%, but on average, around 10% or 11% is the recidivism rate.

We hear the anecdotal stories and we hear people say that they are standing up for the victims. What they are standing up for is a system that is going to victimize more people down the road because 30% of the inmates are going to become recidivists and are going to go back and commit oftentimes more serious crimes than the ones they first went in for. We know that prisons train people to do that. Where are they in terms of defending those victims, the future ones who inevitably are going to be a result of these types of policies?

We are going to be voting against this bill at second reading. If the bill gets through the committee and comes back to the House, we are going to be voting against it at third reading. This legislation is the wrong approach. It is going to victimize a large number of additional Canadians as opposed to the alternative of what we have now. It is very clear that as our violent crime rate continues to drop, a good deal of that is because we began using a number of principles around restorative justice, including conditional sentences. Our system is working.

It is interesting. I sat for a number of years on the public safety and national security committee. People from all over the world came to look at what we were doing because our system was working. They were seeing us drop our violent crime rate. They were seeing that we were moving quite dramatically away from the U.S. experience and that it was working. Conditional sentencing was one of the things they would come to take a close look at to see how it worked. In many cases, I understand, they are beginning to look at implementing it in other countries that were not using it before they saw ours.

It is a system that works. Is it perfect? Absolutely not. Are our judges human? Yes, they are. Do they make mistakes? Absolutely, they make mistakes. However, it is still the best system, and it is far superior to what is being proposed under this legislation.

[Shelly Glover, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary for Official Languages]

Mr. Speaker, I am here today to debate Bill C-42, ending conditional sentences for property and other serious crimes act. As the name of the bill indicates, further reforms are needed to ensure that conditional sentences are not imposed for serious crimes.

Conditional sentences of imprisonment came into force over 13 years ago, with the proclamation in 1996 of Bill C-41, Sentencing Reform, Chapter 22 of the Statutes of Canada, 1995.

Bill C-41 created a new sentencing part of the Criminal Code. Among its key elements were the creation of conditional sentences as a new sentencing option, the first ever parliamentary statement of the purpose and principles of sentencing, referred to as section 718 to section 718.2, and increased emphasis on the interest of crime victims, including the recognition that the harm done to victims should be considered at sentencing.

A conditional sentence of imprisonment is a sentence of imprisonment of less than two years that a court may permit an offender to serve in the community under conditions and supervision. Originally a conditional sentence was available to sentencing courts provided that the following prerequisites were present: the sentence was less than two years; the court was satisfied that allowing the offender to serve the sentence of imprisonment in the community would not endanger the safety of the community; and the offence could not be punishable by a mandatory minimum term of imprisonment.

Shortly after implementation, a requirement was added that the court be satisfied that sentencing the offender to serve a conditional sentence of imprisonment was consistent with the fundamental purpose and principles of sentencing set out in the Criminal Code. This was designed to respond to concerns that courts were awarding conditional sentence orders for quite serious offences.

In 2000 the Supreme Court of Canada held, in Regina v. Proulx, that the conditional sentencing regime did not exclude any category of offences other than those with a minimum period of incarceration. Nor was there a presumption for or against its use for any category of offence. The court stated, however, that it was open to Parliament to introduce such limitations.

Conditional sentences were never intended for very violent or serious crimes, but rather for less serious offences. The problem has been that not all sentencing courts have interpreted the availability of conditional sentences in the same manner, no consistency. Consequently many, including some provinces and territories became increasingly concerned with the wide array of offences that resulted in conditional sentences of imprisonment.

Over the years questionable conditional sentencing decisions have contributed to a loss of public confidence in the sanction and therefore in the administration of justice.

This government responded to these concerns when it tabled Bill C-9, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (conditional sentence of imprisonment) on May 4, 2006. Bill C-9 was referred to the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights on June 6, 2006.

Bill C-9 in its original form proposed a new criterion that would have eliminated the availability of conditional sentences for offences punishable by a maximum sentence of 10 years or more and prosecuted by indictment. This would have caught serious crimes, including designated violent and sexual offences, weapons offences, offences committed against children and serious property crimes such as fraud and theft over $5,000.

However, opposition members of the justice committee thought that the scope of Bill C-9 was too broad. The opposition voted to amend this legislation to only capture terrorism offences, organized crime offences and serious personal injury offences, as defined in section 752 of the Criminal Code, which are punishable by a maximum sentence of 10 years or more and prosecuted by indictment. This was similar to the approach in Bill C-70, which the previous government had tabled in the fall of 2005, but which died on the order paper with the call of the general election. Our government's attempt at report stage to reinstate Bill C-9 to its original form was defeated by the three opposition parties.

As is the case with other sentencing options, a conditional sentence must be considered in the context of the entire sentencing regime and especially the principles of sentencing.

Section 718 of the code states:

The fundamental purpose of sentencing is to contribute, along with crime prevention initiatives, to respect for the law and the maintenance of a just, peaceful and safe society by imposing just sanctions that have one or more of the following objectives:

(a) to denounce unlawful conduct;

(b) to deter the offender and other persons from committing offences;

(c) to separate offenders from society, where necessary;

(d) to assist in rehabilitating offenders;

(e) to provide reparations for harm done to victims or to the community; and

(f) to promote a sense of responsibility in offenders, and acknowledgment of the harm done to victims and to the community.

The preconditions for a conditional sentence, along with the deemed aggravating factors added to the Criminal Code by Bill C-42, such as evidence that the offender abused a position of trust, for example, were designed to screen out serious offences committed in circumstances for which denunciation, general deterrence and incapacitation should be considered the primary sentencing objectives.

In addition, the fundamental principal of sentencing is that a sentence must be proportionate to the gravity of the offence and the degree of responsibility of the offender. I find it hard to believe that this fundamental principle is being properly observed when a conditional sentence is imposed for serious violent or serious property offences.

Accordingly it is my view that the current conditional sentencing regime still fails to categorically make conditional sentences ineligible for many serious crimes. In addition to excluding terrorism and criminal organization offences prosecuted by indictment and punishable by 10 years or more, the Criminal Code also excludes serious personal injury offences from the availability of a conditional sentence.

The term “serious personal injury offence” was designed for dangerous and long-term offenders. It was borrowed to serve as a limit to the availability of conditional sentences by the amendments of the opposition parties to Bill C-9. A serious personal injury offence is defined in section 752 of the Criminal Code as:

(a) an indictable offence, other than high treason, treason, first degree murder or second degree murder, involving

(i) the use or attempted use of violence against another person, or

(ii) conduct endangering or likely to endanger the life or safety of another person or inflicting or likely to inflict severe psychological damage on another person,

and for which the offender may be sentenced to imprisonment for ten years or more, or

(b) an offence or attempt to commit an offence mentioned in section 271 (sexual assault), 272 (sexual assault with a weapon, threats to a third party or causing bodily harm) or 273 (aggravated sexual assault).

Only the sexual assault offences referred to in paragraph 752(b) of the Criminal Code are explicitly ineligible for a conditional sentence order if prosecuted by indictment. A finding that other offences fit the definition of serious personal injury offence will depend on the circumstances of each case.

Up until the coming into force of Bill C-9 on December 1, 2007, sentencing courts had only to interpret serious personal injury offence for the purpose of determining whether the threshold for a dangerous or long-term offender application had been met according to part 24 of the Criminal Code, because that term was defined only for the dangerous and long-term offender provisions.

Since Bill C-9 came into force, courts have wrestled with the interpretation of serious personal injury offences in the context of conditional sentences. The Alberta Court of Appeal in Ponticorvo, 2009 reviewed its decision in Neve, 1999, where it had considered the definition of serious personal injury offence in the context of dangerous offender provisions.

In that context, the court concluded that section 752 required that the offence considered be objectively serious. However, in the context of conditional sentences, the Court of Appeal found that the use or attempted use of violence sufficed and did not require any overlay of objective seriousness. In other words, it ruled that it should be easier for the Crown to establish that an offence was a serious personal injury offence, or SPIO, in the context of a conditional sentence than it was in the context of a dangerous offender.

The Bill C-9 case law only deals with crimes committed after December 1, 2007, when the legislation came into force, so there is really not a large number of reported cases commenting on the serious personal injury offences in the conditional sentencing context.

