Bill C-2 (Historical)

Tackling Violent Crime Act

An Act to amend the Criminal Code and to make consequential amendments to other Acts

This enactment amends the Criminal Code by
(a) creating two new firearm offences and providing escalating mandatory sentences of imprisonment for serious firearm offences;
(b) strengthening the bail provisions for those accused of serious offences involving firearms and other regulated weapons;
(c) providing for more effective sentencing and monitoring of dangerous and high-risk offenders;
(d) introducing a new regime for the detection and investigation of drug impaired driving and strengthening the penalties for impaired driving; and
(e) raising the age of consent for sexual activity from 14 to 16 years.

Tackling Violent Crime Act

[Loyola Hearn, Conservative, St. John's South—Mount Pearl, NL]

moved that Bill C-2, An Act to amend the Criminal Code and to make consequential amendments to other Acts, be read the third time and passed.

[Rob Moore, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada]

Mr. Speaker, I will be keeping my remarks shorter than my allotted time for the simple reason that Canadians have already witnessed what took place in the preceding time.

The bill we are debating passed last night by a vote of over 200 to 1 and yet today the Bloc is delaying passage at third reading. I implore all members of the House to ensure a speedy passage of our government's tackling violent crime act.

There is no greater responsibility for us as parliamentarians and for the Canadian government than to protect the most vulnerable in society. Canadians from coast to coast and probably in all of our ridings have demanded changes to the criminal justice system to better protect victims, to better protect innocent Canadians and to better protect all of us from criminals, those who prey on other individuals, which is why we introduced Bill C-2, the tackling violent crime act.

This bill has been thoroughly reviewed by a committee. It is made up of five different components, most of which were thoroughly considered in the last Parliament and, in this Parliament, the bill was thoroughly considered by a committee and voted on by this House.

The bill tackles the dangerous offender provisions in that it would make our streets safer from those who are the most serious offenders, those who have shown an appetite for repeat violent offences, for recidivism, the very worst of the worst offenders of a violent or a sexual nature.

The bill also addresses gun crimes, bringing in mandatory minimum sentences for those who, in the most serious of cases, use a firearm to commit an offence. I think we should all agree that we need to send a clear message and take seriously gun crimes. Canadians are telling us to do this.

Another component of the bill that we have been hearing from coast to coast in cities across Canada is reverse onus on bail for those who are charged with a gun crime. Too often a serious crime is committed with a firearm and the person is out on the street in a very short period of time awaiting trial. In many cases, the person finds a victim at the local convenience store. Obviously, that shocks the victim and it should shock all of us. We need a reverse onus on bail for gun crimes.

We need to give our police the tools they need to tackle impaired driving, drug impaired driving and to use new technologies to the greatest benefit possible to make our streets safer.

It is also important that we raise the age of protection. It is unbelievable that this was not done over a decade ago. The previous Liberal government always refused to raise the age of protection even though victims' groups and child advocacy groups implored the Liberals to do so in order to protect children. This bill takes action. This bill does so.

Our constituents are asking us to take these measures without delay to make Canadian streets safer. I am asking all parliamentarians to look at the record of what has been done and look at the work that has gone into this bill, the tackling violent crime act. I ask each member to consider the safety of our streets, our communities and our children and to pass this bill as quickly as possible from this place. I also ask the senators to not allow, as we saw in the last Parliament, our criminal justice legislation to be bogged down in the Senate but to allow for a quick study and quick passage of what is a very important bill that is long overdue.

[Keith Martin, Liberal, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague from the other side said that the bill was bogged down in the Senate. I just want to set the record straight. Of the six bills that were not passed by the summer break, four reached the Senate but only in May, and two reached the Senate in June. It was impossible for the Senate to pass the bills in a matter of a couple of weeks at the most.

Therefore, It is really not correct to say that these bills were held up in the Senate. The member's government prorogued Parliament and the Senate did not have any time to deal with these bills.

Would the hon. member agree that the record shows that of the six bills the government had on justice in the last Parliament, four went to the Senate but only at the end of the session and that his government prorogued Parliament?

[Rob Moore, Conservative, Fundy Royal, NB]

Mr. Speaker, what I will confirm for the hon. member is what we all saw, even in this House, where our Prime Minister and our justice minister called on the leader of his party, the leader of the Liberal Party, to encourage senators to stop delaying our criminal justice legislation.

It is a matter for the public to see. The public can see the Debates of the Senate just as they can our Debates. They know that these various bills and previous criminal justice bills were delayed in the Senate for literally hundreds of days, away from the eyes of Canadians and away from the debate that takes place in this House which is the most accessible to everyday Canadians.

Canadians are sometimes under the misconception that when a bill passes the House of Commons then it becomes law but in fact it does not. It goes to the Senate, which is where the leader of the Liberal Party refused to, or was unable to, encourage Liberal senators to give swift consideration and passage of the criminal justice legislation.

It brings into question a broader issue. It is not only acting swiftly now but why now? Why is it that over the last decade action was not taken to get tough on people who commit gun crimes? Why was action not taken in the face of pleas from city mayors and from provinces to introduce a reverse onus on bail? Why was there no action taken on raising the age of protection where Canada had a lower age of protection than other jurisdictions?

We do not know why the Liberal government that preceded us was so ineffective in addressing criminal justice issues. What we do know is that our government has been very aggressive. It has taken its clear direction and marching orders from the Canadian people who have said that they want to have a criminal justice system that works, that they want to get tougher on individuals who are recidivists and who are increasingly becoming the problem, that they want to provide opportunities for those who want to get out of a life of crime, and that they want to provide opportunities for those who are addicted to drugs or to alcohol. We are doing all those things. We are bringing in measures to the Criminal Code to update the code to better protect Canadians. I do not know who could possibly be against that.

The one thing Canadians are telling us to do is to get on with the work that we need to do, which is what I am hoping all members will do with the tackling violent crime act.

[Marc Lemay, Bloc, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I listened very carefully to the speech of the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice. I hope he will listen to me very carefully as well.

I have a problem with the bill. Yes, the Bloc Québécois will vote in favour of this bill. Nonetheless, two things bother me about it. Will the government address them?

My first point is this. Does the government realize that it is not by passing tougher laws with minimum sentences that we are going to reduce crime? Does the government realize that getting out of prison, not going to prison, is the problem? Convicts do not serve their entire sentence. That is the problem. Does this government realize that? Is this heading anywhere?

Since I do not have enough time to ask another question, I will go on to my second point, on former Bill C-32. The parliamentary secretary knows that I sat on the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights. As a criminal lawyer, I have one question: do we have the tools? In fact, does the department have the tools? Do the police have the tools to detect whether drivers are impaired by drugs? That is the problem with former bill C-32. Now, it is being lumped into Bill C-2. What is going to be done? Is there anything planned? Has anything been implemented or do we have to adopt the bill to see what happens?

I will close by saying that my primary concern is whether this government understands that getting out of prison, not going to prison, is the problem. Criminals are released too quickly. That is what people are complaining about.

[Rob Moore, Conservative, Fundy Royal, NB]

Mr. Speaker, I listened with interest to the hon. member's question. This has always struck me. In the last election campaign, the New Democratic Party, the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party called for an increase in mandatory minimum penalties for gun crimes. The parties said to the voters that if they elected them, they would bring in mandatory minimum penalties for those who committed a crime with a firearm.

In fact, the Liberal platform called for a doubling of the mandatory minimum penalties, which in some cases would have resulted in an eight year mandatory minimum penalty. However, Canadians have learned not to believe what they hear from the Liberals.

After the election, when we brought in a bill to bring in mandatory minimum penalties for gun crimes, all we received was obstruction and opposition from Liberals on what we had proposed. It was in effect an incremental change, moving from a four year minimum to a five year minimum on a repeat offence. Someone commits a crime with a firearm is caught by the police, is convicted in a court, is sentenced, serves some time, then gets out and commits another crime with a firearm. Who could argue that this individual should not receive a tougher sentence?

I will address the hon. member's other question dealing with drug recognizance experts. We have put it in place what is necessary for police officers to have the tools they require. Police asked us for the legislative measures contained in the bill.

[Ron Cannan, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for bringing forth Bill C-2, the tackling violent crime act. My constituents of Kelowna—Lake Country have specifically supported our position with regard to the age of consent to look after the youth in our community.

As a member of city council for nine years prior to being elected in January 2006 to the House, I know our mayor and council had sent several letters to the previous Liberal government, but it did not get the job done.

Why did the opposition not support it in the past and why is it stalled in the Liberal dominated Senate? The fact is the bill has been debated and we need to get it passed. Canadians have asked for it and the time has come.

[Rob Moore, Conservative, Fundy Royal, NB]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for his work on behalf of his constituents on justice issues.

On the issue of the age of protection, I cannot answer for the negligence of the members opposite over their 13 years in government for not passing legislation that would raise the age of protection so our most vulnerable, our children, would be protected from adult sexual predators.

We know that groups such as Beyond Borders and child exploitation groups are advocating for the protection of children. For years they have been calling on us to raise the age of protection. This bill does that. Let us get on with passing it.

[Keith Martin, Liberal, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

Mr. Speaker, before I begin to speak to Bill C-2, I have to address my hon. colleague's contradictory comments about the lack of mandatory minimums. On the one hand, he lambasted the Liberal Party for not wanting mandatory minimums. On the other hand, he said very clearly that we had them and we called for a strengthening of them.

When the member for Mount Royal was the justice minister, he introduced mandatory minimums for weapons offences. That was a good thing. That is why we support Bill C-2. We have been trying to drive forward much of what is in the legislation. Ironically, we have been obstructed by the government.

I will go through the facts. Unfortunately, in the House one could look at the old adage that “in war, truth is the first casualty”. What we have here is war by another name. Sometimes truth is the first casualty in the House of Commons, and that is sad for the public.

Let me talk about the facts for a minute and give viewers a bit of history on the bill.

Bill C-2 is an omnibus bill involving a combination of five bills, including mandatory minimum penalties. We support mandatory minimum penalties. I caution the government, however, to ensure that the mandatory minimum penalties for weapons offences, violent offences and sexual offences cannot be plea bargained away and that they run consecutively and not concurrently. Too many times people who have committed serious offences receive penalties that get plea bargained away, so there is no effective penalty.

We also support an increase in mandatory minimums for weapons trafficking. My colleague from Mount Royal introduced many mandatory minimums for these offences in the last Parliament.

The Liberal Party supports the provisions for dangerous offenders, impaired driving and reverse onus in firearms offences. Many years ago there really was no penalty for a person using a weapon in the commission of an offence. That was changed by the last government. The Liberal Party supports the changes in Bill C-2.

Let me talk for a few moments about a few facts around the passage of the bill.

On October 26, 2006, our Liberal leader made a first offer to fast track a package of justice bills in the House, including Bill C-9, as it had been amended, Bill C-18, the DNA identification legislation, Bill C-19, the street racing legislation, Bill C-22, the age of consent legislation, Bill C-23, the animal cruelty legislation and Bill C-26, respecting payday loans. We also added Bill C-35, on March 14 of this year, a bill for bail reform, and we support that.

On March 21, we attempted to use our opposition day to pass the government's four justice bills: Bill C-18, Bill C-22, Bill C-23 and Bill C-35. The Conservative House leader raised a procedural point of order to block the motion. Those four government bills would have been fast tracked through this place in the same day, yet the government House leader, for reasons unknown to us and the public, blocked this. Those are facts.

What has been the path of government justice bills through the Senate? Of the six justice bills that had been passed before the summer break, only four went to the Senate. How on earth could the Senate pass bills that it just received prior to the government proroguing Parliament? It could not do that. It is disingenuous for government members to stand and suggest that the Senate was trying to block their bills. By the time the Senate received the bills, the government closed Parliament. Those are the facts. Anybody can check them out if they wish.

We support Bill C-2. However, I want to bore down on a few dangerous issues that the government is pursuing. One deals with the issue of drug trafficking. The government has said that it will increase the penalties for those who traffic in drugs.

There are two populations of traffickers.

There are those parasites in society who are involved in commercial grow operations, frequently attached to organized crime. We should throw the book at them. Those people are a cancer in our society and they deserve to be in jail.

There is another population that will be swept up in the government's anti-trafficking bill. It is the low level dealers who sell small amounts of illegal drugs to people, but they themselves are addicts. In essence, they are selling drugs to pay for their addictions.

If we criminalize people who have addiction problems and throw them in jail, they come out being hardened criminals. We also do not deal with the underlying problem, which we will have at the end of the day when they come out. In effect, we increase public insecurity and costs to the taxpayer. We do not address the underlying problem and we make our streets less safe. That is stupid, not to put too fine a point on it.

If the government goes through with the bill to criminalize people who are addicts, the low level people buying and selling drugs, it will end up with the situation we see south of the border, which has used a war on drugs approach. It has proven to be an abysmal failure.

What we see south of the border is a view of the future for us if the government pursues its course of action. There have been increased rates of both soft and hard drugs use, increased numbers of people have been incarcerated, increased costs to the taxpayer and more violent crime. Society loses.

The government ought to work with the provinces to implement solutions that address some of the underlying problems.

I will get to the organized crime aspects in a moment.

For the drug problems, I cannot overemphasize what a disaster this will be. The government has been warned of this by people across the country.

Let us take two projects, in particular, that have been extremely effective in dealing with people who have intravenous drug use problems. Both of them are found in Vancouver and championed by Dr. Julio Montaner and Dr. Thomas Kerr, superb physicians and research scientists, who have underneath them the Insite supervised injection program and the NAOMI project.

The supervised injection program is a place where addicts can go to a supervised setting and take the drugs they are given. What has that done? It has reduced harm, put more people into treatment, reduced crime and saved the taxpayer money. Fewer people have gone to emergency and there has been less dependence on our health care system. It works.

The other project I would recommend we pursue is the NAOMI project. Before I get to it, I point out that in the eleventh hour the government extended Insite's ability to engage in its program up until June 2008.

All the evidence published from The Lancet to The New England Journal of Medicine shows, without a shadow of a doubt, that the Insite supervised injection program saves lives, reduces crime and gets people into treatment. It is good for public security and it saves the taxpayer money. Why extend it to only eight months?

If the government gets a majority, it will kill the program. That, in short, will be murder. The government knows full well the program saves lives. To remove that program, would result in, essentially, the killing of people.

A program that works better, which the government does not support but ought to expand, is the NAOMI project. The NAOMI project deals with hard-core narcotics abusers. These people are over the age of 26. They have had five years of drug addictions and two failed attempts at treatment. They are the hard nuts of intravenous drug use.

The NAOMI project took 243 addicts and randomized them into three populations. One population received intravenous heroine, the other one received intravenous dilaudid, which is a prescription narcotic that is legal, and the third was to take oral methadone, which is a weak narcotic.

What happened to those populations? Of the population on IV drugs, more than 85% of people were still taking those drugs, receiving treatment and counselling, getting their lives together, obtaining skills training and being able to live while not being on the street and not engaging in criminal behaviour to feed their addictions. Of the third population, the ones in the methadone program, 50% of people were still in treatment after a year. It works.

What the government should be doing for both Insite as well as NAOMI, is expanding those programs across our country. Our urban centres need it.

In Victoria there are 1,243 people living on the street, 60% of which have what we call dual diagnoses, which means some of them have both a drug problem and a psychiatric problem. I would also add that some people within that population have had brain injuries in the past and have fallen into the terrible spiral of drug use by being on the street. Those people could be you or I, Mr. Speaker, who one day fall off a ladder or get into a car accident, sustain a significant closed head injury, have major cerebral trauma and as a result their lives are affected forever.

Some of those people are on the street and take drugs. Do we throw those people in jail? Do we throw the psychiatric patient, who is dealing to pay for his or her addiction, in jail? That is what would happen with the bill that the government has introduced. Those people need medical treatment. They do not need to be in jail.