The decision of the Alberta Court of Appeal should have resulted in a more consistent application of the definition of serious personal injury offence within the conditional sentencing regime, which would have ensured that similar offences be treated as serious personal injury offences and therefore ineligible for house arrest or conditional sentencing.

While this approach has been followed in a majority of cases, unfortunately this has not always been the case. For instance, in both R. v. Becker, 2009, a decision of the Alberta Provincial Court, and in R. v. Thompson, 2009, a decision of the Ontario Court of Justice, courts were asked to determine whether robbery was a serious personal injury offence in the context of the availability of conditional sentences. In both cases, threats were made, yet in only one of the two cases did the court find that robbery met the definition of serious personal injury offences.

I can tell the House from my personal experience, having been involved with victims of robbery, that it is a serious offence every time it occurs to a person who is in the position of victim.

In R. v. Grewal and Grewal, 2009, a decision of the British Columbia Provincial Court, the court sentenced two accused to conditional sentence orders for the offences of assault with a weapon and assault causing bodily harm. The accused ambushed the victim on his front lawn, hitting him with a shovel and a fireplace poker. The victim required 10 to 20 stitches in his head, suffered broken teeth and neck, arm, thigh and hip pain. What happened? We have already seen in that case how it was not consistent with the rest of the sentencing principles.

In R. v. Prakash, 2009, a decision of the Ontario Court of Justice, the offender was convicted of unlawfully being in a dwelling house, uttering a threat, mischief under $5,000, criminal harassment, impaired driving and breach of a probation order. To me these are serious offences. After taking into account credit for pre-sentencing custody at a two-for-one rate, the offender was sentenced to one day in prison for the offences of impaired driving and breach of a probation order. He then got an additional 12 month conditional sentence on the remaining offences.

I cannot even imagine what the victims were thinking upon hearing those kinds of sentences.

Another concern with only barring serious personal injury offences from the conditional sentence option is that serious property crime such as fraud could still be eligible for a conditional sentence. We are well aware of recent examples of the devastating impact of fraud. Victims who have lost their life savings have called very recently for strengthened sentences for these types of crimes. It is hard to disagree with these concerns, especially considering the fact that fraud, which is punishable by a maximum sentence of 14 years, is still technically eligible for a conditional sentence, despite the amendments brought forward by our government's previous Bill C-9.

Our government intends to address this in Bill C-42 and in future legislation dealing with sentences for fraud.

Another consequence to the opposition's amendments to Bill C-9, our earlier bill to restrict conditional sentences, is that offences contained in the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act were not excluded unless committed as part of a criminal organization. Consequently, the production, importation and trafficking of a schedule 1 drug such as heroin would not be caught and would be eligible for a conditional sentence of imprisonment.

However, as hon. members would know, the government has proposed mandatory minimum penalties for serious drug offences in Bill C-15. I therefore expect that when that legislation is passed and enacted into law, as I hope will soon be the case, these offences would be ineligible for a conditional sentence.

It is clear to me, and I suggest to many Canadians, that greater clarity and consistency is needed as to the availability of conditional sentences for serious, violent and serious property offences. For these reasons, Bill C-42 proposes to eliminate the reference to serious personal injury offences in subsection 742.1 and make all offences punishable by 14 years or life ineligible for a conditional sentence. This would make the offence of fraud and many other crimes ineligible for a conditional sentence.

Bill C-42 would also clearly make offences prosecuted by indictment; those punishable by 10 years' imprisonment; those that result in bodily harm; those that involve import, export, trafficking or production of drugs, or those that involve the use of a weapon ineligible for a conditional sentence.

While this element of the legislation will significantly limit the ambit of the conditional sentence regime, the addition of these categories would not capture all serious offences prosecuted by indictment and punishable by a maximum of 10 years. Therefore, Bill C-42 also proposes a list of 11 specific offences prosecuted by indictment and punishable by a maximum sentence of 10 years that would be ineligible for a conditional sentence.

These offences are prison breach, luring a child, criminal harassment, sexual assault, kidnapping, trafficking in persons, abduction, theft over $5,000, breaking and entering a place other than a dwelling house, being unlawfully in a dwelling house, and arson for fraudulent purposes.

Conditional sentences are an appropriate sentencing tool in many cases, but they do need to be restricted when it comes to serious property offences and serious violent offences. The prudent use of conditional sentence orders should strengthen confidence in the sanction and in the administration of justice.

I hope that all hon. members in the House will support Bill C-42 in its entirety.

Ending Conditional Sentences for Property and Other Serious Crimes Act

[Dominic LeBlanc, Liberal, Beauséjour, NB]

Mr. Speaker, the member for Abbotsford is an able chair of the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights. It is a pleasure to work with him on these issues.

I do not share his pessimism when he says that for once the Liberal Party has done the right thing. I am much more optimistic than the member for Abbotsford. We in the Liberal Party have done the right thing many more times than once. Hopefully, he will continue to work with us and come to that conclusion on his own. He mentioned Bill C-9 in the previous Parliament. He and I were lucky enough to serve in the previous Parliament as well.

I hope I do not stand to be corrected on this because I am going by memory, but I study these justice bills very attentively any time they are introduced and read a great deal about each justice measure that the government introduces. This was a bill from the previous Parliament and I want to ensure my recollection is accurate.

One of the problems that I remember with the previous legislation was that the Conservatives at the time proposed to restrict the use of conditional sentences any time somebody was prosecuted by way of indictment. That was overly broad. They were removing from judges, as they are prone to do, a number of tools important for the rehabilitation of offenders.

They have seen the light and perhaps in this case done the right thing and brought in a more restricted bill, which eliminates the use of conditional sentences in cases where the public clearly would not understand the concept of house arrest. That is why this time, because of the changes they made, we are happy to work with them in the interest of improving public safety.

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I commend my colleague for his work on the justice committee. He and I both serve on that committee and we were also both part of the 39th Parliament.

He will, of course, recall that in the 39th Parliament it was our Conservative government that actually introduced Bill C-9, which dealt specifically with eliminating conditional sentences, house arrest, for the very crimes we are debating in the House today. Yet, it was his Liberal Party that was part of the effort in the House to gut Bill C-9 and take out all of the offences that did not involve serious personal injury.

There was obviously a conversion on the road to Damascus for the Liberal Party along the way because it supports it now. I want to commend it. It is doing the right thing, for once.

I would ask the member, what is it that changed between the 39th Parliament and the 40th Parliament that would now compel the Liberals to support what clearly is good legislation and was also good legislation back then but yet back then they did not support it?

[Brent Rathgeber, Conservative, Edmonton—St. Albert, AB]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure for me to rise today to speak at second reading of Bill C-42, which would further and severely restrict the availability of one of the most innovative but certainly controversial elements of our sentencing law, the conditional sentence of imprisonment.

Before describing the key provisions of the bill, please allow me to take a few moments to discuss the origin, history and rationale for conditional sentencing.

In June 1994, Bill C-41, Canada's first comprehensive reform and modernization of sentencing law and procedures since 1892 was introduced into this very House of Commons. Among its many elements was the creation of the conditional sentence of imprisonment. What this meant was that for a sentence of imprisonment of less than two years a court could and may order that it be served in the community under certain conditions and under supervision. It could only be done under the statutory conditions, such as the court being satisfied that the offender could serve the sentence in the community without endangering the population at large.

In other words, the conditional sentence was aimed at low-risk offenders sentenced to a provincial reformatory for a period of time of two years or less.

When Bill C-41 was tabled, Canada was in the midst of an unprecedented increase in the growth of prison populations, both provincially and federally. The federal inmate population, that is those serving periods of sentences of two years or more, was growing at twice the average long-term rate, with a 21.5% increase in the number of federal prisoners from 1990 to 1995. During that time, federal correctional costs exceeded $1 billion for the first time.

Canada's incarceration rate of 130 prisoners per 100,000 citizens was the fourth highest in the western world, which was quite alarming. Therefore, in the 1995 budget the then minister of finance for the then Liberal government had urged federal and provincial ministers responsible for justice to develop strategies to “for containing the growth of the inmate population and the associated corrections cost therewith”.