My plea to the government, to the Minister of Health, the Minister of Justice and the Prime Minister is to bury their ideology, follow the facts and implement the solutions that will help people with addictions, keep our streets safe, and reduce costs to the taxpayers. It is a win-win situation for all concerned.

The interesting thing about the NAOMI project is that because NAOMI actually gave the drug to an individual who was proven to be an addict, that person did not have to go on the street to get the drugs. If that were done in a broader sense, it would be horrific to organized crime that benefits from this situation because the NAOMI project severs the tie between the addict and organized crime. That is what we need to do.

Organized crime would be horrified if a forward thinking government one day were to enable drug addicts to receive their drugs. Doing that enables addicts to get into the treatment programs that they need. It enables them to detoxify, obtain addiction counselling, skills training and the psychiatric therapy they need. If we do not do that, we will not make a dent in what we see on the ground. There will not be any affect on addictions and it will actually increase the criminal population in our country.

The other side of this coin, of course, deals with organized crime gangs, as I mentioned, the parasites and cancer in our society. These parasites are essentially people in $3,000 suits who benefit from a substance that is nearly worthless but has a value well beyond what it ought to have because it is illegal.

I have a bill on the order paper that would decriminalize the simple possession of marijuana. No one condones anybody using marijuana, everybody wants to prevent people from using it, and everyone certainly encourages children not to use this or any other illegal drug. The fact of the matter is that people do use it and a significant percentage of Canadians have used it at one time in their lives, particularly when they were very young.

Do we throw those people in jail? Do we throw an 18-year-old who has a joint in his or her back pocket in jail? Do we throw an 18-year-old in jail who exchanges or sells or gives a couple of marijuana cigarettes to a friend? That would be trafficking under the government's bill. Do we throw that 18-year-old in jail? Do we give an 18-year-old a criminal record, which is what we have today, affecting his or her ability to work or gain employment and have access to professional facilities for the rest of his or her life? Is that a humane way to deal with our population? It is not.

The worst news for organized crime, in my personal view, would be that marijuana is legal and regulated. It is not to say that marijuana is safe. It is not. It is dangerous, but so are alcohol and cigarettes.

If we can imagine today that cigarettes were going to come onto the market and were proposed as being something that ought to be sold today, do we think for a moment that they would be allowed, with all the cancer, respiratory and cardiac problems that cigarettes cause? No, they would not be, and neither in fact would alcohol. Alcohol would not be allowed today either, for all of the damage it does, but the fact of the matter is that cigarettes and alcohol are legal today.

The groups that benefit the most from the status quo, from marijuana being illegal, and it is just a weed with its value elevated well beyond what it ought to be because it is illegal, are the organized crime gangs. They are making billions of dollars off the status quo, and those billions are used to do any number of things including: trafficking of weapons and people, prostitution, embezzlement, fraud and murder. That is what organized crime is involved with.

What the government should be doing is coming up with a more comprehensive plan to deal with the biker gangs and organized criminal gangs who are--

[The Acting Speaker, Andrew Scheer]

The hon. member for Selkirk--Interlake on a point of order.

[James Bezan, Conservative, Selkirk—Interlake, MB]

Mr. Speaker, we are debating Bill C-2. This is third reading where we should be specifically discussing the points of the bill. The member has just proven that he is filibustering and helping out the opposition parties in trying to delay the passage of Bill C-2. I ask that he gets back on topic and discusses the bill that is before us right now.

[The Acting Speaker, Andrew Scheer]

The hon. member for Selkirk--Interlake brings up a good point. I just requested a copy of Bill C-2. The member's remarks are dealing specifically with issues around illegal narcotics. I believe that is a different government bill that has been introduced, so I will just remind the hon. member for Esquimalt--Juan de Fuca to keep his remarks confined to Bill C-2 which is before us.

[Keith Martin, Liberal, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. For my friend's information, if I were going to be filibustering, I would be using more than 20 minutes, but I have 20 minutes and he can certainly ask questions after that.

However, these issues are extremely important because this bill has to do with tackling violent crime. The relevance to what I am saying is that organized crime is actually a purveyor of an awful lot of violent crime in our country. What the member should do, with his government, is to work with us in developing a comprehensive plan to deal with organized crime. It is the real parasite in our society that we have to address.

In dealing with this, I also want to talk about a drug policy that works because it is attached to organized crime and putting up posters, as the government wants to do, is not going to affect change.

I can tell members, from working in many clinics where violence and drug use is endemic, that simply putting up posters on clinic walls or in communities is not going to stop people from taking drugs.

What works? I have said probably 100 times in the House that if the government wanted to prevent drug use and reduce youth crime, as an example, it would support the headstart program for children.

The headstart program for children is something the police have asked for. It is essentially a program where children and parents come together in a classroom once every week for a couple of hours to talk about the harm of drugs, the harm of alcohol, and to talk about literacy, and about proper eating and proper parenting. All of that can be done and should be done. The headstart program for children would save the taxpayers $7 for every dollar invested and reduce youth crime by 60%.

I implore the government to adopt the headstart program, have a rational drug policy, listen to the scientists, follow the facts and bury its ideology, and we will have a safer country for all.

[Ron Cannan, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I want to clarify a question that I asked my colleague earlier. As I mentioned, when I was spending nine years at city council pushing for the age of protection legislation, our mayor and council wrote several letters to the previous government. The member had commented about us being disingenuous.

I am wondering as the member had said he supported and always wanted to get this legislation changed. He had 13 years to get it done. Could the hon. member answer why he did not change the legislation, if he was so passionate about this in his government?

[Keith Martin, Liberal, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I was only in the previous government. I cannot answer for governments before that, but I can certainly speak about the evidence. The evidence shows that, in the bills that we have and I will go back to my previous comments, on the age of consent, on October 26, 2006, we pushed the existing government and offered to fast-track the age of consent legislation. At that time it was Bill C-22 but the government refused to do that. The government can answer that question as to why it did not push that forward over a year ago and allow it to go at that time.

[Réal Ménard, Bloc, Hochelaga, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am glad to take part in this third reading stage of Bill C-2. I would like, perhaps, to correct a number of perceptions that the government has done nothing to discourage in recent days concerning the work of the opposition.

First, we know that the Bloc Québécois supports Bill C-2. In fact, if my information is correct, I believe that our support is unanimous. I do not imagine that any of our colleagues will be defecting. However, we know that friendship is a fragile thing that we must always work to preserve.

I said that the Bloc Québécois supported Bill C-2. Any kind of offence could make even a man over 40 wish for young offender status.

In a more serious vein, we were presented with a number of bills. Of 12 bills that the government introduced since coming into office, six received royal assent, four made their way to the Senate and the remaining two were to be examined in committee. Naturally we had reservations about the dangerous offenders’ bill, which is a serious bill and I will come back to it. We still have those reservations. There was also Bill C-32 on impaired driving.

When the government suggests that the opposition did not work diligently, some explanation is in order. When a party has been in government for two years—not quite two years even—and you have succeeded in obtaining royal assent for six bills, when half of your legislative agenda has been adopted, I think the government’s criticism is not well founded. The Bloc Québécois has worked very hard in the Committee on Justice and Human Rights and the Committee on Public Safety and National Security. We will continue to work hard in the future.

I know that the member for Abitibi—Témiscamingue will be speaking about this in a few minutes, but there is a problem of philosophy. For a democrat—let me put it the way René Lévesque did—the end cannot justify the means. Even if we know that judicial practice in our courts should be changed, my colleague for Abitibi—Témiscamingue will agree with me that when a person is held in detention before trial, for example, and they want to subtract two days from any sentence for each day in detention, there is perhaps something that we need to look at.

If the member for Marc-Aurèle-Fortin were with us today, he would join with me in recognizing that the government should have made tackling the parole system a priority. This is an area where the support of the member for Abitibi—Témiscamingue is very firm, very strong, and not negotiable. You can be sure that I take comfort in this.

So I was talking about the question of sentencing, about release after one-sixth of the sentence. If a judge in a court of law, with defence counsel, Crown counsel and a jury as provided under the Criminal Code, has imposed a sentence, it seems that allowing the accused to be released after one-sixth of the sentence is very soon. There are philosophical questions that concern us, that cry out for answers. We are not prepared to accept everything in Bill C-2.

Generally speaking, I think we must remember that crime is dropping. There was an increase in crime in the 1960s and 1970s, both property crime and crimes against the person. This continued until the 1990s, with small variations. After that, crime has fallen. There have been peaks, for example in 1994, 1995 and 1996, when we had the whole phenomenon of organized crime. Some of my colleagues may recall this.

In fact, I owe this to history. To be truthful, I must point out that the Bloc Québécois was the first to call for anti-gang legislation. I recall very clearly having discussions with senior officials who wanted to dismantle the organized crime rings. At that point, there were 38 criminal biker gangs known to law enforcement agencies. The main one was the Hell’s Angels. The obvious face of organized crime in our communities was the Hell’s Angels.

Some senior officials wanted to dismantle the organized crime rings using the conspiracy provisions. The member for Abitibi—Témiscamingue will recall that this was section 476 of the Criminal Code, if memory serves me.

Obviously, in the Bloc Québécois, we were convinced that this was not possible. Why? Take the example of Maurice “Mom” Boucher. While he gave the orders, he was not the one who carried them out. There was a gap in the chain of command that meant that it was extremely difficult to lay charges against the organized crime kingpins, even though the people responsible for surveillance techniques, even though the law enforcement agencies, the Montreal police service, the Criminal Intelligence Service Canada and the RCMP, were able to identify who the kingpins of those criminal organizations were.

It was the Bloc Québécois, through the wisdom it has always had—wisdom that is perhaps not innate, because it took a lot of work to gain it—speaking in the voice you are listening to now, that took action to deal with this. The member for Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles also worked very hard on it, as did the member for Berthier—Montcalm. I think I can bring back fond memories in this House if I mention the name of Michel Bellehumeur. He was appointed to the bench because of his personal talent and his intellectual breadth. The member for Berthier—Montcalm had all the qualifications needed to be appointed to the bench, and today he is a judge of the Court of Québec, Criminal Division.

[An hon. member]

Youth Division.

[Réal Ménard, Bloc, Hochelaga, QC]

Youth court. I should have remembered him because of his baby face.

When Justice Bellehumeur was a member of the Bloc Québécois, he was particularly enterprising with regard to the provisions of the anti-gang legislation. He had support in caucus and we convinced the government. We started this battle in 1995 following a very sad incident that I will not forget as long as I live—the car bomb attack that led to the death of young Daniel Desrochers in the Hochelaga—Maisonneuve area.

It was at that point that the public took notice that the existing legislation did not have the teeth to attack organized crime. We were presented with a bill that created the new offence of gangsterism. It was too general. In fact, at the time, it required five individuals who, in the previous five years, had committed an offence carrying a sentence of more than five years. It was the three fives rule. It was too general and the police asked us to review the anti-gang law.

The first Bill C-95 was introduced in 1997 as a result of the Bloc Québécois' hard work. The provisions of the anti-gang law were revisited by Bill C-24 and Bill C-36. It was also the Bloc Québécois that worked on taking $1,000 bills out of circulation, thanks to the efforts of my colleague for Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, Richard Marceau. This man has been a great inspiration in justice matters. He stands out in other areas as well, but in justice he has been a true inspiration.

Once again, it was the Bloc Québécois that introduced and ensured the adoption, on the last day of the 2004 parliamentary session, of a bill on reverse onus. The member for Abitibi—Témiscamingue likes bills that address specific issues and distrusts those that are generic.

The bill was very specific because it reversed the onus of proof for proceeds of crime acquired by criminal organizations.

When I hear the Minister of Justice showing a lack of respect by saying that the Bloc Québécois used stalling tactics, I do not see how that applies to me, and I am sure the other Bloc members feel the same way. It is the role of the opposition to keep pushing the government to be better. Obviously, every member of the Bloc leaves Parliament at the end of the day feeling exhausted, since there is so much work to do.

That said, crime is not on the rise; in general, it is going down. I think it would be ill-advised to hold a debate that does not take that fact into account. The Bloc Québécois has always been very concerned about mandatory minimum penalties.

Sure, they have always existed in the Criminal Code. But when we passed the bill to establish the firearms registry, back when Allan Rock was minister, we also decided to add 40 or so mandatory minimum penalties for offences involving firearms.

The hon. member for Berthier—Montcalm, with his characteristic insight, already had very serious reservations at the time. He relied on studies by criminologists, particularly at the University of Toronto, who concluded that there is no link between the availability of mandatory minimum sentences in the Criminal Code and the crime rate in a society, any more than there is a link between the incarceration rate and the crime rate in a society.

Consider, for example, the United States. The incarceration rate there is three times higher than Canada's, but the crime rate is seven times higher. Thus, it is not through reliance on incarceration that we will have a safer society.

Of course, the Bloc Québécois recognizes that incarceration must be used in certain situations. This is why we do not question the need to have certain provisions in the Criminal Code, such as section 753, which talks about dangerous offenders. A very serious offence must be involved in order for an individual to be a dangerous offender. An offender must be convicted of personal injury offences. An offender must present such a high a risk of recidivism that the court must be convinced that the person cannot control himself or herself or has difficulty controlling his or her impulses.

Regarding dangerous offenders, the older people among us—including some members of my caucus—will recall that, in the 1950s, they were referred to as “habitual criminals”. Perhaps some members remember this? Even my mother used this expression, although never about her own children.

I think I am out of time, but I would like to be able to start over again after question period.

[The Acting Speaker, Andrew Scheer]

The hon. member for Hochelaga will have six minutes left at the end of oral question period to finish his speech.

We will now proceed to statements by members.

The House resumed consideration of the motion that Bill C-2, An Act to amend the Criminal Code and to make consequential amendments to other Acts, be read the third time and passed.

[The Speaker, Peter Milliken]

Order, please.

Before question period, the hon. member for Hochelaga had the floor, and he has six minutes left to wrap up his statement.

The hon. member for Hochelaga.

[Réal Ménard, Bloc, Hochelaga, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I was sure you would remember.

I am pleased to have this opportunity to finish my speech. I was about to explain that the government lumped together the five justice bills it had introduced previously to produce the new Bill C-2, which the parliamentary committee studied very thoroughly.

As I said, even though the Bloc supports Bill C-2, we wanted to make a few changes. Before I was interrupted by question period, I told the House that the Bloc Québécois has, in the past, expressed significant reservations about imposing mandatory minimum sentences.

Bloc Québécois members have long argued that this is not an effective way to fight poverty. We are convinced that we must instead provide police with the means to conclude investigations. The issue here is more the effectiveness of legislation and the fear it inspires. We believe that some offenders, some people who might find themselves on the wrong side of the law, will be deterred more by the possibility of going to court than by the mandatory minimum sentences they could receive. In fact, the witnesses we heard in committee explained that people do not necessarily read the Criminal Code before they commit an offence. That is why, historically, we have been extremely wary of mandatory minimum sentences.

We also analyzed the whole issue of the age of consent, which has now become the age of protection. My colleague from Châteauguay—Saint-Constant was responsible for this issue. Very early in this debate, the leader of the Bloc Québécois and member for Laurier—Sainte-Marie, in cooperation with his caucus, wanted to include a close in age clause to make sure school-aged children engaging in non-exploitative sexual activity would not be liable to be arrested.

We also looked at the whole issue of reverse onus, not at the trial stage, but at the judicial interim release stage, as provided for in section 515 of the Criminal Code. The government was proposing reverse onus, which we were told was already common practice. In fact, according to the experts who came to talk to us in committee, people who committed offences involving firearms were not subject to release at the hearing stage.

Naturally, when we studied Bill C-2 in committee, we examined the whole issue of impaired driving. I am not talking about a particular departmental policy here, but about Bill C-2, which introduces three main innovations.

The bill will make it mandatory to stop and submit to tests. Previously, this was optional under the Criminal Code. There will be two main types of tests. An individual may first undergo standard field sobriety tests at the roadside. Then, he or she may be examined at the police station by a drug recognition expert. We were told that this practice existed in some American states and that some people in Quebec had even received this training.

Of course, we are not minimizing the seriousness of impaired driving. Just this morning, the Bloc Québécois lent its support—enlightened support, I might add—to a motion introduced by the parliamentary secretary to study a number of important issues, because we know our fellow citizens are worried about them.

Indeed, the bill that raised the most questions for us, even though we support Bill C-2, was the bill dealing with reverse onus for dangerous offenders.

As we all know, the Criminal Code has had provisions concerning dangerous offenders since 1947. Our seniors, for instance, sometimes used the expression “habitual criminal”. My mother said that, although never in reference to any of her own children, of course. But she talked about habitual criminals in general terms. I was able to make a link between that expression, which has passed on to the vocabulary of another generation, and a provision in the Criminal Code.

We had some questions. Of course, in matters of law, a reverse onus of proof is always very serious. The main offences are: weapons trafficking, possession of a firearm, unauthorized import and export, discharging a firearm, attempted murder, sexual assault with a weapon, aggravated sexual assault with a weapon, kidnapping, hostage taking, robbery committed with violence and a weapon and extortion.

It seems I am out of time. Mr. Speaker, I would like to ask for the consent of the House to continue speaking for another five minutes. I would then be able to deliver my conclusion.

[The Speaker, Peter Milliken]

Do we have unanimous consent to allow the hon. member to continue his comments for another five minutes?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

[The Speaker, Peter Milliken]

The hon. member for another five minutes.

[Réal Ménard, Bloc, Hochelaga, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. You are too kind. I get the impression that there are some people who like me. That is very kind. I want to thank my colleagues.

In the Bloc Québécois, we have looked closely at the primary offences and assessed their gravity. We are not taking this lightly and we have asked ourselves questions about the reverse onus of proof. This means that when someone commits two offences on this list and then commits a third offence—which is cause for concern—they will have to explain why they should not be designated a dangerous offender.

The Crown is never required in court to present a dangerous offender designation. It must inform the prosecutor—because this requires the prosecutor's consent—and the court whether or not it intends to present a designation in dangerous cases or not.

The committee was informed that this could require a great deal of work in terms of the evidence and physically assembling the file. We were even given the figure of 300 hours for the Crown and 300 hours for the defence, for a grand total of 600 hours.

I would like to add as well that there are already some provisions in the Criminal Code that involve reverse onus of proof. For example, if someone is sitting in the driver’s seat and an offence is committed, that person is deemed to be the driver and owner of the vehicle, even if it is stopped.

There is also an onus of proof regarding prostitution in the Criminal Code. If one associates with persons involved in offences against sections 210, 211, 212, or 213 of the Criminal Code, one is deemed to be living off the avails of prostitution. There are six or seven examples of reverse onus that have given rise to decisions, such as Downey in regard to prostitution, Smith in regard to firearms and White in regard to the possession and trafficking of narcotics. We obviously do not want reverse onus to become a common practice.

Both the Council of Criminal Defence Lawyers and the Bar were concerned that reverse onus could potentially be prejudicial to one of the rights guaranteed in the Charter, that is, the right to remain silent.

It is only logical. If someone is in a situation where he has committed two offences and then commits a third, there is a declaration to designate him as a dangerous offender. That person necessarily has to defend himself. His lawyer can conduct his defence without having him testify, by having other people testify or calling expert witnesses. However, the people on the committee were concerned that this could be prejudicial to the right to remain silent and the presumption of innocence. There were even some witnesses who worried that it could be contrary to section 7 on liberty and cruel and unusual punishment. Other witnesses said that it could infringe on section 10 of the Charter on arbitrary detention.

It is obvious, therefore, why the Bloc Québécois took Bill C-2 very seriously. We had an excellent discussion in caucus and our colleagues argued their points of view, but we ultimately came to the conclusion that, on the balance of the advantages and disadvantages, it was best to support Bill C-2. However, I want to warn the government against any more attempts to introduce bills with reverse onus of proof.

I would like to congratulate all my colleagues who worked so hard on Bill C-2 in committee.

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

Mr. Speaker, I have a quick comment. I did not object to the member having the extra five minutes, but I did want to put a condition on it that he continue as he had through most of his speech with his back to the rest of the chamber in speaking just to his caucus, because, of course, his back is the best side of him.

I would like to ask the member a question about the delay we see from the government, first in prorogation and then in bringing all of this bill together. In particular, could the member mention the information we received at committee that there are parts of this bill, in particular driving while impaired by drugs, that the provinces are not ready for?

Therefore, even when this bill goes through the whole process in the Senate and is ready for royal assent, parts of this omnibus bill will in fact not be ready to be administered by the provinces and will be sitting on the shelves for a while. The danger is that other parts of the bill may sit on the shelf for an extended period of time for the same reason.

[Réal Ménard, Bloc, Hochelaga, QC]

Mr. Réal Ménard: Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague for his comments. It is rather bold of him, though, to assume that my back is the best feature of my anatomy. I suppose that this could well be a case of faith without works because the hon. member has a less than complete knowledge of my anatomy.

Our colleague is quite right to say that 6 of the 12 bills received royal assent before Parliament was prorogued. Parliamentarians took their work very seriously and the government’s criticism is totally unfounded.

It is true that, in committee, some provinces were concerned about the entire issue of driving under the influence, taking samples, the handling of this evidence and the acquisition of the equipment needed for these new technologies. They were concerned about the possible related costs. In addition, the working out of this part of the act must obviously not invalidate the principle that it is desirable from a public safety point of view to have the means to ensure that people under the influence of drugs are kept off public roads.

Our colleague is quite right, though, to point out that there may be something premature about it or that there are just not enough resources to enable the provinces to carry out their new responsibilities.

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

Mr. Speaker, I rise to speak to Bill C-2, the omnibus crime bill.

I would like to start by expressing our grave concern over the delay in getting these parts of this bill passed through the whole process. The government has been blatantly partisan in its agenda with regard to this bill and its parts, using it not in the best interests of the country in advancing some of these bills as rapidly as possible, but actually slowing down the process so that the government could be critical, particularly of the Liberal Party, both in the House and Senate, and so it could attempt to portray the Liberals and I guess all opposition parties and anybody who does not adopt its right-wing radical agenda on crime as being soft on crime.

More than 60% of the bill was in the Senate. There were three different bills in the Senate when we broke for the summer recess. Based on past practice, I would argue that at least one and probably two of those bills would now have cleared the Senate or certainly would have by the time we break at year-end. Probably all three of them would have cleared.

The government's decision both to prorogue and to then bring back all these five bills into the omnibus bill has now delayed the passage of at least those three bills by several months. Also, of course, with a minority government we always sit on that edge as to whether we will have a snap election because of lack of confidence in the government, and there are good reasons to have lack of confidence in the Conservatives.

That could happen at any time. If that happens, we have to start the whole process all over again after the next election when we get back. We could be looking at delays of another year or two years. The government purposely caused that delay in order to play partisan politics with these bills.

Let us look at the bills we had before the Senate. We had the mandatory minimums bill there, which is a big part of the government's agenda. I should say in regard to mandatory minimums that the opposition parties, led by mine, were able to get the mandatory minimum sentences reduced to bring them generally in line with the sentencing policies of our courts across the country, our superior courts in particular, and with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, so that this would not be struck down at some point in the future.

That bill is still sitting there. Of the five bills that make up the omnibus bill, it was the first one to get to the Senate. It is still sitting here and again it is going to be literally months before it gets through.

Again, there is absolutely no reason for that other than partisan politics on the part of the Conservative Party and the Conservative government. It is shameful, quite frankly.

In that case, the reason we supported this bill is that we need specific guidelines given to our judiciary with regard to specific violent crimes. That bill did so. Quite frankly, the bill was one we had championed in the last election. Once we brought the bill into line with the charter, we were quite pleased to support it.

Let us look at the other bill that was in the Senate, the age of consent bill. We have fought for a large number of years over the issue of raising the age of consent from 14 to 16. I would say the issue has been before the House at least a half a dozen times over the last 10 years in the form of private members' bills. We attempted to get the issue before the House in a government bill during the Liberal administration in 2005 and were unsuccessful, but there is strong support in the country to raise the age of consent from 14 to 16.

As we see in the opinion polls and as a number of experts tell us, it is running at 70% to 75% support for this to be brought into law, to be brought into the modern age, really, and to bring us into line with a number of other jurisdictions. I will not deny that a number of people are opposed to this, but in fact the vast majority of Canadians want it. Again, we are at serious risk of not seeing this happen should we have a snap election because of the conduct of the government.

Similarly, there was a fairly small bill that dealt with alleged violent crime and people seeking bail who were accused of violent crimes where handguns or guns were used. It got broad support from all of the opposition parties, as well as the government, obviously. It was sitting in the Senate. Now it is at risk of perhaps never becoming law until after the next election.

I want the Canadian public to understand the kinds of politics that the government is prepared to play with on what are very crucial issues. In some cases, they are life and death issues.

In order for the Conservatives to make their agenda work for them, to be tough on crime and to beat their chests, the whole macho thing, they need to be able to attack the Liberals in particular for being soft on crime and for delaying. That is not accurate. None of the opposition parties has delayed these bills at all.

The omnibus bill is made up of five former bills, as I have already mentioned. The three I have mentioned involve mandatory minimums for serious violent crime, the age of consent, and the provision with regard to bail. The other two components deal with impaired driving as the result of drug consumption, for both licit and illicit drugs, as well as a provision in that particular part of the bill for doing away, reasonably and I expect effectively, with what is more commonly known as the two-beer defence.

Quite frankly, in my opinion, it is somewhat of a scandal that this was ever allowed to develop as a defence. Basically, it significantly undermines the use of the breathalyzer and that technology. I believe we have the right wording now to do away with that defence when it is inappropriate and still allow, in those extreme cases where for whatever reason the breathalyzer technology has broken down or has not been applied properly, that people would be able to defend under those circumstances and prove that in fact they were not impaired by the consumption of alcohol.

The final bill and the one, quite frankly, that gave us the greatest problem is the bill that dealt with the dangerous offender provisions. Before I go to that, I want to raise the whole issue. As we saw yesterday in the vote at report stage, the NDP in fact, with one exception, supported the bill. We believe that in spite of the dangerous offender provisions, and I am going to come back to that in a minute, the balance of the bill had provisions in it that either we had ourselves brought forward in the last election in our political platform or were prepared to support the government on because we felt that it was in the best interests of Canada. It actually either protected people or met the requirement of having to make amendments to the Criminal Code where it was long past needing those amendments.

It is interesting that just yesterday in the Ottawa Citizen there was a summary of a report that came out of the United States. It is called, in part, “Unlocking America”. The report was done by a number of well-known criminologists and sociologists. It is a very extensive report. It is consistent with a large number of other bodies of evidence in the United States on the imbalance that has been created by successive governments in the United States, primarily at the state level, in terms of the states' incarceration and criminal law practices.

Always the issue when we are looking at the criminal justice system, at civil liberties and human rights in light of the criminal justice system, and at protecting society, which of course is the absolute first criteria, is that there is this balance. How do we best protect society?

To do so, obviously, we use the criminal justice system. We have crimes and we have punishments, but equally important, and one perhaps could argue much more important, is the whole question of how society prevents crimes from ever happening. It is generally accepted, I think, that there are two ways of doing that.

One is to have preventative programs particularly directed at youth so they never enter into a lifestyle that leads them to committing crimes, both petty and serious, and, second, it is also to have a society that has reasonably strong enforcement to guarantee that the laws are in fact there and are enforced to protect society.

Every time there is a conviction, I like to think that it is in effect is a failure on the part of society for not having proper prevention and enforcement infrastructure in our society. Maybe it is not utopian to believe that we will ever get to that point, but it is utopian to believe that at this time we would be able to prevent all crime, so ultimately we need that system in place whereby incarceration or other penalties can be invoked.

Obviously the ideal to strive for, the perfection that we should all strive for as legislators, is to prevent a crime from ever occurring in the first place so that we do not have victims and also so we fulfill our responsibility of protecting all of our citizens, all of our residents of Canada, to the absolute maximum.

The “Unlocking America” report shows what the Americans have done in a large number of states, although not all of them by any means, because they did some comparisons. They have struck the role for government to play, a role very much on the incarceration and punitive side. The report, which is consistent with any number of other reports that have come out of the U.S., shows the ineffectiveness of that. It is ineffective and very expensive.

It is interesting to see the comparison between some of the states that have followed more closely the Canadian model up to this point over the last 20 or 30 years. The model showed that those states had lower incarceration rates, but with a couple of exceptions the states with the lower incarceration rates also had lower crime rates, and vice versa, so that those states that had particularly high incarceration rates had the highest crime rates.

A good comparison is that between the state of New York and the state of California. The state of California, as we all know, did the three strikes and out policy and all sorts of other very heavy-handed incarceration and sentencing policies. Its crime rate was consistently higher over the last two decades than that of the state of New York, which took many more steps with regard to prevention and enforcement and was much more effective at bringing its crime rates down.

There are a couple of statistics I want to mention. One is that the report looked back more than 30 years ago to what the crime rate was in the United States, to what it went to and to where it is now, and also at what the incarceration rate was at that point and what it is now. The incarceration rate increased eightfold over that period in the United States. Obviously the population during that period would have increased by probably about 30%. The incarceration rate went up 800% and the population growth was perhaps about 35%.

The crime rate is almost identical in the United States today to what it was in 1973. That was the year of comparison used. It is almost identical. It went up and it went down, dramatically in some states, New York state being a good example, but the incarceration rate had absolutely no impact on the crime rate in the United States even though it went up 800%.

The other thing that stood out through that whole period of time, so it had no effect on the crime rate, is that it is now costing the United States $60 billion a year for all the people it has incarcerated. The United States has an incarceration rate that is highest in the world. It is even higher than China's. China has roughly three to four times the population of the United States. The United States has 2.2 million people incarcerated at the present time and China has 1.5 million.

The incarceration rate in the United States compared to Canada is about 7:1. Our crime rate is about one-quarter of what it is in the United States.

The point I am trying to make by bringing forth these facts is that we need to be very careful in Canada as to how we deal with crime. As I have said, the greater majority of this bill is a bill that we looked at and said that, yes, these are good provisions, these are provisions that make sense in terms of building a fair, equitable justice system that protects our society.

We need to be very careful that we do not go down the route of the United States in terms of this excessive use of incarceration and punitive process that produces no effective reduction in the crime rate and, at the same time, is hugely expensive for the taxpayer.

That brings me to the final part of Bill C-2 that gave us the greatest concern. We believe that the part in this bill that deals with the dangerous offender section of the Criminal Code is already in the code and the amendments that the government was making, in particular, the reverse onus that it was bringing in, was offensive to the charter. We had crossed the line. We had not struck that proper balance. We were going the U.S. side. We were going to incarcerate, for the rest of their lives in the vast majority of cases, everybody who was designated a dangerous offender, which would increase our prison population to some significant degree.

The ultimate conclusion is whether we support the entire bill when we have this provision that is so offensive to the charter or, quite frankly, is so offensive to just common sense that it will not work. It is a useless tool because it will be struck down by the courts at some point in the future.

At the same time, if we oppose that, we give up the rest of the bill that has the age of consent. Even the mandatory minimums that are in there and some of the provisions around impaired driving are badly needed in our society.