The Speech from the Throne in 1996 promised that the federal government would develop alternatives to incarceration for low-risk offenders, while focusing the more expensive “correctional resources” on the high-risk offenders.

This direction resulted in the establishment of a multi-year federal-provincial-territorial process called “The Corrections Population Growth Exercise”. Bill C-41, as it was introduced in that Parliament, and the conditional sentences in particular were seen as key to Canada's response to the significant growth in the number of prisoners.

A special study of the impact of conditional sentencing on prison populations was conducted by the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics in 2001. In the words of highly noted and renowned Professors Julian Roberts and Thomas Gabor of the University of Ottawa, in a 2002 article in the Canadian Criminal Law Review, the results reveal:

—that conditional sentencing has had a significant impact on the rates of admission to custody, which have declined by 13% since its introduction. This represents a reduction of approximately 55,000 offenders who otherwise would have been admitted to custody.

In a subsequent article published in the British Journal of Criminology, Professor Roberts, by this time at Oxford University, described conditional sentences as leading to the most successful decarceration exercise in the history of common law sentencing reform.

While the availability of conditional sentences arguably achieved the policy of restraint in the use of incarceration, it did so at considerable cost to the public faith in sentencing and the sentencing process.

Controversy has surrounded the conditional sentencing regime since its introduction. The sentence is seen by some as being too soft a disposition for offenders who are custody bound because it is no more severe or intrusive than a sentence of probation. As the legislation reads, the differences between probation and a conditional sentence are barely noticeable. The courts, moreover, may be unwilling to hand down conditional sentences in most cases because of that very perception, that if probation would be an appropriate sentence then the conditional sentence is probably inappropriate.

Some critics of conditional sentencing go so far as to say that the stated goal of conditional sentences, which was to reduce incarceration rates, had failed due to the problems it presented to the judiciary in properly applying conditional sentences. In fact, there is a series of appellate jurisprudence on conditional sentencing, and I will not give a law lecture today, but I invite any hon. members who are interested in the courts struggling with conditional sentences to read the Supreme Court of Canada's decision of 2000 in R. v. Proulx.

However, conditional sentences have been appropriately used in many cases, but there have been too many examples of a failure by the courts to balance the objectives of denunciation and general deterrence with the desire to rehabilitate an offender.

Due to legislation that allowed for those individuals convicted of serious offences to receive conditional sentences such as house arrest, judges have been handing down sentences all too frequently. This practice has caused an enormous loss of confidence in the judicial system by the public. We are here to serve the public and when the public loses confidence in the administration of justice, all hon. members ought to be concerned. The answer to this problem is to give judges guidance in sentencing matters.

There has been more than one legislative attempt to do so and to provide greater guidance to judges who are considering a conditional sentence. Members who have been here longer than I will recall Bill C-9 introduced by this Conservative government on May 4, 2006, which ultimately passed on May 31, 2007. However, sadly, it did not pass unamended.

The bill, as it was originally written, would have ensured that conditional sentences like house arrest would not be allowed for serious and violent crimes. However, sadly the bill was amended by the opposition parties in the justice and human rights committee. The amendments preserved conditional sentences for crimes such as possession of weapons for dangerous purposes, kidnapping, arson and impaired driving causing bodily harm and death.

Criminals who commit these crimes should be punished appropriately and, in my view, serve their time in prison. By restricting these crimes from conditional sentencing eligibility, Canadians will have a justice system that imposes sentences that fit the severity of the offence, properly deters serious offences and helps keep our streets safe.

With that history lesson, it brings me to Bill C-42, the bill which under consideration before the House this afternoon. The bill would add new, clear provisions to the conditional sentencing sections of the Criminal Code to ensure once and for all that conditional sentences would not be available to individuals who committed serious violent and serious property crimes.

The proposed reforms would ban the use of conditional sentences for the following: offences for which the law prescribes a maximum sentence of 14 years or life; offences prosecuted by indictment and for which the law prescribes a maximum sentence of imprisonment of 10 years that result in bodily harm, involve the import/export, trafficking and production of drugs or involve the use of weapons.

It would also ban the use of conditional sentences for the following offences when prosecuted by indictment: prison breach; luring a child; criminal harassment; sexual assault; kidnapping and forceable confinement; trafficking in persons for material benefit; abduction; theft over $5,000; auto theft; breaking; entering with intent; being unlawfully in a dwelling house; and arson for fraudulent purpose.

It is expectation of our government that when this legislation comes into force the conditional sentencing regime will provide the correct equilibrium between the punitive and rehabilitative objectives of sentencing of low risk and less serious offenders.

In doing so, it should provide improved public confidence in the sanction and in the criminal justice system generally. It will send the correct message to both criminals and the law-abiding public at large that those who commit serious and violent crimes will no longer be entitled to conditional sentences such as house arrest.

Imagine an individual being convicted of arson and being able to serve the time in the comfort of that person's own home. It is barely imaginable. However, after the passage of this bill, this misguided sentencing practice will no longer occur in Canada.

On this side of the House we do not believe that house arrest is a suitable punishment for serious crime. Canadians I have spoken to do not believe so, either. Too many criminals, in my view, should never have been given conditional sentences in the first place. Moreover, too many convicts have breached the terms of those conditional sentences.

The solicitor general of Saskatchewan reports that 39% of criminals sentenced to house arrest were returned to jail for breaching the conditions of their sentences. Statistics Canada reported in 2006 that over 11,150 criminals were serving conditional sentences, 2,791 of whom were convicted of violent crimes, crimes against a person, 3,619 were convicted of property crimes and 2,062 were convicted of drug trafficking.

In my view and in the view of my colleagues on this side of the House, there are too many cases where individuals convicted of serious and violent crimes are serving conditional sentences. Criminals who commit these crimes should be punished appropriately and serve time in prison. By restricting these crimes from conditional sentencing eligibility, Canadians will have a justice system that imposes sentences that fit the severity of the crime, that properly deter others from committing serious offences and, most important, promotes safe streets and safe communities.

As I conclude my comments, I would like to remind all members of the House that they have a choice. A previous Liberal government introduced conditional sentencing that allowed serious and violent crimes to be eligible. In the last Parliament, the Liberal, New Democrat and Bloc opposition opposed previous legislation to end the practice of allowing serious and violent criminals to serve their sentences in the comfort of their own homes. However, this Conservative government is trying to ensure that serious criminals spend time where they belong: in jail.

Our government believes that the justice system should put the rights of law-abiders before the rights of lawbreakers. Whatever the leader of the official opposition may say when the cameras are on him, the record shows that the Liberal opposition members are soft on crime.

We call on the Liberals, both in this House and in the Senate, and all parliamentarians of all political stripes to listen to Canadians, to listen to their constituents and to walk the walk, not just talk the talk when it comes to being tough on crime. It is time for all parliamentarians to get behind the government's urgently needed safe street and safe community agenda, and for that reason I urge all hon. members to support Bill C-42.

Criminal Code

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

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Yukon who sat on the justice committee for a number of years with me and saw this going on with the government. Let me answer his question by addressing one bill specifically because it is coming back. The Conservatives are trying to rejuvenate it and it is the conditional sentencing bill. In terms of taking advice or researching the background of the bill and the reasons why we have conditional sentences in this country, the Conservatives are trying to make these blunt changes without having any understanding of the consequences, mostly to the provinces, or they are simply not caring about the consequences.

Bill C-9 was the bill introduced early in 2006 shortly after the Conservatives were elected and that bill was going to create a situation where about 5,000 more people were going to spend an extra year in jail than they were currently spending. From the process we went through with the minister in front of the committee, I think we even had the public safety minister take a look at this in terms of responding to a question, neither of those ministers had any idea of what the consequences were going to be.

Their department officials did. I gathered some of the information from them and the rest from the Library of Parliament. The opposition parties came together and took out the abusive part of that legislation. We passed the bill where it did need some amendments and clarification, and we ended up with a decent piece of legislation, but now they are back and they are trying to do it again.

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

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.

[Joe Preston, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I recognize I may not have the full allotment of time, but I will give it my best and you can pull the plug if I go over.

I am happy to speak to Bill C-519, introduced by the member for Palliser. We have already told him what a great member he is, so perhaps we should stop that.