Faced with that decision, and after much debate in our caucus, we ultimately had to support it and, unfortunately, abdicate our responsibility as legislators to pass proper legislation and expect that at some point down the road the courts will strike down that part of the dangerous offender/reverse onus part that is so offensive. We are not comfortable, quite frankly, with that but we are here to make decisions and that is the decision that our caucus has made.

I want to make one final point with respect to a question I raised with the Bloc. It is a question of how the government has approached this. Some parts of the bill will be delayed even after it gets through the Senate because the provinces, which need to administer parts of this, the impaired driving in particular, are not ready for it. I think that is a mistake on the part of the government. It should have been ready with the provinces to implement that. It is a section of the code that needs to be amended and needs to be implemented as rapidly as possible and we have had no explanation as to why it delayed on that.

[Chris Charlton, NDP, Hamilton Mountain, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to make some comments about the bill that is before us and to thank the hon. member for Windsor—Tecumseh who, as we know, was recently voted the most knowledgeable member of Parliament. Therefore, I take his comments on the bill very seriously and I want to congratulate him on that distinct honour.

I notice that the Minister of the Environment is applauding the member and I really appreciate that.

I know the member for Windsor—Tecumseh is one of the hardest working members. If we look at the number of crime bills that have gone through the House since the last election, the number is absolutely phenomenal. It is because of the member's diligence that we have been able to make some of the amendments that have made some of the crime bills palatable to those of us in the NDP caucus.

When I think about the kinds of issues that are raised with me by my constituents, yes, they are concerned about crime but they are not really looking for a law and order response to those. What they are looking for is a response that is based on some fundamental principles of justice.

As the member for Windsor—Tecumseh just said, four out of the five bills that are part of the omnibus bill, after his tremendous work and the amendments that he has brought forward, I was comfortable supporting on behalf of the constituents of Hamilton Mountain.

However, the reverse onus provision is really troubling for me. I think it offends the fundamental sense of justice. It is a law and order approach. It does not really speak to the way that my constituents of Hamilton Mountain would want us to deal with these very serious crime bills.

I am wondering if the member for Windsor—Tecumseh could tell me whether my concerns are right. I am hoping that the reverse onus provision will be struck down by the courts and that it will actually not meet a charter challenge and therefore I can feel just a little better about having supported Bill C-2 yesterday at second reading. I did that because I agreed with four out of the five bills, but the fifth bill is troubling to me. I would like the member's assurances, as the most knowledgeable member, that that provision will be struck down.

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

Mr. Speaker, I am, quite frankly, embarrassed about that award, in part because I think I am now expected to live up to it for the rest of the year until we have another one next year and someone else will take over responsibility for that.

I have two answers for my colleague from Hamilton. I practised law for 27 years and I practised a fair amount of criminal law at the start of my career, a lot of matrimonial law in the middle part and then personal injury law. Throughout my career I had clients who were charged and convicted so they were criminals. I had a lot of clients as well who were victims of crime, many clients who were victims of spousal and parental abuse. In my personal injury practice I had a number of clients who were assaulted or in other ways and suffered as victims of criminal conduct.

Throughout my entire career I can honestly say that I never had anyone say to me, “I am really happy this person is going to get 10 or 20 years in jail, if the alternative was that I wasn't a victim at all”. I never had a victim say to me, “I'm really more concerned about the penalty this person is going to suffer than I am about the impact it's had on me and my desire never to have been victimized”.

That thinking by victims of crime should give us some guidance.

With regard to the specific provisions of the reverse onus, there is another part of the bill that has a very good part. It is actually about 95% of the bill that we support. There are provisions for recognizance changes. We have needed those since I was practising criminal law back in the mid-seventies. We finally got around to doing it. It gives judges greater authority to control people when they are not incarcerated in an institution and it provides for significant additional protection to society. Therefore, that part of it is good and I think the member should feel comfortable in supporting the bill for that.

Ultimately, yes, on the reverse onus we will need to rely on the courts to strike it down.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I listened closely to my hon. colleague explain the delays and the interference from the government on its crime agenda. We know that the government members are sitting in the backroom cranking out their Gestetner machines to say how all members in this House are soft on crime unless they wear blue Conservative and how their 10 percenters will be rolling across our ridings saying that the members of the House are delaying action on crime.

However, what we have seen is that they were the ones who prorogued the House. They held up the business of Parliament for a month and when the bill on age of sexual consent came back, they did not revive it. It would have been law now. It is the same with the gun crime bill. It would be law now. We will most likely be in a situation where we could go to an election and nothing will be settled.

Most of us come here to Parliament in order to create good policy, to create a stronger fabric for our country, but we are seeing the petty partisanship of the government. Do the government members really want to have this solved or would they rather have the gaping wounds so that they can continually beat their chests, point to their base and say that no one else is tough enough on crime? I think there is actually a desire on their part not to have these issues dealt with so they can tell Canadians that nothing is being done. They can then tell Canadians to elect more Conservatives so that they can go back and obfuscate issues of crime even more.

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

Mr. Speaker, at some point the Conservatives will run out of sections of the Criminal Code to amend. Maybe they thought they were getting close to that and in order to slow the process down they thought they would bundle these all together. They probably thought there would be an election before the bill would pass and then they could go out and tell Canadians that they needed more seats because they need to get a majority government in order to get the bill through. Obviously, if it had gotten through before that, they would not have that argument.

I think there is some logic behind that. However, it is quite cynical logic and it does not bode well for the moral compass of the Conservative Party. Unfortunately, I think it is very close to reality.

[John Baird, Conservative, Minister of the Environment]

Mr. Speaker, I may, from time to time, not agree with the hon. member but I certainly have respect for his experience in this regard. He is a member who passionately believes what he says and I have nothing but respect for that.

I would like to underline for the member that the government would be more than thrilled to see the tackling violent crime act become law so we can protect vulnerable people. I represent the constituency of Ottawa West—Nepean where there are a lot of seniors who are concerned about this issue. I have friends who have been the victim of home invasions and whose families have been victimized. What they sent me here to do is to be their voice on this issue.

My comment for the member opposite is that the government would like nothing more than for the tackling violent crime act to become part of the Criminal Code.

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

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the minister's comment but the facts do not back him up. I appreciate the position he has taken. My house has been broken into three times. The last time, my daughter, who was in university at the time, was at home.

People do want their government to protect them. It is always an issue as to whether this does it. I have problems with some of the approaches the Conservatives have taken as to whether they would be effective. I would have been much happier, quite frankly, if the government had spent more time on making sure those 2,500 police officers that were promised in the last election were out on the street. Not one of them has been delivered up to this point.

The government says that it wants to go ahead with the bill but when it prorogued Parliament that legislation died in the Senate. We had to start all over again. Rather than bringing it back at the stage it was, the government brought it back and started all over again in this House. I think, to some degree, that puts into doubt the credibility of how serious the government is in wanting to get these bills passed and the laws into place soon.

[Andrew Telegdi, Liberal, Kitchener—Waterloo, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to commend the previous speaker for his speech and his understanding when it comes to dealing with crime and how to actually lower the crime rates.

I dare say that the scope of the bill is problematic. It troubles me, because instead of dealing with legislation one piece at a time, it puts a number of them together, some of which are good, but some of which are very offensive. Certainly that is not the way a minority Parliament should function, nor is it the way the Prime Minister when he was the leader of the official opposition said that a minority Parliament should function.

The member mentioned the study “Unlocking America”. I used to be involved with an organization called, Youth In Conflict With The Law. It was named after the proposed youth in conflict with the law act which ended up being the Young Offenders Act. I started working with that organization in 1976 after I left university. One of the focuses we had was to try to deal with offenders within the context of the community and to do as much as we could at the community level to create a safe and secure community. One of our mottos was that crime and justice is a community responsibility.

For all the reasons mentioned by the previous speaker and documented in “Unlocking America”, getting tough on crime does not work. In “Unlocking America” nine leading U.S. criminologists and sociologists who have spent their careers studying crime and punishment did an exhaustive study. They pointed out that the approach of getting tough on crime, building more jails and incarcerating more people, just does not work. It might make great television and it might make great news in the tabloids, but it is an approach that just does not work. It ends up being very expensive. Beyond being very expensive, it ends up being very destructive.

Bill C-2 is one bill, but another one which will be coming forward is Bill C-25 which deals with young offender legislation. I find it very frightening that under this particular bill, unfortunately, people who go into the system as young offenders can end up in the penitentiary system, not for committing a great deal of crime in the community, but for reasons such as committing a crime within the institution itself.

Numerous people came forward at the committee hearings on this bill. One of them was Dr. Anthony Doob, a criminologist from the University of Toronto, who very clearly showed that the perception of crime in many ways is driven by the media and by politicians who want to exploit the fear of crime and does not truly have that great a basis in reality.

In his studies, Dr. Doob asked the people in one control group for their reaction to headlines from tabloids. Dr. Doob gave another control group transcripts of the trial. Dr. Doob found that in cases where people had the information, they had read the transcripts and understood the judge's reasoning, they either agreed with the judicial sentence, or thought that the judicial sentence was too harsh. This was in total contrast to those in the group that received their reports on crime from the media, from the tabloids, or from television programs.

The media love to tell about the goriest crimes that have occurred in the local community, or in the country. But if there is nothing in Canada, then they will look to the United States, and if there is nothing there, then they will look to any continent on the planet for their special diet of criminal activity. These reports frighten people. Usually they hear these reports just before they go to bed at night.

It has often occurred to me that those folks and politicians who engage in that kind of fearmongering are victimizing a large number of people. People begin to believe that the relatively safe community they live in is much more dangerous than it is. That is not right. Parliamentarians and political parties should not be engaged in that kind of fearmongering.

Another individual who made a presentation was Kim Pate, who is with the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies. Unfortunately, Kim did not have enough time to talk at committee, but she did talk at length about the challenges faced by inmates who suffer from mental health problems in the federal institutions. She also talked about the over-representation of particular minority groups that are incarcerated. In Canada there is a disproportionate number of aboriginal people incarcerated. This raises some very troubling questions. Miss Pate also talked about the number of institutional charges that will be put on somebody entering the system, to the point that the individual, for whatever he or she has done in the institution, could be declared a dangerous offender.

Today I talked about Ashley Smith, a young woman who was due to be released from prison today. She was sentenced in New Brunswick as a young offender at the age of 15. She took her life on October 19 in an isolated jail cell at the Grand Valley federal institution in Kitchener following an extensive period of solitary confinement. Four correctional staff at Grand Valley were charged with criminal negligence causing death. One correctional staff member at the Saskatoon Regional Psychiatric Centre has also been charged with assault.

Ashley's tragic death has raised a number of troubling questions that must be answered. How did a young girl struggling with mental illness, incarcerated as a young offender, end up, through excessive institutional charges, in federal correctional facilities thousands of kilometres away from home? What can be done to improve the way we deal with offenders so that we minimize the recurrence of such tragedies? When will we learn as a society that it is more feasible to invest in community safety and crime prevention programs than to pursue draconian laws that incarcerate more and more people at the expense of public safety? I underline at the expense of public safety.

The “Unlocking America” report makes the point that over-charging, which has occurred in the United States, has done absolutely nothing to bring down the crime rate. It has done everything to destroy families and communities and to perpetuate discrimination. This has been going on much too long.

In talking about crime prevention, I will come back to my community, the Waterloo region. We have been working on community based crime prevention since 1978. Next year we will be hosting the 30th annual justice dinner. We will bring in speakers on how to improve public safety through social development in our community.

We are not the only community that says this is the way it should be done. The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police talks about creating public safety and reducing crime, not through the hiring of more police officers, not through building more jails and not through hiring more jail guards, but through social development that addresses the root causes of crime.

In 1993, following on the excellent work of a Progressive Conservative government, the justice committee, with Mr. Horner as chair, produced what is known as the Horner report. The Horner report called upon the government to fight crime through social development.

My community took up that challenge at that time and we created the Waterloo region's Community Safety and Crime Prevention Council. The very first chair of that council was Larry Gravill, the chief of police.

The membership of the council includes all the social service organizations, local governments, non-governmental organizations involving criminal justice, the crown attorney's office and the police force. We worked collaboratively on how the community could address the root causes of crime.

Over the years many other folks have come forward to chair the council, be they from the school board, local government or the Children's Aid. The last chair we had for the committee was Matt Torigian, and he has been appointed and designated as the new police chief in Baden.

Surely that approach is much more preferable to the approach that is put forward in the bill, particularly on the mandatory minimums and the designation for dangerous offenders.

An interesting thing I did in my questionnaire was to ask whether we should have the traditional Conservative neo-con approach to fighting crime, or whether we should do it through social development. I am happy to say that two to one, the citizens in my community want to fight crime through social development.

I mentioned that the neo-cons like to put out wrong information and try to tell untruths. I will give an example. The member for Kitchener—Conestoga put out a householder where he said, and I will be quite willing to table it--

[Ken Epp, Conservative, Edmonton—Sherwood Park, AB]

Mr. Speaker, on a point of order, it has been a long tradition and part of the rules of this House that members do not speak in a derogatory fashion about other members, and the use of the individual's language with respect to our party is, because of the context in which it is used, derogatory.

Mr. Speaker, I would ask that you demand that he not use those offensive terms when speaking of our party.

[The Acting Speaker, Royal Galipeau]

I thank the hon. member for Edmonton--Sherwood Park and I am sure that the hon. member for Kitchener--Waterloo will get back to the essence of the debate, and he will do it in a parliamentary fashion, as he is experienced to do.

[Andrew Telegdi, Liberal, Kitchener—Waterloo, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am at the very essence of the debate. My point is people are putting out wrong information to serve political purposes that have no basis in fact.

I will table in the House a mailout by the hon. member for Kitchener—Conestoga. In it he says that the 2005 rate of violent youth crime increased by 22%, but in essence, youth crime in 2005 fell by 2%. This is the kind of fearmongering about which I am talking.

I said we end up victimizing a lot of people when untruths are spoken, when facts are misrepresented and when a community is portrayed as being more dangerous than it is. Waterloo region is a relatively safe community and its crime rates are relatively low. It is unconscionable that somebody would try to scare members of that community by putting out false information.

In wrapping up, if we want to create a more peaceful and secure community, the best way to do it is through prevention. Yes, there are some people who have to be locked up, and some for a long period of time, to protect the community. Make no mistake, the government is trying to make us as safe as people are in the United States, the most violent society in the western world. It has the highest incarceration rate in the world.

In putting this together as an omnibus bill, it is unfortunate that the government would put in parts of it that should not pass the House. Over time the Conservatives will be known for the neo-cons that they are and for exploiting people's fear of crime while doing nothing to address public safety.

[John Baird, Conservative, Minister of the Environment]

Mr. Speaker, I listened with great interest to the member's speech.

Could the member tell the House why he voted in favour of the bill if he thinks it is so terrible?

[Andrew Telegdi, Liberal, Kitchener—Waterloo, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am happy to tell the member that I did not vote in favour of the bill. If the member had watched, he would have seen that.

The member opposite was a member of the Mike Harris hatchet job to social programs in the province of Ontario. Many of the crimes and gangs we see in the city of Toronto now exist because of his government in Ontario. When it was in office, it slashed the social programs, victimized communities and eliminated crime prevention programs.

If those members were really interested in public safety, they would heed the call of the police chiefs to keep the gun registry instead of trying to destroy it. The member has no lectures to give to anybody on crime prevention. The member, with Mike Harris, did more than anybody else to destroy it .

[Alex Atamanenko, NDP, British Columbia Southern Interior, BC]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague from Windsor—Tecumseh referred to a study called “Unlocking America”. The study shows that the net result in the United States is an expensive system that relies much too heavily on imprisonment, is increasingly ineffective and diverts large sums of taxpayer money from more effective crime control strategies.

According to the study, much of the burden has fallen on disadvantaged minorities. Blacks and Latinos make up 60% of the U.S. prison population. According to the report, 8% of American black men of working age are now behind bars. In effect, the report says, “The imprisonment binge created our own American apartheid”.

In Canada, although the first nations population makes up 3% of the population, 20% are incarcerated under the dangerous offender category.

If the bill goes through as it is, specifically the dangerous offender provision, in the opinion of the member will this increase incarceration rates for first nations people?

[Andrew Telegdi, Liberal, Kitchener—Waterloo, ON]

Mr. Speaker, everything the member says about who is in jail in the United States is exactly correct, and it is in that report. It is really unfortunate the “Unlocking America” report was just released yesterday. I think the members of the justice committee would have really benefited from studying it.

He spoke about what would happen to the first nations. Ultimately, they will be the ones who will carry the brunt of the changes. I can only hope the Supreme Court, in its wisdom, will strike down the bill as unconstitutional.

Let me point out something else the neo-cons tried to do. They tried to disenfranchise inmates from the right to vote. Given the high prison population in the United States of America, what happens has a real bearing on the outcome of an election because many people are disenfranchised and unable to vote. Those are exactly the people who the neo-cons would have not go to the polls.

[Ken Epp, Conservative, Edmonton—Sherwood Park, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I have a very curious question. The member proudly announced that he did not vote for the bill. That means he either voted against it or he abstained. He sat in his chair or he was not in the House at the time of the vote.

It is my understanding that most of the Liberals, including their leader, voted for it. Could the member please explain to us why the leader would lead his party to vote for a bill that according to him is unconstitutional and one which he could not support? He must be saying that his leader and his colleagues are all wrong.

Is that what the member is saying?

[Andrew Telegdi, Liberal, Kitchener—Waterloo, ON]

Mr. Speaker, first, I will answer for myself. I wanted to ensure that I could give the speech today in the House. The member will have to watch to see how I vote when the bill comes concludes at third reading and how I will vote on Bill C-25 as well.

I have spent too many years of my life working to try to create safer communities than to be in agreement with a bill that does so much to hurt communities, destroy young and older people and not make our communities safer.

Once again, if the Conservatives want to fight crime and really reduce it, listen to the chiefs of police and do it through social development. It comes from that.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Mr. Speaker, we spend day after day in the House playing a farcical little drama, where we have the Conservative members saying that everyone else is obstructing their crime agenda, that their crime agenda is being purposely held back and that all the little old ladies are somehow unsafe because of members of Parliament trying to do their duty.

Yet, we have the example with this bill. We passed a bill on raising the age of consent, and the government did nothing to move that forward. We had the bill to deal with gun crimes, and the government sat on it. It went to the extraordinarily length of bringing it back as a new bill. Then it stood and said, after proroguing Parliament for an extra month, that the other parties did not take their jobs seriously. We certainly take our jobs seriously in the House.

I have watched this farcical drama where we finish a bill, get it to third reading, then it goes all the way back so the government can run this little drama through again.

Does the hon. member feel that by going through the motions again and again, the government has absolutely no real interest at the end of the day of getting the crime agenda off? As a Parliament, we could have dealt with the crime bills and then gone on to deal with more substantive issues to people. It is something that works in the Conservatives' little ten percenters that they mail into people's neighbourhoods and it is something that works on their attack ads on television?

[Andrew Telegdi, Liberal, Kitchener—Waterloo, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I very much agree with the member. We could have passed most of these bills as they came through the House. Then we could have had the choice to vote for those that did some good and to vote against those that did not.

There is no question that the neo-conservative agenda is not to deal with the reality of crime but to create the fear of crime unrealistically. We see it in the United States on FOX television, which the Conservative members, the neo-cons, would love to have play in Canada on all the channels to scare the public. Then they could offer a pseudo-solution. They way they approach this is they exploit the crime bills and crime victims, because they are being exploited as well.

Moneys spent on useless incarceration could be better spent on assisting victims of crime and deterring crime. However, the neo-conservative government has taken on the agenda that it is better to keep mental health patients in jail rather than in hospitals. Their agenda is to try to drive the fear of crime for political gain. That does not work in the Waterloo region.

[Mario Laframboise, Bloc, Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak on Bill C-2 which we are examining today.

It is a pleasure for me to have the opportunity to help those listening to us by casting some light on what an omnibus bill is. An omnibus bill is a bill which combines several bills that could not be enacted in the previous session because the government decided to prorogue the House and terminate them at whatever stage they had reached. That was the choice of the Conservative Party and the reason behind Bill C-2, the bill before us now. If the government had not decided to prorogue the House, a goodly number of those bills would have already been passed.

Before getting into the heart of Bill C-2, I would offer a reminder to those listening. When a bill amending the Criminal Code is being passed, we need to keep the crime situation in mind. That is something easily done by people who follow the television news. We all know how the print and electronic media try to attract readers and viewers by focusing on certain situations, trying to sell papers or attract viewers by interviewing victims or their relatives.

Ours is, of course, a media-driven society. The media make the situation more difficult when they neglect to show the other side of the coin. It is all very well to focus on crimes, to opine that certain sentences are too soft, and so on, and to try to find evidence that the justice system is not working, but when it comes to the other side of the coin, discussing the crime situation in general, the media is not pulling its weight there.

This is what I wish to draw to your attention, as well as to the attention of those listening. Things must be balanced. That is our objective as legislators, to begin with. And it is my colleagues here in this House, such as the hon. members for Trois-Rivières, Shefford and Manicouagan, and all the members of the Bloc Québécois, who have the onerous task of balancing things out.

The Conservatives have but one thing in mind: to do everything they can to hold on to power. I often say jokingly—though I sometimes believe it seriously—that power drives one mad. One only needs to look at how the Prime Minister and some of his ministers are behaving to see what it is like to be in power after having been in opposition. A person might well say that power does have that effect on certain people and their sanity.

I am providing this background because crime has been declining steadily in Quebec as well as in Canada over the past 15 years or so. That is not an invention of the Bloc Québécois or the sovereignists that we are. Statistics Canada recently confirmed that the national crime rate reached its lowest point in over 25 years in 2006. Moreover, the homicide rate in Quebec was the lowest in that province since 1962.

So, we are doing fine. I am bringing this up, because the hon. members may have heard of people being surveyed. The Conservative Party, through the government, conducted a large survey of more than 2,000 people across Canada to determine how it might win its election by listening to what the people had to say about crimes and punishments. Interestingly enough, however, there was no mention of the current state of crime in any of the questions; I know this because, by chance, one of my assistants was among those surveyed. The press and electronic media give the impression that crime is rampant, but when we check the statistics and see that crime is down, with a crime rate at its lowest level in 25 years, we put things in perspective.

That is, of course, what the Bloc Québécois is trying to do. We have always been very aware and have always endeavoured to find a balance.

It is not easy to find a balance between the Conservatives, the Liberals and the NDP. I can say candidly that they are pretty much all the same. In light of all the surveys published all over the place, it is clearly important to have a party representing a majority of Quebeckers and trying to bring some balance to this House.

The Bloc Québécois has tried to bring such balance throughout the debate on Bill C-2 while at the same time bearing in mind the statistics. As I indicated, the national crime rate reached its lowest point in over 25 years in 2006. In Quebec, the homicide rate was the lowest since 1962.

Does this means that all is well? No, all is not well. We know that crime has not been eradicated. It is sad to say, but in our industrialized countries where the rich and the poor coexist alongside one another, there will always be crime. Our objective is to try to lower the crime rate as much as possible, and that is something the members of the Bloc Québécois work on every day.

However, we must also put all this crime into perspective. I will provide another statistic. In terms of violent crime, Quebec has the second lowest rate and is just behind Prince Edward Island. Quebec even recorded a 4% decrease in youth crime in 2006, surpassing all the other provinces.

It is important for members from other provinces to understand that it was quite some time ago that Quebec opted for social reintegration rather than repression and increased sentences, the establishment of minimum sentences or other measures. That is a choice made by Quebec.

I do not wish to repeat the statistics mentioned by other colleagues in this House, but when we look at U.S. states that also opted for reintegration rather than repression—the state of New York among others—we see that crime rates in those states, compared to others, are decreasing. That is the kind of statistic that is of interest to us.

As parliamentarians, we must mitigate the very harmful influence of media sensationalism. It is understandable because they have to sell newspapers or the best television news reports. They will try to capture the sensational aspect of an incident rather than portraying the balance that can be inherent in a society.

It is important to us that the rest of Canada understand that Quebec has done things differently. In addition, the effects on crime rates are very important and hence the position of the Bloc Québécois in the committee that discussed Bill C-2. Our position was different than that of the other parties in this House. We do not hold that against them. It is just that Quebec and the rest of Canada are very different. We do not think in the same way.

One day, Quebeckers will make the rest of Canada understand. We will decide to have our own country with our own laws and so forth. In the meantime, we participate and try to bring Canadian society up to speed with Quebec society. And that is not easy. It is not easy.

I will give some examples of the Bloc Québécois proposals made in committee that were rejected.

We proposed amendments to Bill C-2, to eliminate the practice of granting parole almost automatically after one-sixth of a sentence has been served. Since in Quebec we have reintegration, this causes a problem. Automatic parole after one-sixth of a sentence has been served means that when we want to create programs and force criminals to attend therapy, we find that they participate less when they know that they are automatically eligible for parole after serving one-sixth of their sentence.

Again, everyone will say that it does not make sense that criminals are eligible for parole after serving one-sixth of their sentence. This has been going on across Quebec. We wanted to change this in a House committee, but our proposal was rejected by the Conservative Party and the other parties.

Once again, Quebec society is much more advanced than Canadian society.

We also suggested putting an end to statutory release once two-thirds of a sentence has been served, by having a professional formally assess inmates regarding the overall risk of reoffending that they represent to the community.

As for social reintegration, we believe that statutory release once two-thirds of a sentence has been served is no longer acceptable in Quebec society. Before criminals are almost automatically released, we want them to be assessed by professionals. We made that suggestion in committee, but, once again, the other parties did not agree.

We suggested that the onus of proof should be reversed in the case of criminals found guilty of the offences of loan-sharking, procuring, robbery, fraud over $5,000 and counterfeiting in order to facilitate the seizure of assets that are the product of crime.

It was the Bloc Québécois that proposed reversing the burden of proof with respect to the proceeds of crime in cases involving organized groups. As some may remember, the Bloc Québécois led that crusade against organized crime by proposing that the burden of proof be reversed so that it would no longer be up to the Crown to prove where the money came from to acquire the goods. The opposite is now true. The burden of proof automatically falls on members of criminal organizations, who must prove that they paid for their goods with legitimate earnings. Since that is difficult to do, goods can be seized automatically.

That bill concerning criminal organizations was supported by the other parties in this House. We proposed to do the same for the issue under consideration today. Why not reverse the onus for criminals who have been found guilty of offences involving usury, procuring, robbery or fraud? That would cover not criminal organizations, but organized criminals. In cases of fraud exceeding $5,000, these criminals would be required to prove that the goods they acquired were paid for using legitimately earned funds. Failing that, the goods would be seized.

Believe it or not, the other parties rejected the amendments the Bloc Québécois proposed for Bill C-2.

We proposed attacking the street gang problem by giving the police better tools to work with, such as longer warrants for investigations using GPS tracking. As I said earlier, Quebec society is a little farther ahead than the rest of Canada. GPS technology is an integral part of fighting crime in Quebec. Unfortunately, the proposed amendments do not include this suggestion made by the Bloc Québécois.

We proposed a ban on wearing signs, symbols or other indications that identify individuals as belonging to groups recognized by court as criminal organizations.

Once again, we struck at organized criminal groups. Quebec fought a battle. It went very well. We are lucky to have with us in the House the former minister responsible for public security in Quebec, the hon. Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, who did an excellent job in that position. He went after organized criminal groups directly, with the support of the Bloc Québécois, by amending the Criminal Code to provide for reverse onus of proof. We did well. We wanted to ban the wearing of insignia by criminal groups, organized gangs of bikers and others, but this amendment to Bill C-2 was rejected.

We wanted to put an end to the rule whereby time spent in detention prior to trial was doubled for sentencing purposes. A sentence would begin at the moment of detention rather than at the time of sentencing, in order to put an end to an abusive practice which did no credit to the administration of justice.

We discovered that, when the rule is applied, that is, when an individual is taken into custody prior to trial, the time involved is doubled in the sentence. This is standard, and criminals have obviously understood it. So they put off their trial as long as possible since, when they are in custody prior to trial, they get a bonus of double time and a reduced sentence.

Quebec society understood it well because of the fight against organized crime and all that. We put these amendments forward, but, unfortunately, none of the ones we put forward was passed, even though some have the unanimous approval of the ministers of public security in Quebec and other provinces.

This exemplifies the Conservative government, which has its blinkers on tight, which conducts polls with very specific focus, and which tells us that no changes will be allowed to a bill and that it will be made a vote of confidence.

So, the Bloc Québécois will support the conclusions of Bill C-2, except we would have liked to improve it. However, once again, the sway of power over these Conservative men and women is such that they are self absorbed. They show no desire to improve bills. They think that they are right, that truth and life are within their power and are in the end opposed to any idea of improvement.

This is what power has done to them. We will see what happens in the next election. As I am the Bloc's chief organizer, I want to reiterate that we will support the bill, not because we are frightened by the possibility of a vote of confidence, but because we think it will further the fight against organized crime, even though this is not the way we would have chosen.

Here is an example. I am getting to the core of Bill C-2. It combines five bills, including one that strengthens the provisions on offences involving firearms. It is perfect. Initially, Bill C-10 was simply being repeated. That bill sought to amend the Criminal Code to increase minimum prison sentences to five, seven or 10 years, depending on whether the crime was a repeat offence, for eight serious offences involving the use of a firearm, if the weapon used was not a hunting rifle. Once again, we see the Conservative vision. It is a weapon, but not a hunting weapon.

For anyone who follows these things, hunting rifles have changed considerably over the past 30 years. First of all, they are no longer made of the same materials and they are very light. This often makes it very difficult for law enforcement. I would like to believe that no hunters will use their weapons, except there is no longer a registry. Indeed, the goal of the Conservatives is to eliminate the gun registry, claiming that only hunters are going to acquire weapons. Yet, given the new technology, more and more criminals are going to use long guns—as they like to call them—precisely because they are lighter, thanks to new technology and so on. The Conservative philosophy wants to protect long guns. Naturally, to do so, there can be no registry. After all, no one who has a long gun is a criminal.

I am sorry, but plenty of cabins get robbed and hunters' weapons make their way into the criminal networks. Yet, this legislative amendment would not apply to those who have firearms. And I repeat, when it comes to these offences involving firearms, for instance, it says “if the weapon used is not a hunting weapon”. Consequently, the bill deals with all weapons except hunting weapons.

I have a great deal of difficulty understanding that, but I can understand the Conservative philosophy behind it. To the Conservatives, you can do anything with a hunting weapon. It is as simple as that. That is all there is to it. There is a reason they want to abolish the gun registry.

I would like to digress for a moment. In Quebec, 95% of hunters registered their guns. This is no problem, because there are no longer any fees. We supported the amendment that eliminated the renewal fee. Since people had already registered their guns, no one lost any sleep over this, except in the west, where the situation is reversed, obviously. Westerners were opposed to the registry from the start and decided not to register their guns. Today, to please western Canada, the Conservatives have once again decided to abolish the gun registry, even though hunters in the rest of the country could live with it. This Conservative approach to governing is evident in this bill.

Once again, all we want to say to the people who are watching is that, yes, bills have to evolve. That is true, but we have to be careful. We must not succumb to the sensationalism of the media, which will not hesitate to blow any accident or crime out of proportion to sell newspapers or get people to watch newscasts. Yet statistics prove that Quebec's approach, which consists of rehabilitating criminals by giving them every possible opportunity to work their way back into society, is much more effective at reducing the crime rate than the punitive approach some societies have opted for, as the Conservatives would like to do.