The bill addresses an important aspect of the bill system. More specific, the bill provides that where an accused is charged with a serious personal injury offence, as defined under section 752 of the Criminal Code, the prosecution shall present all the relevant evidence in its possession before a justice makes an order for the release of the accused.

Bail has been described earlier. The type of evidence that would be required is all the evidence that is relevant to the release of the accused, including all relevant evidence respecting the alleged offence and its commission.

As the bill summary notes, the purpose of the proposed reform is to ensure that an accused in such a case is not granted bail as a result of an agreement between the prosecutor and the defence counsel without the judge being fully informed by all of the relevant evidence in the possession of the prosecutor. As the member mentioned in his original comments, he personally knew the people involved in the crime of which he spoke and it is important that these relevant pieces are taken into account.

Bill C-519 is a private member's bill, not a government bill. Regardless, I am of the view that the bill is consistent with the government's overall crime platform. The government's criminal law reforms have sought to ensure the justice system operates in an effective manner in order to protect victims.

For example, in the last session of Parliament, Bill C-9 was passed in order to prevent the use of conditional sentences, which also refer to house arrest for offences proceeded on indictment that carry a maximum sentence of 10 years. Bill C-18, the DNA databank legislation, also received royal assent, thereby strengthening the Criminal Code regime with this powerful crime solving tool. Also street racing laws were passed with the proclamation of Bill C-19.

In this session of Parliament, Bill C-2, the Tackling Violent Crime Act, received royal assent. This important omnibus bill addresses a broad range of concerns. It tackles serious gun crimes by imposing higher minimum sentences for imprisonment and tougher bail rules. It allows stricter conditions and more effective sentencing and the management of dangerous and high risk offenders. It raises the age of consent for sexual activity to protect our youth from sexual predators. It strengthens the laws against impaired drivers to protect Canadians from those who drive under the influence of drugs or alcohol.

Unborn Victims of Crime Act

[Tom Lukiwski, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons and Minister for Democratic Reform]

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak to private member's Bill C-484, which proposes to amend the Criminal Code to make it an offence to injure, cause the death of, or attempt to cause the death of a child before or during birth while committing, or attempting to commit an offence against the mother.

I do not think that anyone in the House could oppose the intent of this legislation. The assault of a pregnant woman and a direct or indirect assault against the child she is carrying is deserving of a very significant and strong penalty.

The bill is technically complex and therefore, in my opinion, should be carefully reviewed if it is referred to committee for study.

Bill C-484 proposes a mandatory minimum penalty of 10 years for the offence of directly or indirectly causing the death of a child while committing or attempting to commit an offence against the mother, who the person knows or ought to know is pregnant. I am not a lawyer, but I hope that the term “ought to know” satisfies the constitutionally required mental elements for criminal offences intent.

I am concerned that if two charges are laid as proposed in the bill, one charge for assaulting the pregnant woman and one charge for injuring or killing the child she is carrying, it may not necessarily result in a lengthier sentence for the accused, as most sentences in this country are served concurrently. I therefore believe we need to address this deficiency not just within the bill before us today, but in general.

I know that the justice minister has had a full agenda over the last year, and I strongly applaud him for his initiatives, for example, with the tackling violent crime bill, but I do hope that in time he will address the issue of concurrent sentences by allowing for consecutive sentences for limited offences. In my opinion, it is not right that an offender who may seriously assault multiple victims serves the sentences for each of those offences concurrently.

I would also urge our government to continue the ongoing commitment and efforts to address spousal violence and violence against women.

According to a 2006 Statistics Canada report, women in this country are still more likely than men to be the victims of the most severe forms of spousal assault, as well as spousal homicide, sexual assault and criminal harassment. The report states that only 8% of sexual assault victims report the assaults to police.

The key findings of the report with respect to spousal violence are: women are more than twice as likely as men to be physically injured by their partners; women are four times more likely than men to be choked; women are six times more likely to receive medical attention; women are five times more likely to be hospitalized as a result of the violence; women are twice as likely than men to report ongoing assaults, and by that I mean 10 assaults or more; women are more than three times as likely as men to indicate that they feared for their lives from a violent spouse; and, the rate of spousal homicide against females has been three to five times higher than the rate for males.

This government's tackling violent crime priority aims to ensure that everyone, particularly the most vulnerable members of our society, can feel safe and secure in their communities and their homes. This government has introduced and passed a number of bills, including Bill C-9 in the first session of this Parliament, which ended conditional sentences for serious personal injury offences such as aggravated sexual assault.

This government has also introduced a number of non-legislative measures, including the announcement of a $52 million boost to programs, services and funding for victims of crime over the next four years to help federal, provincial and territorial governments respond to a variety of emerging issues facing victims of crime across the country. The appointment of Steve Sullivan on April 23, 2007 as the first federal ombudsman for victims of crime is a part of that package.

Since February 2006 the federal-provincial-territorial working group on missing women has been examining the issue of missing women and, in particular, cases involving serial killers who target persons living a high risk lifestyle, including but not limited to those working in the sex trade.

Justice Canada, through the family violence initiative, actively addresses family violence, which has a serious impact on women through ongoing activities that focus on criminal policy development and support research, programming, public legal education and evaluation.

Although Justice Canada does not have the mandate to provide sustained funding for direct service delivery, including shelters, it does contribute to programs, public legal education materials and consultations that are designed to protect aboriginal women and children from family violence.

This government is firmly committed to protecting women and other vulnerable persons from all types of violence and to holding perpetrators accountable for their acts.

The intent of the bill before us today aims to protect women. It is a bill that I wholeheartedly support, and I encourage all of my colleagues to support it as well.

Criminal Code

[Andrew Scheer, Conservative, Regina—Qu'Appelle, SK]

moved that the bill be read the third time and passed.

Mr. Speaker, I want to personally thank all the members of the justice committee for their work on my private member's bill. I very much enjoyed my time before the committee when I had an opportunity to present. I presented along with representatives from the car insurance industry, members of the RCMP and other interested stakeholders who have long been asking for government to make some changes to the Criminal Code to better address the problem of motor vehicle theft in our country.

While I am disappointed that some major tenets of my bill tackling car theft were taken out at committee, I appreciate the fact that the committee passed several aspects, which remain in the bill we are debating today. The portions that were cut out all pertain to the mandatory jail times for repeat car thieves.

I think that was a mistake because it is precisely the repeat car thieves that we need to get tough on. Every region in Canada has been affected by the theft of cars and trucks. Indeed, lives have been lost. In addition, there have been billions of dollars of costs for car owners and insurance premium payers.

However, what remains is something that organizations have been asking for. If the bill as currently worded passes today, we will be establishing a separate offence for theft of a motor vehicle. This is something that the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police has long been asking for.

The bill also sets out some maximum sentencing provisions. As the maximum penalty is 10 years as the bill is now written, this brings about an interesting set of circumstances. In the last year, the government passed Bill C-9, which limited the use of conditional sentences such as house arrest.

The passage of this bill means that people who commit certain offences that carry maximum penalties of 10 years or greater are ineligible for house arrest. They must actually face time in prison. While theft of a motor vehicle does not automatically fall into this category, Bill C-9 has the effect that crimes which fall under section 752 of the Criminal Code are not eligible for a sentence of house arrest.

In addition to those crimes listed, any “conduct endangering or likely to endanger the life or safety of another person or inflicting or likely to inflict severe psychological damage on another person” falls into this category. This would mean that when car thieves steal a car and, after perpetrating the crime, proceed into a high speed chase or dangerous driving, for example, in which they endanger the lives of other motorists, they would be subject to this provision.

So at least some positive aspects of the bill have remained.

I truly believe that when people are convicted of stealing a car or truck for the third time it is time for them to face real consequences. The bill as originally worded contained this provision. It was a “three strikes and you're out” provision, whereby upon the third conviction of theft of a motor vehicle the minimum sentence would be at least two years in jail. I think most Canadians agree that a two year prison sentence is not too harsh for a person who has stolen cars or trucks three times.

The problem is that too often our neighbourhoods are made to be rehab centres. Honest Canadians are forced to live close to all kinds of dangerous and repeat offenders because of a legal system that too often puts the rights of criminals ahead of the rights of honest citizens.

However, in a minority Parliament I understand that compromises are going to be made, that the opposition has the ultimate say in what kind of bill gets passed, and that there has to be cooperation among all parties. I am very pleased that all parties were able to work together at committee to come up with a version of the bill that was palatable to all the justice critics of the parties and to all representatives on the committee.

I will conclude here. I know that I have an entitlement to a 15 minute time slot, but I have had a number of conversations with members of the other parties and I think that the bill as it is currently worded is acceptable to most members. I am going to conclude my remarks early in the hope that we can finish debate at third reading very quickly to speed up passage of the bill and get it over to the other place in a timely manner.

[Réal Ménard, Bloc, Hochelaga, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak to Bill C-13, which is fairly technical. It deals with the language of juries, procedures for service of documents and also, the aspect that interests us most, the whole issue of official languages and the provision of trials in the official languages. Consequently, it addresses access to justice by minority groups.

We support this bill and are in favour of the amendment tabled by our Liberal colleagues. If I have understood correctly, this amendment clearly recognizes the responsibility of a judge to inform the people before him in a court of law, the people who will be participating in a trial—whether or not they are the accused—that they have the right to a trial in either official language, naturally in the language of their choice. This ensures that justice will be served.

In general, I would like to remind the House that Bill C-13 initially proposed that an accused who does not speak the same language as the majority of a group of accused should not be penalized. It suggested as well that it would be possible for a judge or the chief court coordinator to ensure that a co-accused who does not speak the same language as the majority appears before a bilingual judge or has a separate trial. That is part of our constitutional guarantees. It is also in the Criminal Code and is one of the factors we should always remember as parliamentarians, that is to say, people must always have access to justice in their mother tongue.

For example, when francophones outside Quebec are put on trial—especially when the trial involves multiple charges or there are several accused at the same time—there is always a danger that they will be assimilated because the majority rules, and obviously that is not what we want. The bar expressed its concerns in committee that justice could be denied to minority groups at various points in our current trial procedures.

In regard to linguistic rights, the current system provides that at the request of the accused, a judge will order a preliminary hearing. We all remember that the preliminary hearing is the stage before the trial itself when a judge assesses the evidence that the Crown has and commits the accused to trial. It is a very important stage. The legislation currently provides that, at the request of the accused, a judge will order a preliminary hearing and trial before a judge alone or a jury that speaks the official language of the accused. There is always a concern, therefore, that no one in a minority language situation should be denied knowledge of the evidence against him and the legal procedure or prevented from interacting with the officers of the court and the judges, so that there is always the possibility of ordering a trial in the language of the accused.

I also want to remind the House of similar concerns surrounding the entire question of legal documents. When an accused asks to have his trial in the official language of his choice, in accordance with section 19 of the bill, the Crown must have the documents containing the charges, the information and the indictment translated into the official language of the accused or the language that he best understands. After everything is translated, if that would help the accused understand it better, it is turned over to him.

Changes have also been made in regard to the examination, cross-examination and preliminary hearing. I mentioned that the preliminary hearing is very important because it is here that the Crown reveals its evidence. This is when it is determined whether or not there is enough evidence to proceed to trial.

It should be noted that witnesses can use either official language at the preliminary hearing and the trial. Clause 20(2) of the bill enables the prosecutor, if authorized by the judge and if the circumstances warrant, to examine or cross-examine a witness in the witness’s official language.

Let us look at the case of a francophone accused of a crime. For example, suppose the member for Québec, a francophone, were accused—let us imagine the worst—of having killed her husband. She is ordered to trial and there is a person who saw her kill her husband, Mr. Lemieux, a man who gave her more than 20 years of his life, a veritable saint of a man. If the person who saw her kill her husband is an anglophone, he or she will be summoned to testify as a witness. In this case, the crown prosecutor is bilingual. One may ask in what language the prosecutor will ask questions of the witness. Thanks to the amendments to Bill C-13, it will be possible for the person conducting the examination of the witness, even if he or she speaks a different language than that of the accused, to communicate directly with the witness, thereby avoiding the need for interpreters. Thus, the member for Québec, a francophone, kills her husband; an anglophone witness is called to testify and the prosecutor who laid the charge is bilingual. The cross-examination could be conducted in the language of the witness. In my example, I referred to my colleague, the member for Québec, but honourable members will recognize the fictitious nature of my example because the member for Québec is well known as a peacemaker, without excess of any kind, far removed from anger and possessing total self-control.

That said, I want to say a few words about the amendments that the other place, the Senate, has proposed.

In my opinion—it was a recommendation of the Senate and it is a recommendation of the Liberal opposition—it is desirable that the judge should personally ensure that the person who appears before the court, whether at the preliminary inquiry stage or during the trial on the merits of the case, is clearly aware of his or her linguistic rights, including the right to request a trial in either official language. In a case were there are co-accused, one accused person can even ask for a separate trial when necessary.

Obviously, there are many people involved in the trial proceedings who could inform the accused that his or her linguistic rights must be respected. The prosecutor or the accused’s attorney could do so, or others. In my view, it is a wise move to make certain the judge is able to do that.

Our colleagues in the other place, the senators, have also asked that the legislation be reviewed in three years. This kind of review mechanism, I believe, is now quite common in our bills.

Of course, the Bloc Québécois supports this amendment. The Senate has submitted different cross-referencing provisions, particularly with regard to Bill C-2, the omnibus bill tabled by the government. I have been told there was a bit of a delay in the Senate, which provoked some anger from the parliamentary secretary. As I recall, Bill C-2 was a combination of five previous bills, namely, C-9, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (conditional sentences), C-10, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (minimum penalties for offences involving firearms) and to make consequential amendments to another Act, the bill on dangerous offenders, the bill on reverse onus in bail hearings and a bill dealing with impaired driving and the new charges that could be laid.

So, Bill C-2 impacts on Bill C-13, and the Senate has presented cross-referencing amendments.

Of course, the Bloc Québécois supports Bill C-13 and the amendments proposed by the Liberal opposition. However, I cannot conclude without talking about the court challenges program.

How sad it must be for all parliamentarians to see how this government has taken an insensitive measure. I thought the Minister of the Environment would join his voice to that of the Bloc Québécois and defend francophone minorities. If I am not mistaken, he was responsible for this issue when he was a member of the Mike Harris cabinet. Mike Harris will not be remembered as one of the most progressive parliamentarian in history, but I thought that the Minister of the Environment wanted to follow the philosophical saying to the effect that taking the middle road is doing the virtuous thing. How can one support abolishing the court challenges program and thus move away from the middle road and virtue?

As members know, the Bloc Québécois is a very responsible opposition party. It is the number one political force in Quebec, and it will continue to be so, if such is the wish of Quebeckers. So, the Bloc Québécois brought forward an amendment at the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage, and also at the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, to resurrect the court challenges program. Unfortunately, we were disappointed by the Conservatives' response. The Conservative Party can no longer be called “progressive”. The fact that they removed the word “progressive” from their name is quite telling.

So, the Bloc Québécois brought forward an amendment in both of these committees. As we know, had it not been for the court challenges program, the French fact outside Quebec—for which our ancestors fought—would not be what it is now. And the Minister of the Environment must raise his voice in cabinet, regarding this French fact.

It is being said that the Minister of the Environment is part of the progressive wing of cabinet. How could he have supported this decision? I will have to tell the member for Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, because I believe he has some influence with this man. I believe that the member for Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie will have to make the Minister of the Environment understand that he has failed in his responsibilities by not crossing party lines and by leaving francophones outside Quebec to be denied an extremely important tool in this way.

Why is this important? Take the example of school boards. In Quebec, we call them commissions scolaires, but outside Quebec they are conseils scolaires. Governments have not always spontaneously decided to grant resources and equip francophones in some communities with all institutions, from Prince Edward to Alberta, and including Saskatchewan. By using the court challenges program, with public funds, they were able to bring challenges in the courts. The case went as far as the Supreme Court of Canada and forced the establishment of school boards in francophone communities outside Quebec, which are of course minority communities.