[Alex Atamanenko, NDP, British Columbia Southern Interior, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I wish to thank my colleague for his speech. He spoke about the crime rate, which is at an all time low in Quebec as well as in Canada. He also said that the media want sensational news. And he mentioned that there must be balance.

The NDP has been talking for a long time about this balance based on three principles. The first is prevention, that is, we work with young people and we try to have crime prevention programs in place. Second, we want a certain amount of protection, that is, enough police officers in the community to work with these individuals. Last, there is punishment, which we are discussing today in Bill C-2.

Does he see this as an example of a well-balanced program to fight crime?

[Mario Laframboise, Bloc, Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his question.

By dint of listening to the Bloc Québécois, the NDP has improved its platform over the years. I commend him for using the Bloc Québécois' ideas; we are proud to share them with other parties. The NDP has adopted this philosophy. He is quite right when he says that this balance is not found in the bill.

That is why I was saying that the Bloc Québécois wanted to present amendments in order to achieve a certain balance. This option was not retained by the Conservatives because of their very conservative and republican leanings. They have this unfortunate tendency of copying what the Republicans are doing in the United States. We can feel it in this bill. Nevertheless, the Bloc would have appreciated it if the proposed amendments had been accepted. However, we will not reject the bill because of that.

[Robert Vincent, Bloc, Shefford, QC]

Mr. Speaker, among all the arguments heard today, there is one thing that has not been addressed. It is all well and good to repress and imprison people for offences they have committed, but most of these offences are minimal and require minimal sentences. Such sentences are not served in federal penitentiaries, but in provincial penitentiaries.

Who will pay for the prison guards if there is not enough space? Who will build these prisons and pay for their needs? Will it be the federal government or the provincial government? After the new bill is implemented, will it be the provinces that pay and the federal government that benefits? I would like my esteemed colleague to answer my question.

[Mario Laframboise, Bloc, Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the hon. member for Shefford for his question.

He is absolutely right. When the sentence is two years or less, it is in provincial jurisdiction. Sentences of two years and less will therefore be the responsibility of the Government of Quebec. That is why certain amendments allowed us to grant the money required in order to ensure this transition.

Once again, the Conservative Party is governing as though it were alone. We saw them do that in the manufacturing crisis. I know my colleague from Shefford is very affected by that crisis. Even though the government has billions of dollars, the Minister of Finance said that it is the provinces that will have to take action. It is provinces like Quebec and Ontario, who have a balanced budget or a deficit—in the case of Ontario—that have the responsibility and heavy burden of spending. The problem with this federation is that more than half our taxes are sent to Ottawa when the needs are in the provinces.

My colleague from Shefford gave a good example. Decisions like that that will bring Quebec slowly but surely toward sovereignty.

[The Acting Speaker, Royal Galipeau]

Order, please.

It is my duty, pursuant to Standing Order 38, to inform the House that the questions to be raised tonight at the time of adjournment are as follows: the hon. member for Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, Post-secondary Education; the hon. member for Mount Royal, Airbus.

The House resumed consideration of the motion that Bill C-2, An Act to amend the Criminal Code and to make consequential amendments to other Acts, be read the third time and passed.

[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.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Mr. Speaker, we have consistently been hearing the question of why the government has been rolling out its crime agenda, slowing things down, proroguing the House, delaying the passage of bills, starting the bills over again and then, of course, ramping up the attack on everyone else in this House that they are somehow soft on crime. The record in this House is that we have a government that has perhaps not a great interest in actually seeing these bills passed.

I would suggest that my hon. colleague read the book What's the Matter with Kansas. It is an excellent analysis of how the republican party has used hot button issues to continually drum up support in its hard core base and create the notion of wedge issues.

Of course, the analysis of how it uses the hot button issues shows that these issues are never to be settled. It does not matter how many crime bills come forward, there will always be another drunk driver. There will always be another punk that grabs a handbag at the bus stop from the sweet little old lady. There will always be a reason for the backbenchers of the Conservative Party to stand up and say that not enough is being done on crime, regardless of how much this House deals with crime issues.

I would ask my hon. colleague, does he not feel that all members of this House and the members who sat on the committee have certainly tried to work with the government to get some usable, workable crime legislation passed? What we have seen is that his work has continually been cheapened by the sloganeers in the Conservative Party.

I ask my hon. colleague whether or not this crime agenda will actually ever come into law because of the stalling that the Conservatives seem to be doing on these bills?

[Larry Bagnell, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

Mr. Speaker, the member's questions are excellent ones. I would like to borrow that book which also sounds excellent.

I will not explain again the four different ways the government used to delay the age of consent and most of the other provisions in this bill. The member has made a very good point on that.

I think it is upsetting to the democracy of the House when we are bullied into accepting the bad things in an omnibus bill. We are told that amendments cannot be made or there will be an election.

The greatest affront, and it is not to me because I am not an expert in law or even a lawyer, is to the experts in the country who spend their careers in this area. They came before us and explained how these particular items would not work.

In fact, they explained how many of these provisions and this direction in general was going to make Canada a more dangerous place. People will be put into prisons for longer periods. Studies have shown that when they come out of prison they are more dangerous. Eventually all these prisoners come out.

I am sure what is most disturbing to my colleague is that the government is going in the wrong direction. The government has an emphasis on crime, although crime is going down in Canada. The government is moving in the wrong direction. It is great to fix the problem, but it is fixing it in the wrong direction. The government is going backwards and it could make the problem worse.

The government should be spending all this energy and resources on dealing with the prisoners through training, rehabilitation and healing in the prisons. This is what the prisoners are asking for. It has been proven to work in restorative justice. The government should be spending money on the prevention of poverty and social issues.

We need to be increasing the number of police officers. The experts have said time and time again that increasing the sentences makes people less sociable and more dangerous. It is also about their thought of being caught. We should have the services available to help those people.

I certainly encourage an entire new direction in this House. The emphasis should be on healing, education, rehabilitation and restorative justice. Then the vast majority of these people can be meaningful contributors to society. This is what the experts who work in the field have suggested to us at committee.

[Robert Vincent, Bloc, Shefford, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I have a question for my Liberal colleague.

When a first-time offender is imprisoned for drunk driving, as the member was saying, he is sentenced for two years less a day. So these sentences must be served in a provincial penitentiary.

With the new Bill C-2, if many people are sentenced to two years less a day, they would have to serve their sentences in provincial penitentiaries.

What will be done about the tax burden, the money that will be injected into provincial prisons? Because we may be forced to build more prisons. If we incarcerate people, we will run out of room. If we run out of room, we will have to build prisons. Buildings cost money, as do the inherent operating costs, such as heating, hiring new staff, new prison guards. All of this will be done at the provincial level.

How much money will the federal government give the provinces to help absorb these costs? Have they thought about that? Perhaps all they thought about was taking $4 or $5 million to hire police officers and focus on more repression? Once these people are put in prison, who will foot the bill? The provinces. How much money will they get from the federal government to support the bill?

Is the member's province prepared to invest even more money to please Conservatives with no social conscience? I await his answer.

[Larry Bagnell, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

Mr. Speaker, members are clapping because that is an excellent question. Of course, the government had promised more police officers but it did not deliver them.

The member's question about the courts, and provincial and territorial jails is excellent. I asked that question twice in committee. In the last round we were at finances and I asked the exact same question.

If these laws are going to be successful, where is the money set aside for the increased onus on not only the jails but the prosecution? What is the government going to do about it? Are there any calculations? The minister had no answers. He said, basically, “We'll cross that bridge when we come to it”.

I asked again today because we are back in another cycle. Now some of the bills have been passed. Has there been any analysis done in the last year since I asked the question? No. There were hums and haws, and really no answer as to why there was not sufficient money for the prosecution, the increase in legal aid that this is going to cost, and money for the penitentiary systems both provincial and federal.

I have visited the jails. It is such a shame. The prisoners are already crying for healing and education. I asked one of them in the fall, “Don't you go to school all day?” He said, “The teacher quit, they're going to hire one next year”. There is not enough training so that persons can get back safely into society.

Now the government is going to overcrowd the jails when they do not even have enough resources. It will make the jails even worse places, turning out even more hardened criminals, making them less adjusted people.

The member raised a very good point. I will be delighted if anyone in the government gets up to suggest that if its plan happens to be a success, there are going to be some resources to deal with the increase of people in our prison system.

[Chris Charlton, NDP, Hamilton Mountain, ON]

Mr. Speaker, when I talk to people in my home town about this crime agenda, they are not so much motivated by a sense of vengeance or wanting to seek retribution. Primarily, they are really concerned about ensuring that we do not have more victims in our communities. They are more interested on the prevention end than the hard-nosed, get tough on crime approach that we are seeing from the government.

I am sure the member has heard, as a member of the committee, many people bring forward positive suggestions for crime prevention measures. I heard the member talk about restorative justice and initiatives such as those. Could the member elaborate on those to create a more balanced picture of how we in this chamber should be dealing with crime?

[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.

[Alex Atamanenko, NDP, British Columbia Southern Interior, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I listened with great interest this afternoon to hon. members and I would like to thank the members of the Liberal Party, the Bloc and, of course, our member for Windsor—Tecumseh for their thoughtful comments.

The member for Windsor—Tecumseh has had 27 years experience as a lawyer and understands the system. Therefore, I have full confidence in him when I ask him what he thinks of this or how should we do that. He always has very good answers that have been well researched.

I want to let everyone know that when we talk about crime prevention and the justice system, we are doing that from very well researched sources and very thought out policy. I want to make sure that people are aware of that.

On the other hand, I did not have a chance today to listen to any members from the Conservative Party, which is probably a good thing.

Before we came back, people in my riding were asking about this crime stuff. They wanted to know what we were doing and what was going on. I basically said that the government had postponed the session and I then explained the whole idea of prorogation. I said that it did not make any sense and that it was a waste of money. I told them that everything that had been done will need to be restarted again. I said that all the work will need to be rekindled again and all those wages for the committee will need to be paid again. As a matter of fact, the agriculture committee just went back to work this week.

This is a symptom of what has happened and the whole idea of a delay. As my colleague from Windsor--Tecumseh said, at least four bills were already in the process before the delay and two bills may even have been law today. We might have had a couple of good crime bills, which everyone had worked on together and other parties had a chance to make amendments. We could have been going forward but instead it is almost as if we are being held, and I hate to use the word, hostage.

I heard arguments today that if we do not support the bill why did we vote for it. A lot of us voted for the bill because we felt that there was no alternative. Some good amended bills, which were worked on, discussed and should have been law, are part of this package and we should not delay them any longer.

We are at the stage now where we have this omnibus bill and we are in the process of debating it. I want to make it clear that I agree fully with what my colleague from Windsor—Tecumseh said about Bill C-27, the dangerous offenders bill, which is that we tried to amend one part of it relating to dangerous offenders upon a third conviction and would place the reverse onus on the convicted person to prove that he or she should not be considered a dangerous offender. Apparently there will be challenges and problems with it but the bill will be passed and I guess we must to live with it.

I would like to share with the House an article from the Penticton Western News, which touches on my riding and on the riding of the Minister of Public Safety. The editorial, “Legislation plays on public fears”, states:

Canadian jurisprudence -- once an example of moderation -- is changing for the worse. This is the conclusion we draw from the Tackling Violent Crime Act now winding its way through the House of Commons.

I might add that this is not some kind of a left wing newspaper that is always constantly attacking government policy or the mainstream way of life.

It goes on to state:

This broad, sweeping piece of legislation threatens to inject Canada's legal DNA with alien elements that may not only be unconstitutional, but also unconscionable because they fan private fears by exaggerated public threats.

We have seen this topic discussed among members of the opposition parties today.

The article goes on to state:

While the provision to raise the age of consent to 16 is a welcome measure to bring Canada in line with the rest of the developed world, the rest of the act -- which actually includes five bills -- is nothing short of demagoguery.

Its tough language implies that we live in a crime-ridden society, when nothing could be further from the truth. National crime statistics have declined to the lowest levels in 25 years.

Other members have mentioned the United States, our neighbour to the south, which has an incarceration rate of over 700 people per 100,000 people, the highest incarceration rate in the world, followed only by Russia with something like over 400 people per 100,000, and China. The Canadian rate is something like 100 people per 100,000 people.

When I ask people whether they would feel safer in a country that has an incarceration rate of 700 per 100,000 or in a country like Canada which has an incarceration rate of 100 per 100,000, they obviously say Canada. Something is not quite right here.

The article goes on to state:

Yet, in spite of all the available evidence, [the] Prime Minister...has convinced many that our streets and communities are indeed not safe. What we need instead, he argues, are tougher penalties for criminals and more prisons to hold them for longer, if not indefinitely. Once again, this approach contradicts all the available evidence about the effectiveness of long prison sentences.

While criminals need to be punished, they also need to undergo rehabilitation, so they will not return to their old ways once they are out of prison.

Yet this government has failed has failed to support such programs, prompting complaints from guards, whom one might expect to support a larger prison system.

The article goes on to state:

But that is not the worst part of this act. It creates an unnecessary atmosphere of fear, paranoia and suspicion.

Earlier, the NDP agenda was discussed. It is based on the same philosophy as the Bloc Québécois', that is, that prevention and protection must be emphasized alongside punishment. Together, these three fundamental principles are effective at fighting crime. This bill, however, is only about punishment.

I would like to pick up on the article about the report “Unlocking America”, which my hon. colleague talked about earlier. The article reads:

Due largely to tough-on-crime policies, the Unlocking America report says, there are now eight times as many people in U.S. prisons and jails as there were in 1970.

In fact, the U.S. states with the lowest incarceration rates generally have the lowest crime rates, it says.

I asked that question earlier and I would like to ensure this is on the record. The article goes on to state:

U.S. taxpayers now spend more than $60 billion a year on corrections, says the report. “The net result is an expensive system that relies much too heavily on imprisonment, is increasingly ineffective and diverts large sums of taxpayers' money from more effective crime control strategies.”

Interestingly enough, the government promised to increase the number of officers on the police force. We have not seen those numbers so far and yet the government is willing to build more prisons with our money to put more people in jail. Something here does not make sense.

The article continues:

Much of the burden has fallen on disadvantaged minorities. Blacks and Latinos make up 60 per cent of the U.S.'s prison population. According to the report, eight per cent of American black men of working age are now behind bars. “In effect, the imprisonment binge created our own American apartheid,” it says.

My hon. colleague from Windsor—Tecumseh gave me an interesting statistic. He said that as far as dangerous offenders go in our country, although 3% of our population is made up of first nations people, in the dangerous offender category, 20% of the prisoners are from first nations communities. There is something not quite right. The danger is that if we implement a lot of the provisions of this new act, this will increase even more.

In talking about the United States, the report states:

“At current rates, one-third of all black males, one-sixth of Latino males and one in 17 white males will go to prison during their lives. Incarceration rates this high are a national tragedy.”

U.S. prisoners receive sentences that are twice as long as British prisoners, three times as long as Canadian prisoners and five-to-10 times as long as French prisoners, the report says. “Yet these countries' rates of violent crime are lower than ours.”

Since the early 1990s, U.S. crime rates have fallen sharply and are now about 40 per cent below their peak. The report says it's “tempting” to conclude that this decline occurred because incarceration rates soared during the same period.

However, this is not, according to the article, true. It states:

“Most scientific evidence suggests that there is little if any relationship between fluctuations in crime rates and incarceration rates.”

In fact, in many cases, crime rates have risen or fallen independent of imprisonment rates, it says.