How bizarre, not to say stupid, is the reasoning of this government, which claims that it never enacts or introduces unconstitutional laws? Well, I have been sitting in this House for 14 years and I have seen legislation and regulations repeatedly challenged and held to be invalid. Remember that the tobacco regulations, for example, were declared invalid by the Supreme Court. A number of decisions that have been made have been held to be invalid. It is not simply a matter of laws being ruled invalid, it is a matter of getting new ones recognized.

For example, Michael Hendricks, a resident of Montreal, used the court challenges program to have same-sex spouses recognized.

Today, people whose sexual orientation is homosexual can marry, can have proper weddings and experience the joys of marriage—and of course sometimes also the anguish of divorce. Had it not been for Michael Hendricks and his spouse, René Leboeuf, we would never have moved so speedily toward full recognition of rights for the gay and lesbian community. So you can see that the court challenges program has served both francophone communities outside Quebec and gay men and lesbians well.

When we come to examine the Conservative government’s record, the debit side will include the insensitivity it has demonstrated. I can only mourn the fact that no one in the Quebec caucus of the Conservatives felt the need to stand up for francophones outside Quebec. In fact, I say “francophones outside Quebec”, but there is nothing in the court challenges program that made the anglophone minority automatically ineligible to use it. Of course I will be told that the National Assembly has long made sure to respect the anglophone minority in Quebec. In the plan he put forward before the 1995 referendum, Jacques Parizeau said that it was a founding minority of Quebec.

In Quebec, the constitutional rights of anglophones were recognized, and still are. For instance, anglophones have access to learning institutions from kindergarten to university. Even though Quebec is not officially bilingual, a whole range of programs and measures is available to anglophones outside Quebec.

Valéry, a famous name in history, wrote that one can measure how great a civilization is by how it treats its minorities. Of course, in Quebec, we have every reason to be proud of how we have treated the anglophone community. We are equally proud of how we have treated our aboriginal communities. It is well known that René Lévesque was the one who gave recognition to aboriginal communities. Indigenous languages are still used by aboriginal people, and mechanisms maintained by the state allow them to assert themselves as founding nations of Quebec.

In summary, we support this bill. It deals with a number of technical details, but where language rights are concerned, we feel that it is a good piece of legislation, particularly with respect to the right of the co-accused to be tried in the language of the minority, provided that it is one of the official languages. We also support the Liberal amendment that will see the judge presiding at the preliminary hearing or trial be put in charge of recognizing the rights of those appearing before him or her and having them recognized.

In addition, we condemn the Conservative government's insensitivity to minority communities. Hopefully, by the next election, the government will have had a burst of conscience and lucidity and restored the court challenges program.

Finally, I hope that the Minister of the Environment will rise and put a question to me.

Controlled Drugs and Substances Act

[Brian Murphy, Liberal, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to take this opportunity to say a few words about Bill C-26 and on the topic of justice, as this government sees it.

I must say I am very pleased to speak to this bill and this government's justice program, but, frankly, I have several concerns about this. Indeed, this government has introduced and will continue to introduce bills that do not work.

It gives me a great deal of anxiety to look at written laws that do not respond to what they are intended. I have some time to elaborate on that.

I listened to the bright and articulate Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice, who shares part of a county with me in terms of representation. Our people are not a world apart. It gives me a great deal of anxiety to hear him suggest, perhaps naively, that the bill would have its intended effect.

The government rolls out bills in front of blue plastic platforms and talks about the new government. Cabinet ministers are paraded around in ridings the Conservatives would like to hold, or hold onto slimly. They roll out justice bills in advance of discussing them with stakeholders, in advance of discussing them as a future agenda at the justice committee and in advance of having any real discussion about law reform with a law reform commission. Canadians would be interested to know that there is no law reform commission. There is no body that can discuss and promulgate laws that affect all of us, and which have the teeth they are intended to have.

The government can try to get a three minute spiel on the evening news, which it uses to tell Canadians that it will stop all drug production and send all producers to jail for longer terms. It feels this will end the problem. That is naive, which is better than saying it is devious. The Conservative government put bills before Parliament then prorogued Parliament so those bills never saw the light of day. It then reintroduces the same bills and new bills knowing they too will likely never see the light of day. It is almost devious. If I sat on the other side, I would probably know the big game plan, but to most reasonable people involved in criminal justice issues, including police forces, prosecutors, social workers, the Conservative justice program is intended to fail.

The Conservatives have been in office for two years now so they cannot claim to be the new government. If we had socks that old, we would not call them new socks. That is an old sock over there. The odour is pronounced. This says to me that the Conservatives have not really come to terms with how to make society safe.

There is one non-partisan point that binds all parliamentarians here. We all want safe communities. Try as it might, the Conservative government, the old sock government, wants to paint those of us in the opposition ranks as people who do not care about safety and society. Perhaps those things first motivated some of us to get into Parliament. I see mayors on this side of the House. I see people who have experience in emergency measures organizations, who have been involved on police commissions and who have headed police commissions. To suggest parliamentarians do not want to save society stinks like the old sock justice program that the Conservative government has introduced.

Those members do not mean what they say. A long time ago they had another one of those blue plastic background announcements with law enforcement officials at bay. They announced that they would create 2,500 new positions for police officers across Canada. They have not done that.

Most of the laws the Conservatives roll out require a certain amount of police presence, and that is an understatement. I can suggest that most of it, when it comes to the detection of drug manufacturing facilities, will require a significant outlay of police resources.

The hon. parliamentary secretary will know that in the Dieppe-Moncton-Riverview area, even before the RCMP took over the municipal force there, the joint forces operation for drug detection was up and running. It continues to run very well. It is like anything else and will be saddled with more duties under a law such as this, which will have well trained police officers wondering if the shoot of a marijuana plant in two places is two plants to get it over the 500 mark, or if it is one to get it under the 500 mark. These are problems of detection which have not been resourced. The government is not serious about its criminal justice agenda.

The other thing Canadians must know is what this law has in one part of it, and it might seem to be well-meaning. Again, I have nothing but the utmost respect for the parliamentary secretary over there. He probably thought, when he parsed the legislation on this law, he was protecting school areas and people who frequent public areas when he agreed to put his minister's pen to subclause (ii) of clause 1, which says that the mandatory minimum punishment of two years will apply if:

(A) the person committed the offence in or near a school, on or near school grounds or in or near any other public place usually frequented by persons under the age of 18 years,

If we all knew where everybody under the age of 18 years was at all times, there would be many happy parents, school superintendents and police forces. This is so vague as to fall on its face. I pray the able committee members at the justice committee, if and when the bill should be referred to the justice committee, can fix this. This goes to the point that in their rush to get in front of that blue plastic sign and give a moment of news release, the Conservatives did not yet again produce a proper law that we could look at and say with some satisfaction that the bill would change our society.

I have been a lawyer for some 20 years. I have been the mayor of a municipality. I know, as all members of the House do, that drug abuse is a problem in any western society. It is a problem in any world society. It is a problem with which many people are grappling. Parents are involved in grappling with these issues. Teachers, doctors, nurses and people from all walks of society, not only members of the justice committee who belong to the Conservative Party of Canada, are all involved in this. Why is there not more attention paid to consulting the stakeholders and coming up with bills that will work when it comes to drug abuse?

The whole other problem of treating the addict as a criminal has to be addressed. Unfortunately, because of the time involved, it cannot be done tonight.

Bill C-26 against controlled substances does not provide the balance needed to reduce crime, substance abuse and drug use, nor does it protect public health. The public health aspect is very important in this debate.

Instead of these commitments, and with no real bills, we are left with a strategy that comes from south of the border, the United States, one that mirrors the Bush administration's policies. Yet these same American policies are doing nothing but overcrowding American prisons.

This bill will lead us down the same path as the one chosen by the United States. There will be many more people in Canadian prisons, if this bill and other Conservative bills are passed and enacted in this country. However, this does nothing to resolve our country's drug problems.

There is no question that sentences are very important and they are an important part of the solution. I look forward at justice committee to hearing this evidence that serious sentences, mandatory minimums for drug use in particular, would have the effect of decreasing drug use and drug abuse, and decreasing crime as a concomitant of that. I am looking forward to those studies because I am afraid they do not exist.

Fighting crime with longer sentences does not work. If it did and there was insurmountable evidence of that, I get back to my premise that we are all interested in a safer community, a safer Canada. So if the evidence were overwhelming that mandatory minimums, longer sentences, longer prison time served actually would keep society safer, why would we not be for it?

In order to bring up good legislation through the process here in Parliament, we have to have evidence-based legislation. We have to show that if we pass this law, this will be the effect. We cannot just say it in front of the blue plastic sign in front of the TV cameras. Tougher penalties for people who produce and are trafficking in drugs will only scare the small time producers and organized crime will fill the gap.

The aspect of gangs and organized crime is something that every community in Canada has to grapple with again. There is no one piece solution to this, but this certainly is not it. As written, it would seem, and we will hear the evidence at committee, that there is a crackdown intended on many small-time, as the parliamentary secretary mentioned, on many small operations that can be put together with household materials and with common accessories for heating and containing liquids and powders.

However, no one is condoning small-time operations, but to crack down solely or to target mostly small-time producers, there is just going to be inevitably a gap. Unless we get to the issue of addictions and what we are going to do to deal with societal issues regarding addictions, the demand side of this equation is not going to be effective.

It seems that all republican, read this now as Conservative in this country, all republican dogma on the war on drugs is supply-based. Take out the supply and the problem is gone. Well, it did not work during prohibition in the 1920s and 1930s. If we take out the supply, that is just a layer of the supply. There will always be a supply if there is a demand.

I am sounding like a raving capitalist and I apologize to my Conservative friends for that, but supply and demand is very much at issue here. What should be tackled is the demand side. How do we make it so that there would be no more demand for crystal meth? How do we make it so that a teenager at a party is not given a date rape drug? Because we do not want anyone to use it, we have to attack the demand for the drugs. There is nothing in the bill that talks about that whatsoever.

Eugene Oscapella, a criminal lawyer who teaches drug policy, would be one of the experts who would come to a committee and give evidence. When we ask the minister questions on the first day of the committee hearings, we will be assured that he is contacted and spoken to because a recognized expert in drug policy living right here in Ottawa would certainly be someone that the minister or the parliamentary secretary or someone from the blue plastic old sock gang should probably get to see. He would say organized crime does not care about the law. With the changes to the law as proposed, the government is doing a service for organized crime.

Would that not be awful, that a government in Canada would actually benefit organized crime? It is certainly not what is intended. I will give my colleagues on the other side the benefit of the doubt. They cannot intend this, but by bringing forth such poor legislation it may very well be the effect of this.

The bill needs to reflect a balanced response to substance abuse and drug addiction which includes of course prevention treatment, enforcement and harm reduction measures.

Did I mention that 2,500 police officers and 1,000 RCMP officers in total were promised by the government and not delivered upon? When one makes a promise to fund something, all one has to do is pass a budget. I believe the government has passed two and things called mini-budgets. So, it has had the opportunity.

Prorogation and blue plastic background in announcements could not have interfered with the ability of the finance minister, if the Minister of Public Safety and the Minister of Justice really wanted, to put the money behind where the talk was to make sure that there would be 3,500 more police officers on the streets now or in this case, in the bushes of parts of this country where grow-ops are taking place.

Now, there is no one in the bushes of the places where these grow operations are taking place. Has the government walked the walk? No. It just talks the talk.

On mandatory minimum sentences for drug offences, we have had a lot of evidence during the hearings on billsC-9 and C-10 but Bill C-10 in particular with respect to mandatory minimums. Again, if they worked, we would be all for them.

There have been mandatory minimums in certain situations where it has proven that they acted as a deterrent for the institution of criminal acts. However, do we really think that by taking people, for instance at the lower end of the chain, who are making drugs in their kitchen and are using drugs in their home, and that by going to prison alone is going to stop the production of that drug in total or help those people to become meaningful members of society?

What does it do for the addiction issue? Where is the extra funding which would have to come to Correctional Service Canada, to the parole officers across the country, to the correctional services officers across the country, and to the various attorneys general in the provinces across the country who will need funding for all of their officers who supervise probation orders and conditional sentences? Where is all of the money to back up these laws?

Instead, we have a stack of laws, many of which were not intended to pass, many of which were killed by prorogation, and many of which show that the government is not interested in getting tough on crime or tackling crime. It is interested in tackling the airwaves.

What can we do to get us out of this mess? We can actually put politics aside, talk about a safe society, put our money where our mouth is, and send the bill to committee to see what can be done about reducing the number of harmful grow operations, which if not detected would destroy our society.

What about discussing how much resourcing this bill will need? What about getting rid of silly definitions that parse between 500 and 501 plants and at or near a public place where young people are headed? What about working on the bill together and what about actually having an act which will do what it says, which is to amend the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act and make consequential amendments which will make our society safer? We are all for a safer community. Let us work toward getting there.

Justice

[Rob Nicholson, Conservative, Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to know why the NDP is so soft on violent criminals in this country. We have a full agenda, and that is right, the NDP helped gut Bill C-9, the conditional sentencing act.

We have a full agenda before Parliament right now and I hope the NDP sees the error of its ways and gets behind all of it.

Tackling Violent Crime Act

[Larry Bagnell, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

Mr. Speaker, last week in Ottawa there was a great restorative justice session where the victims and the offender came together and said that it was a great improvement and that it was moving forward. The police chief said that the present system had failed and that there was a 70% failure rate in the present system in diversion and rehabilitation and a 35% to 42% failure with the circles.

We are finally getting some success and what do we get in Parliament? We get Bill C-9, which tries to take away those success stories.

[Larry Bagnell, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

Mr. Speaker, I am happy to speak to this bill. It is a bill that has a number of problems as well as a number of positive elements. I want to take us through this kind of bizarre situation where we are being forced to accept the bad in order to get the good. That is the problem with an omnibus bill. If a whole bunch of things are put into legislation, we have to take the bad with the good.

It is even more bizarre in this particular situation when the government has threatened that it is a confidence motion. Canadians being told that they have to accept this bill with all the bad in it or there will be an election even if they do not want one.

I am going to go through the problematic parts of the bill as well as the good parts and explain how, in spite of our efforts to get a number of provisions through that could have been law by now, they have been held up a number of times by the Conservatives.

This bill is a compilation of five old bills. I will go through each of the particular clauses of the bill and mention some of the good and bad parts.

I will start with Bill C-27, which is really the only part of the bill that had not been through the House before. The rest could have been law now had the Conservatives not used the mechanisms they did in proroguing the House and in not bringing back the rest of the bills at the stages they were in Parliament.

The minister suggested today in committee that he was concerned or upset about the problems I had with this part of the bill. Of course, the problems came from concerns that experts had with Bill C-27. The minister should be concerned. When he brings forward a bill that many experts say has a very high probability of being unconstitutional, he should be concerned.

Let us look at the parts of the bill the experts were talking about. First, they suggested it could possibly be unconstitutional as related to section 7 of the charter. Under the old system, there were four reasons, I think, which my colleague brought up today, whereby a person could be declared a dangerous offender. Under the old system, the Crown or the prosecutor would say for which of the four reasons one would be a dangerous offender.

Now, under the reverse onus, they say people are guilty until they prove why they should not be categorized as dangerous offenders, but they do not specify which of the four items they mean. In spite of my colleague's efforts to get this into the bill, there is no explanation as to which of the four items the prosecutor or the Crown thinks makes a person a dangerous offender. It is like putting the onus on people to defend themselves when they do not know what the charge is or what the reason is or what they have to defend themselves against.

The other item in this particular part of the bill that the expert said contradicted a number of points government members were making is that the government says this is only for the most vicious of vicious criminals, only for the most dangerous offenders, but the expert legal witnesses once again outlined how the offences in the bill could easily lead to people who are not the most dangerous of dangerous offenders being caught in this particular mechanism inappropriately.

The third problem, which was not brought up specifically that I can remember, although I am not sure if it was brought up by the experts, is the whole philosophy of proportionality in the justice system. According to the theory or principle of proportionality, the penalty should match the crime in severity. It should be a reasonable match. If, under the mechanisms I just mentioned, people are given a life sentence for what are not the most serious offences, there would certainly be a good chance of going against that principle.

When we talk about taking away people's liberty for the rest of their lives, it is a very serious matter. If Parliament has erred in that area, I recommend that the courts look at that aspect of cases. Indeed, many of the legal expert witnesses said that would actually be the case.