What are we to conclude as we debate this bill? The first conclusion, in summary, is that we have wasted time. A lot of these bills could have been in effect now but, as I mentioned earlier, we have been held hostage, for lack of a better word. If we support part of this bill, then we must vote for the whole bill. If we see a flaw in Bill C-27 that has not been corrected, then we must leave it up to the courts to do it.

I believe I have expressed the concerns that I have and the concerns of a lot of citizens in my riding.

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

Mr. Speaker, the Conservative government promised to hire 2,500 new policemen and to seek RCMP recruits, even in the instance where the RCMP itself is having difficulties bringing the levels up on a normal evaluation. What does the member think about the unkept promises of the law and order government?

[Alex Atamanenko, NDP, British Columbia Southern Interior, BC]

Mr. Speaker, it is evident that a promise has been broken. A program should have been in place by now. We should be working on increasing policing in our cities and small communities. We have seen some of the negative effects of it. I submit that rather than dwelling on this bill and rehashing what should have gone through, this is the direction that we should have been taking in the last few months.

[The Acting Speaker, Andrew Scheer]

It being 5:30 p.m. the House will now proceed to the consideration of private members' business as listed on today's order paper.

[Serge Ménard, Bloc, Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak in this House on a subject to which I have devoted most of my professional career. When I left university, I became a crown attorney, first at the provincial level, then at the federal level. Then I became a defence attorney. I was even the president of the Association des avocats de la défense. I was the Bâtonnier of the province of Quebec, and then minister of justice and minister of public safety. As you can see, I have long thought about crime in general and effective ways to fight it. I have also thought about the bogus solutions that are sometimes proposed and that have produced disastrous results in neighbouring countries. I would not want this country to follow in its neighbour's footsteps only to end up with the same results.

From the outset, I would say that I think we all share the same goal, and that is to fight crime. Where we differ is in how to go about it. I give my opponents credit and they should give me credit as well, especially since my past has shown that, in situations where I really had power, I could fight crime effectively. Our major victory over the Hells Angels in Quebec is a very clear example of that.

Nevertheless, I often heard from the other side that we were filibustering on Bill C-2. I do not know whether the people who said that know what a filibuster is. In French, the word is “filibusterie”. The word “filibuster” comes from the French word “filibustier”. This tactic was first used in the U.S. senate by an elderly senator who had serious objections to a bill. At the time, there was no limit on speaking time, as there is now in all legislatures, thanks in part to him. To express his disagreement with the bill, he decided to speak without stopping. He even took the Bible and read long excerpts from it, and he kept on speaking.

Today, we have measures to prevent filibusters and systematic obstruction. We have a set amount of time to present our arguments. Filibustering means using every possible procedural means to prolong a debate.

Bill C-2 groups together five bills that were introduced during the previous session, including the bill on bail. The motion at third reading was adopted unanimously, without a vote, on June 5, 2007. I therefore do not see how we could have delayed that part of Bill C-2.

Bill C-32 on impaired driving died on the order paper, even before the report stage. Once again, I do not see how anyone could accuse us of filibustering.

Bill C-27 on dangerous offenders also died on the order paper, in committee. What does it mean when a bill dies on the order paper? It means that ordinarily we should have resumed the deliberations that were interrupted in late spring, but the session was prorogued. The government prorogued it. It was the government that aborted the process these bills had to go through before becoming law. As a result, these bills could not be discussed any further.

The same is true of Bill C-22. Even worse, this bill had been adopted at third reading. Once again, it had received unanimous approval.

We voted in favour of these four bills. Where, then, is the filibustering, this tactic where members try to prolong the debate so that a bill they disagree with goes nowhere?

One major bill remains, Bill C-10, which provides for minimum sentences for offences involving firearms.

We were against it for a number of reasons, but the bill was passed at third reading on May 29, 2007.

The government decided to group these five bills together for one reason: none of the bills elicited systematic opposition. Knowing that we have some objections to Bill C-10, which I will discuss shortly, the government is trying to say that if we vote against Bill C-2 because we are against this part, we are also against all of the other parts.

This argument keeps coming up in this House, and I do not think it is well founded. I cannot understand why all of the parties keep using this argument. I myself have never used it and probably never will. However, when we vote in favour of blocks of legislation—such as the throne speech, which contains numerous measures—that means we support some measures, but are against others.

We weigh the measures we support against those we oppose. We explain why we vote as we do. For a throne speech, when the negatives outweigh the positives, we vote against it even though we support some of the measures it contains. It is utterly unfair to say that since we voted against a group of measures, we must oppose all of the measures in that group.

The same goes for the budget when they criticize us for voting against measures that we actually want to see in place. We voted against the budget because the cons, the measures we did not support, outweighed the pros. The same applies when we vote for a budget, which does not necessarily mean that we support every single measure in it.

The argument is a faulty one, but the government has come to rely on this tactic to influence public opinion during the coming election, an election that the government seems to want as soon as possible. For example, they will say that we are against changing the age of consent, even though the bill passed unanimously, and so on.

Let us get to the heart of the matter: minimum penalties. We have some objections in principle to minimum penalties. Based on my personal experience, I believe that minimum penalties do not influence crime rates. I think many people who have long been studying crime would agree with me.

First, I think that no member in this House would be able to tell me how many minimum penalties there are in the Criminal Code. People do not know the minimum penalties. In Canada, the most glaring example is marijuana. I passed the Bar exam in 1966. I started working as a crown attorney at the provincial level, and that was the first time I heard talk of marijuana. There was not much at the time. Throughout university, I do not remember hearing about anyone smoking pot. I did not even know that expression, and I was obviously not the only one.

I then became a crown attorney at the federal level and I started to work on cases related to these issues. Let us talk about marijuana and hashish from Indian hemp. The Indian hemp growing here had no hallucinogenic properties. So at the time, all marijuana, hashish and Indian hemp that people have been smoking since the late 1960s to the present day came from somewhere else.

Does anyone know what the minimum penalty was for importing marijuana into Canada? I am sure that people do not know, just like people at the time did not. The minimum penalty was seven years in prison for importing marijuana. It is one of the harshest sentences in the Criminal Code. But it was while we had that minimum penalty that marijuana use started growing, reaching peaks in the 1980s.

Since that time, levels of marijuana use have remained very high. We can clearly see that minimum sentences had little effect. The problem is that people do not know what the minimum sentences are.

On the other hand, we have an example of success, but it still needs to be taken a little further. I am referring to impaired driving. The minimum sentences have not been increased, but we have seen awareness campaigns and increased education. People know that it is a crime to drive while impaired. I remember when I finished my studies and I was buying my first car, no one talked about it. Our attitude was to consider if the person was capable of driving and we did not really see it as a criminal act. This is no longer the case.

The public has become much more aware and we have seen a decrease in impaired driving charges. In fact, they have decreased significantly. When authorities began conducting the first tests on our roads to see if people were driving while impaired, it was not uncommon to stop about 10% of drivers. When road tests are done today, with the same sample chosen in the same manner, less than 1% of drivers are found to be impaired. People have become more aware. I think of my children who drive and who, when they go to parties, have a designated driver, everyone taking their turn. These are habits they have learned without the fear of prison.

Thus, as we can see, the simple fear of a sentence does not have an impact. Plus, people do not know what the minimum sentences are. We must know a little about how the criminal mind works. I practised criminal law long enough to know a little about the subject. Does anyone really believe that criminals think seriously about the sentence they might have to serve if they are caught? First of all, most crimes are committed on impulse. What people want to avoid and what prevents them from committing crime is not the penalty, but rather the fear of getting caught. If there is a good chance they will be caught, people change their behaviour.

I also had another experience in my personal and professional life. When I began practising law in Montreal, it seemed to be the capital of armed robbery. Some of those listening may remember the famous movie called Monica la mitraille. It was a very good movie. I do not remember her real name, but I did see her in court. She was the leader of one of the groups who committed armed robberies in Montreal. There was about one a day at the time.

Does anyone remember the last armed bank robbery committed last year? I am convinced that almost no one does. Is it because thieves are now more afraid of the sentence than back when it was harsher? Why did they do it? Why has the number of these robberies decreased considerably? It is because of intelligent preventive measures. Banks are built differently and there is no longer access to large amounts of money. The risk of being caught in relation to the anticipated profits is not worth it. Furthermore, all kinds of measures have been put in place in banks and the efforts of bankers has also decreased the menace of armed bank robberies.

Putting in place a series of measures resulted in a true decrease in crime. Fear does not stop people from committing crimes.

The third example I can give is the death penalty. We abolished the death penalty in Canada 25 years ago. Since then the number of homicides has declined steadily rather than increasing.

I am not saying that we should not have sentences. We must have sentences and for certain crimes in certain circumstances they must be severe. However, the use of minimum sentences does not work.

I have another philosophical problem with minimum sentences and it is worth talking about. A judge hears a case and arguments, then weighs all the factors that need to be taken into consideration when handing down a sentence, such as individual and general deterrents, the seriousness of the charge, the seriousness of the crime, the circumstances under which the accused committed the crime, his involvement in the crime, recidivism if any, his home life, his responsibility or the influence others may have had, and so forth.

Implementing minimum sentences forces a judge, who went over all these circumstances in his heart and soul, to conclude that, even though that person should get 18 months in jail, the minimum sentence is 3 years. He is required by law, in that case, to commit an injustice. I have heard judges say that when they hand down minimum sentences.

We often forget that when we want to impose minimum sentences we are thinking about the worst offenders. When I listen to the examples given by the members opposite who defend this bill, I know full well they are thinking about the worst cases. We have to realize that minimum sentences do not apply just to the worst cases, but also to less serious cases.

I will give an example that I witnessed in my career. This will show that, although the members opposite claim that seven-year minimum sentences are not being handed out, a number of people have, at one point, served seven years in prison for importing marijuana.

I remember a young woman whose capacities were diminished after an accident. She had a daughter and her husband had left her. She met a charming, smooth talking American fellow with an education, like her, and she fell for him. He was willing to live with her handicap. He was very attentive towards her. They were in love. He seemed to have a income, without being very wealthy. One day, he left, saying that he would be sending her parcels. It was not immediately clear to her what he was talking about. Parcels did start arriving. Based on telephone conversations between them, it is obvious that she suspected that the parcels contained something illegal, because he asked that she not open them. She did not import anything. She simply stored parcels in her home. But because she suspected that there was something illegal going on, under the doctrine of wilful blindness, she was undoubtedly guilty, like him, of importing narcotics.

I wonder what sentences my colleagues in the House would hand down to that man and that woman respectively. Does it not seem profoundly unfair that the same sentence be imposed on both of them just because the minimum sentence prescribed is seven years? Since the offence involved relatively small amounts of hashish, the least dangerous drug, he may not have deserved a seven year sentence and she certainly did not. This goes to show how minimum sentences result in unfair situations. Different situations have to be considered.

In addition, the examples of cases raised in the House often appeared very serious, based on the two or three reasons for which the judge imposed such sentences. I doubt, however, that this was the case. The judge probably cited 10 reasons or so, which are not listed, for coming to the decision which is described to us as unacceptable. It is entirely possible that a few of the thousands of sentences rendered every day in Canada seem too heavy handed. In the case of a truly unacceptable sentence, the potential remedy would not come from Parliament, as is suggested by our discussions, but from the appeal courts.

In none of the arguments put forward in support of increasing sentences was an unreasonable decision by an appeal court ever mentioned.

Finally, the most important thing to know concerning firearms: in the United States, they incarcerate seven times as many people as we do, and guns roam freely, so to speak. As a result, three times—

[The Acting Speaker, Andrew Scheer]

The hon. member for Vancouver Island North for questions and comments.

[Catherine Bell, NDP, Vancouver Island North, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I listened very carefully to my hon. colleague's comments. He talked a lot about young people and the need for education and support for young people to change behaviour over time. That is so important. We in the NDP believe we need to have these kinds of supports and education so that as our children grow up they understand the difference between right and wrong and how to behave in society.

Here is what I have seen from young people today, including my son. The member talked about how young people who go out drinking now have a designated driver. The first time my son said he was going out with his friends to a party, I was quite worried about it, but they had, among themselves, selected a designated driver. I thought that was very responsible.

What I have seen from young people is this type of responsibility, which shows a maturity in people so young, and I think that says a lot about the education system and how we are bringing up our children today. I know there are a lot of young people out there who are very conscious about the environment and society in general and who want to be good citizens.

With regard to this bill and why it is here before us today, we are accused of stalling things, so I just want to know if the hon. member thinks that it is not a little hypocritical of the government to make those accusations against our parties when it is the Conservatives who prorogued this House and put everything back to square one.

[Serge Ménard, Bloc, Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, QC]

Mr. Speaker, obviously, I agree completely with the member.

In introducing this bill, the government is concerned about appearances and about correcting perceptions. It is positioning the debate so that we look soft on crime, while it is tough on crime. I remember a wonderful expression used by the member for Etobicoke—Lakeshore, who said that the important thing was to be “smart on crime”. We have to hand down the right sentences and impose the right penalties on the right people when they need them.

I am also thinking of the detrimental effects prison has on young people who may have committed a crime under the influence of other people and who may even have reoffended sometimes. If you want to rehabilitate these people, prison is the worst place for them. You have to use other methods.

There is also something else to consider. The United States has an incarceration rate seven times that of Canada. I do not remember the exact budget for our correctional services, but to reach the U.S. level, we would likely have to spend seven times more. The worst is that when these young people are sent to schools for crime, they pose a danger to society when they are released.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I have a question for my colleague. A number of the elements in this bill had already been passed by the House and of course they already have been thrown back to square one by this move by the Conservatives.

One of the contentious elements of the bill is the attempt to tinker with the whole dangerous offender provision. There has been some advice given that this law will not actually stand up to a charter challenge. I would like to ask the hon. member what he thinks of that and the likelihood that we are bringing forth a law which at the end of the day simply will not pass legal muster.

[Serge Ménard, Bloc, Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, QC]

Mr. Speaker, since the charter was adopted, the Supreme Court has surprised me several times. I am therefore reluctant to make any predictions as to what its ruling will be. However, I can say what parameters the Supreme Court will base its decision on.

I believe that the provision many members are opposed to is the provision on reverse onus, whereby when an application is made to declare someone a dangerous offender, that person would have the burden of proving that he is not a dangerous offender. We are talking about someone with several convictions that were all beyond a shadow of a doubt. Consequently, the individual does not have the burden of proving, but the burden of demonstrating. Once an individual has been convicted, the convictions are deemed to have been proven beyond the shadow of a doubt.

Still, I have a hard time believing that having the burden of demonstrating in the case of something that can result in indefinite incarceration—because that is the result—can satisfy the charter criteria.

[Gérard Asselin, Bloc, Manicouagan, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I would first like to congratulate the hon. member for Marc-Aurèle-Fortin on an excellent speech. It is an honour for the constituents of Marc-Aurèle-Fortin to have a member with so much experience, both professional and political. It is to the great credit of the citizens and voters of that riding, as well as that of the Bloc Québécois, to have among its ranks such a qualified member, someone with the skills, qualifications and experience to guide the members of our party. He has done a great job of that in the House today, as well.

The Chair had to interrupt the hon. member for Marc-Aurèle-Fortin because his time had run out. At that time, I think he was about to give us a few statistics on firearms in the United States and the number of incarcerations. He was going to draw some parallels between what is happening in the United States, a country with harsher punishments, and what is going on here in Canada.

My question has two parts. The federal government can pass all the legislation it wants concerning sentences, but when a judge imposes a sentence of two years less a day, it must be served in a provincial corrections facility. Thus, the legislation can be passed here in Ottawa, at the federal level, but the sentence might nevertheless be served in a provincial facility in Quebec. If that is the case, the incarceration will be paid for entirely by the citizens of Quebec.