I also said I would talk about some of the good elements in this section. There is a clause whereby the Crown has to say in court whether it will proceed with a dangerous offender hearing. There actually was an amendment from the NDP. I did not quite understand why that would be taken out, because I thought it was a good element in this part of the law. It would stop someone from falling through the cracks. It stops a procedural missing of that opportunity. The prosecutors have to say whether or not under the evidence they are going to proceed. Certainly when there is a potentially dangerous offender we would not want the opportunity to fall between the cracks.

Let us go on to the second element that is pushed into this huge omnibus bill: mandatory minimums. Of course we have supported some mandatory minimums, but certainly not to the degree that is in the bill. Once again, expert after expert came to the committee and showed how mandatory minimums, under certain extreme circumstances, indeed could easily make Canada a more dangerous place, not a safer place. We would have criminals who are learning from other criminals. They are less adjusted. Of course people always forget that virtually all of them come back to society so in essence we would be making Canada a more dangerous place.

That was not just evidence during committee. Let me repeat what was in the Ottawa Citizen today to corroborate that. The article states:

Most legal experts agree with retired judge John Gomery's criticism of new mandatory minimum sentences being proposed by the...government, calling them simplistic and likely to produce unjust outcomes.

Also, in the same article, Ed Ratushny, law professor at the University of Ottawa, called the growing reliance on mandatory minimums to fight crime “simplistic and naive”.

In the same article, William Trudell, head of the Canadian Council of Criminal Defence Lawyers, said, “What it says is, 'we don't trust you, judge'.”

In the same article, David Paciocco, a former crown prosecutor, said that apart from the human misery they impose, mandatory minimum sentences generate huge costs for taxpayers.

Once again the government seems to be ignoring any sense of respect for the committee process. I have never seen such a barrage of complaints against bills as there was against Bill C-10 and Bill C-9 , yet where were the amendments from the government? They were non-existent in terms of trying to bring in a just law based on the knowledge that we received at the committee stage.

Once again I will talk about the good parts in that old Bill C-10. There were new offences. One was an indictable offence for breaking and entering to steal firearms. There was an indictable offence for robbery to steal a firearm. We certainly agree with those two, but the mandatory minimums were pushed through in the last Parliament by the Conservatives with the help of the New Democratic Party and were certainly in excess of what we believed was appropriate.

Going to the third of the five bills included in this new version, it was Bill C-22, which would increase the age of consent from 14 to 16. It is another example of a bill that had passed the House already. The delay was incomprehensible to us. Parliamentarians wanted to get it through. Why did the Conservatives, either the justice minister and/or the House leader, delay the bill on three different occasions? On October 26, we offered to fast track seven different bills, I think, including this bill. Yet the bill was debated at second reading on October 30 of that year and did not go to committee until March 11, which was 11 weeks later. The government totally ignored our offer of fast tracking.

The second time, the government delayed the age of consent bill by proroguing Parliament. I do not know if there has been a time in history when justice was set back so far by a prorogation of Parliament. Which department had more bills stopped when Parliament was prorogued, more than any other department? It was the justice department. What a way for the government to slow down its own agenda needlessly.

Some of these bills are those that the minister kept saying today in committee he so wanted to get through quickly. Then he prorogued Parliament. Once again, a number of those bills easily could have been through by this time.

The third time the Conservatives delayed the age of consent bill by not reinstating it. It had already been through the House. It could have been reinstated to where it was instead of going back to square one and being thrown into an omnibus bill with problems from other bills that had not yet been debated, particularly Bill C-27. That component of it could actually have slowed down and sabotaged something that people wanted to get through Parliament.

Finally, in what seemed to be even a fourth method of trying to stall the age of consent bill, the Conservatives started suggesting that a lot of bills would be confidence motions. Fortunately they have withdrawn this, I think. So they were trying to find some way of getting an election, when once again all the bills on the order paper would die and we would lose the age of consent bill.

I want to go now to the fourth part of this bill. It is related to impaired driving. This is another bill that has already gone through committee. Again, it could have been reinstated. After a prorogation of Parliament, bills can be brought back with the consent of Parliament to the stages where they were, so four of these bills could have been brought back in far more advanced forms. Some of them could have been through now.

Of course they would have been through if we had not prorogued Parliament and if the Conservatives had not slowed down the process, but the Conservatives could have brought these bills along faster and put them through instead of putting them into a huge bill where any one of a number of things could slow them down.

It was the committee's duty to spend time in committee and call witnesses to go over the items that they had not yet dealt with in those parts of the bills, particularly Bill C-27, which had not been through committee yet, and of course it was good to do that because of the very serious reservations that were raised in committee during those hearings.

Once again, I would highlight some of the good parts of the old bills. In this one, the impaired driving bill, one of the good parts is that it will make it easier to catch people who are impaired not only by alcohol but by drugs. We are making advances in making the streets safer by being able to have a mechanism for detecting and keeping off the roads people who impair themselves by the use of drugs. As members know, we already do that in relation to alcohol.

However, once again there is a questionable part in that section. In trying to close a loophole, the government added a section which suggests that only scientifically valid defences can be used as evidence. At what other time would a person go to court and only be allowed to use scientifically valid defences? When people go to court, they hear all sorts of witnesses on various things, and now the government is limiting their defences in this particular bill to only scientifically valid defences.

We also heard some disturbing testimony about the occasional lack of rigorous maintenance of machines used to determine abuse and about there being no regular schedules and no independent evaluation, all of which brought up concerns that should be dealt with by committee.

Members can see, with the number of concerns that I have talked about so far, and I have only done four of the five sections, that there are a number of major concerns. People's rights could be taken away. Constitutional rights could be abrogated. People could not bring evidence forward because it would be prohibited by a section of this bill.

This is a major undertaking so it is very important that the committee does its work and is not rushed, yet when I asked the justice minister this morning whether he believed in the committee process where we bring forward witnesses and then make some changes, he assented and said that he did believe in the committee process.

However, last week when the youth justice bill was in committee for one day the House leader complained that opposition parties were stonewalling. There was only one day for the committee to hear from all the witnesses, the minister, and departmental officials.

This particular bill is going to affect youth and the public in very serious ways. The Nunn commission did a comprehensive review of the bill and made a number of recommendations. The government took only one and then added something that did not come from that report at all and will totally change the way youth are sentenced.

Did the House leader expect one day of committee debate to be sufficient? When he was asked about this, he said it may not have been sufficient, but he would know on the quality of the debate. That is pretty weak.

The government House leader did not put in the bill the recommendation of the Nunn commission regarding the protection of the public to sentencing. One would think that victims in Canada would want to be protected. The public wants to be protected. A major recommendation was left out of the youth justice act, and yet the government House leader thought it was so simple that it only required one day of committee debate.

All parties in the House have to deal with the serious situation of the serious omissions and the things that have been put into this legislation without any rationale. We will find out from the witnesses their concerns about that.

Old Bill C-35, which dealt with reverse onus for bail and firearms, has been incorporated into this omnibus bill. Liberal members agree with this. We have been trying to rush it through. It could have been through a lot faster. Problems were raised in committee. There is the potential charter issue again about reverse onus.

In Canada, the general philosophy is that one is innocent until proven guilty. There are an uneasy number of provisions, as Bloc Québécois members mentioned this afternoon, where the onus is being reversed. The Conservatives are saying to Canadians that one is guilty unless proven innocent.

What do the experts have to say about reverse onus? What do the experts have to say about making this serious abrogation of a fundamental principle of Canadian law?

The experts have said that this reverse onus is not needed because it is going to make very little difference. This section has serious consequences. For the serious offences listed, where individuals would be denied bail, they are already being denied bail in the court system. This part of the bill would have little effect.

Liberal members have a number of problems with Bill C-2, but we do support its good elements. We certainly have problems with the way the Conservatives have forced bad things on Canadians by putting all the old bills into one omnibus bill.

We have problems with the Conservatives saying that we have to accept this bill, including the bad parts, or there will be an election. That is not a good way to develop policy. That is not a good way to get the trust of Canadians. Not allowing any amendments and not allowing any changes after having heard from knowledgeable experts is not a good way to develop legislation.