[Serge Ménard, Bloc, Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, QC]

Mr. Speaker, from the outset, the hon. member has been too flattering. Personally, I think it is an honour for me to represent the riding of Marc-Aurèle-Fortin. I know that almost all members of this House feel the same way about their ridings.

It is true that I have professional experience; however, that has posed a philosophical problem. I do not wish to demonstrate false humility, which is a perverse form of pride; yet, when one knows from experience that the majority of individuals have a false perception of the problem, what is the politician's duty? Is it to respond to the misperception while knowing that the solutions he suggests will not be implemented? Or is it do his utmost to change the public perception?

I completely understand that most people still believe that crime is on the rise, which is not the case. The one constant is the publicity surrounding crimes. People will rarely go and check the statistics at the end of the year. In fact, in Canada, crimes are tracked. There is a uniform crime reporting survey for police. By the way, the crime must be reported, otherwise victims will not be able to claim insurance. So crimes are reported, especially violent crimes, except perhaps in the case of an ongoing domestic dispute. When firearms are involved, or anything like that, it is all reported.

So, who goes to check with Statistics Canada? At the beginning of the year, the service was free, but it no longer is. Nevertheless, they have comparisons. I do not remember the exact numbers. I have them saved on my computer—which is closed—but I have talked about them enough to remember. They can be found at Statistics Canada, but I know a few.

In the United States, the incarceration rate is seven times higher than it is here, and firearms are much more prevalent there. What is the result? There are three times more homicides in the United States than in Canada. Five times more spouses are killed in the United States than here, in Canada. I am told that it is gangsters, but gangsters—

[The Acting Speaker, Andrew Scheer]

I regret to inform the hon. member that his time has expired. Resuming debate, the hon. member for Timmins—Baie James.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am very proud to rise on behalf of the people of Timmins—James Bay to discuss Bill C-2.

What we are called to do in Parliament, as parliamentarians and despite everything else, is to make laws of the land that will hold up and reflect a sense of jurisprudence and also a belief that the laws will establish a way we should be as a nation. This is the forum in which that happens.

Unfortunately, we have seen over the last number of years, particularly with the Conservative government and its crime agenda, the debasement of debate. There are 308 members to reflect judiciously on serious issues. Then when they stand up and speak, they are ridiculed. We have the cheap cat call gallery in the Conservatives, which is always looking to twist and take words out of context. What we end up having is the notion of debate passing through some kind of spinmeister's message box in search of a wedge issue.

At the end of the day it serves a certain political group very well. It creates a legitimation crisis. It creates a sense that Parliament is not there to get something done, that parliamentarians are sitting on their rear ends doing nothing because they are not responding.

I will speak in particular about the Conservatives' crime agenda. They government has accused basically everyone in the House of stalling on crime and being soft of crime. Conservative members have said at times in the House that members somehow support child pornography. These claims are outrageous, and it is debasement of our role, which is to bring forward reflection on bills that deal with crime.

Nowhere is this clearer than on Bill C-2. A number of the sections of this bill were brought through the House, voted on, discussed and brought forward with good amendments, to the point of being law, particularly the age of consent bill, which at the point of being law. The issue of gun crime sentencing, which all parties worked on, and provisions with regard to bail would all be law now. Yet the Conservatives prorogued the House and allowed those bills to die.

The government then started the whole process over again and began to accuse our friends in the upper chamber of not doing their job. If we even stood and asked questions, we were told we were being soft on crime and delaying the issue. It is a total obfuscation of fact. It really raises question as to why are these laws not already law, if the government were serious on a crime agenda and having laws that would work for people. The bills were ready to go.

What we have is this continual cheapening of political discourse. That leads me to the shenanigans we saw today during statements and question period. My good friend from Nepean—Carleton, who is often a favourite partisan ankle-biter, stood and tried to take the words I said yesterday and spin them into a little wedge issue for the Conservative Party and make it seems that I somehow refused to support the age of consent from 14 to 16, that I tried to block the bill and that we were soft on crime.

I will not respond to the member's comments. I admire his partisan glee, but if he is going to do a hatchet job, he might as well do the job properly. This is unfortunately the problem we see, the debasement of debate. These discussions have become so absurd and silly. I do not know exactly to whom he thinks he is appealing.

I spoke about this yesterday, about how the Conservatives would try to twist facts. The Conservatives will misrepresent what was said. Then the spin doctors will take the ten percenters—

[The Acting Speaker, Andrew Scheer]

Order, please. I heard a term, but I did not hear the entire sentence in which it was used. I heard a word used to describe one of the other hon. members. I want to caution the hon. member. I am not sure if “ankle-biter” would be found to be parliamentary. I will give the hon. member the benefit of the doubt, if he would just watch how he describes other members.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it really speaks to what is happening in terms of these issues. The statement the member made is silly. If that member wants to come up to Timmins—James Bay and run around with a little Conservative ten percenter saying that I am soft on crime, by all means do it.

The people back home sent me here because they want to get rid of that bunch. They do not believe what those members say for an instant. If the Conservatives want to spend money using the public's ink to attack me personally in my riding, they can go ahead. They can send as many ten percenters as they want. They can do their little fife and drum show and say I am soft on crime. People back home know it is not true. They know we are here to reflect on crime bills and try to get them through.

With regard to Bill C-2, it is the misinformation that party has used again and again to try to show that members are delaying. In fact, it was the Conservative government that prorogued Parliament and let those bills die, particularly the age of consent bill, which would have been law if the Conservatives had simply signed, with a stroke of the pen, to revive it.

There is speculation that there might be an election by the time the bill goes through the Senate. The Conservatives know full well that the bill might not become law. I asked yesterday whether they might enjoy that situation and then they could run an entire campaign on how everyone else in the House was soft on crime. That is not doing Canadians any good.

My dear friend from Nepean—Carleton offered $1,000 to young people to write an essay on how to protect themselves from Internet luring. However, there was a catch. They had to take his petition around to people, a petition that blamed the Senate for stalling a bill that his own government had killed. He did not tell those young people about that.

This is another example of how the Conservatives continually put their grubby, partisan fingerprints on the imagination of our young people. What happened with that petition was a real debasement of Parliament. It brought discredit on all of us in the House, because we take these issues seriously. We take the issue of the age of consent seriously. We take the issue of gun crime seriously. We now have to play this little soap opera out day after day in the House.

The government has no national vision. It has no plan. It has been trying to rag the puck on crime bills because it has nothing else in its war chest. We are now involved again in a debate that has already been done. Everything had been settled, yet the government turned the clock back and rolled out the legislation again.

No wonder people do not have any faith in politicians when we look at the government's crime agenda. If a government is willing to be that partisan about issues involving the protection of the public, then how can we have faith in it on anything else? There are so many crime bills coming forward: mandatory minimums for bicycle theft, mandatory minimums for furniture theft, getting tough on whatever. All the government has on the docket are more crime bills. As I pointed out yesterday, this is like a wound that will never heal. All we need is one more horrific crime, one more drunk driver and the government will that say our laws are not serious enough.

This debases the larger issue of what Canada's policy should be in terms of crime. Do we need to get serious on gun crimes? Certainly we do. Do we need to have policies in place to take on gangs? Yes indeed. We need to effectively target the ability of police to serve the regions of our country where we see spikes in crime. However, we also need to have a clear, coherent plan for dealing with criminals and recidivism.

I keep going back to the member for Nepean—Carleton because it was such an amusing piece. In fact, I might send it out as my ten percenter so people can see what they would have if they had a Conservative member instead of myself.

He said that I was opposed to the “three strikes and you're out” policy. Yes I am. I am certainly opposed to what the Conservatives are trying to do with their simplistic “three strikes and you're out” policy. People in California have been sentenced to life for stealing a pizza. That is the direction the government would like to take us.

The Conservatives are detracting from the larger issue. As long as we sit in the House having to defend ourselves about being soft on crime or about supporting child pornographers, or whatever else the government wants to throw at us in terms of its mud, we are not discussing the substantive need for having a forward thinking policy for the nation in the 21st century.

For example, there is a need for a committed infrastructure program for municipalities, whether rural or urban. We have no plan from the government. We are not talking about that because we are running around talking about bicycle theft today and whatever crimes tomorrow.

The other issue detracting our attention from the House by continually having bills brought back, argued again and dragged out is the example this past week of the Prime Minister, who shamed us on the international stage. At the Commonwealth talks he showed that Canada was no longer an international leader, that the government did not represent a national interest. It was a front for the ecological free booters, who are pillaging the tar sands. We need to have a serious discussion in the House about the failure of the government to come forward with an environmental policy that is anything but acting as a shield for big oil.

The issue of crime is a serious issue. We went through this in the House. We dealt with the issue of the age of consent. We dealt with the issue of gun violence. We came forward with coherent elements on which every party worked. At the end of the day, that is our role as legislators. We have to bring forward the experience of our communities so we bring in laws that will actually work, laws that can be applicable on the street, that the chiefs of police will agree with and for people who work with cases of recidivism, laws that are part of a coherent policy.

At this point we are now going through an entire debate process that should have already been done. These laws should be on the books. Why are we debating it again? I am not sure. However, I will not at this point turn around when the Conservatives say to take it or leave it, stand up or sit down. It is my role as a legislator to speak out on bills and I will continue to do that, regardless of the partisan mailings that go into my riding, regardless of whether they get backbenchers to stand to attack me or any other member of the House. Let them do it. It does not detract us from our job in this caucus of reflecting on the bills that are brought before the country. We need to ensure that when we introduce laws, they are workable laws and they are laws that will, at the end of the day, bring us forward as a nation rather than backwards.

I will finish on the “three strikes, you're out” policy. We have seen the complete failure of the crime policy in the United States, a vision for dealing with crime. The rates of violence continue in the United States. Gun crimes continue. People who should not have been thrown into the justice system are eaten up with its mandatory minimums and its “three strikes, you're out”. It is a failed policy.

The only thing worse than a failed policy are people who look at that failed policy years later, when they have all the empirical evidence, in the cold light of day, and make a calculated decision to approve a failed policy. That is even worse. It is much worse than the mistake our American neighbours made. If there were gun and gang violence, there would have been reasons for thinking that maybe the approach taken in the United States would work, but we have seen the failure of that approach. We know it has to be balanced and it has to be balanced between the need to ensure there is a way to get people out of the criminal system and into rehabilitation. We also need to have laws in place to take out the gangs, to have the police on the streets and to get serious on offences where need be.

We tried to strike that balance in the House. Having struck that balance, the Conservatives are driving in a much larger wedge. In the end, it comes to protecting our communities, and I have to always take it back to Timmins—James Bay, which I represent.

If the government is serious about getting tough on crime and protecting citizens, why have our communities on the James Bay coast been left almost without policing. The police officers, the service and the Nishnawbe Aski Nation police across the NAN territory are continually put in dangerous situations because there is no funding for them.

When we have one or two police officers in an isolated fly-in community of 2,000 people, that is not a place we should put anybody. We should have proper backup for police. Any other part of this country would take that for granted, but for some reason, in our isolated first nations communities, not only are the police underrepresented but the citizens are underrepresented. We have much higher rates of violence in these communities because of the lack of services, the lack of supports for communities and the lack of policing support. We know the stress that our police officers are under and the stress these communities are under.

If we are to get tough on crime, where is the money? Show me the money that would ensure that in the places where there is violence, which is on the isolated first nations reserves, that we have police, that the police have the necessary social supports and that we have the regional centres for victims of violence they could be taken to. They have none of that on the James Bay coast. I have always said that it is like a virtual third or fourth world.

However, one would think that a government that talks about getting tough on crime and dealing with the needs of citizens would recognize that we cannot simply put one police officer on his or her own in an isolated community with no backup. First, we are hurting the citizens and leaving them without police services, and second, there is not a non-native police service in this country that would put up with that.

Do we have to get serious about crime? Yes, we do. That is our job. Our job is to bring in laws and to ensure these laws work. We will reflect on these laws as they come forward. We will bring forward amendments that will make good laws and we will oppose laws that will not work. However, what we will never do is abrogate our responsibility as legislators to take the time to reflect on those bills.

If the government wants to take the time to prorogue the House for five weeks, that is its business. If it wants to allow bills that should have been law to sit and die, bills like the age of consent and the bills dealing with gun violence, and then begin again from scratch, that is its business. If it wants to take as long as it has to take, that is its business, but it cannot tell us in the House what our business is, which is representing our people and ensuring that any legislation the government brings forward, whether it is wrapped up in an omnibus bill or whether it is called a confidence motion, that it is legislation that will work and, at the end of the day, it has an efficacious nature that we can actually bring back and say to the people of Canada that 308 members of the House brought forward legislation that will work.

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I enjoyed hearing the comments of the NDP member for Timmins—James Bay. I also enjoyed his involvement on the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage. He has a great sense of humour and he brings a lot of knowledge of the arts to the table at that committee. He is a great piano player and guitar player. In fact, I have heard him play piano and he puts my modest talents to shame.

However, I will say that he is away out of his depth when it comes to addressing the scourge of crime that is plaguing our country.

He took great care and joy in attacking my Conservative colleague for Nepean—Carleton and yet my colleague from Nepean—Carleton was spot on when he accused the member for Timmins—James Bay of being, not only soft on crime, but of trivializing the work that we are doing in the House to try to attack violent crime.

Bill C-2 addresses dangerous offenders who repeatedly offend. These are violent offenders. It addresses the issue of gun crimes. It addresses the issue of protecting the most vulnerable in our society, our children, against adult predators. He refers to the Conservatives as “wanting to run after the kids who steal handbags”. Imagine him trivializing that work.

He went on to say in this very House, “Grabbing old ladies handbags; kids tossing litter out on the sidewalks”. He refers to not getting serious about mandatory minimums for “furniture theft and bicycle theft”.

I would suggest that he should apologize to the House for trivializing the victims of crime in this country and the work that we are doing in the House, the very serious work we are doing to address crime in this country.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I have great respect for my colleague. We have worked well together on committees. I have always told him that I respect him because he normally does his homework, unlike my dear friend from Nepean—Carleton who does not do his homework. I need for him to help his younger colleague.

My sense is that at the end of the day we are dealing with repeat offences here. We had a bill that was already pretty much law and we had to start it over again. I think there is a bit of a reverse onus on the Conservative Party to show us that it is actually serious about getting tough on crime and is not just playing it in the House.

I was more than willing to go through this first round of bills. The member will know that I probably spoke once or twice on the need to raise the age of consent. I am more than willing to speak a lot more this time because I believe there is a reverse onus for the government to get serious, to stop playing games in this House and stop running these bills through again and again.

As far as my friend from Nepean—Carleton saying that I am not onside on raising the age of consent, he obviously does not do his homework. However, that is okay because I did not expect him to. I am sure the member for Abbotsford will know--or wherever it is in B.C. he is from. I get my places all mixed up once I get--

[An hon. member]

It's all paradise.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am sure it is all paradise out there.

I am sure he would do his homework to know that I do take the issue of age of consent very seriously.

[Keith Martin, Liberal, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

Mr. Speaker, when the NDP killed the previous government it killed a national early learning head start program for children. The police have even said that one of the most effective ways of preventing crime is to have an early learning head start program for children.

Why did the member's party kill the previous government and, in so doing, kill the early learning head start program that would have reduced youth crime by 60%?

Would the member support the government's initiative to criminalize low level drug dealers who are actually addicts paying for their addiction through drug dealing and whether those people should be treated as a medical problem rather than a judicial problem, differentiating them from the commercial grow operations and the organized crime gangs that are the real parasites that are trafficking and those are the real criminals in this equation?

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the number one rule in this House is that one should not lead with one's chin.

Why would the member continue to give us credit for bringing down a government that the Canadian people were so sick of that they threw out? I think it does misrepresentation to the will of the average Canadian citizen who recognized that the member's government was so hopelessly corrupt that it needed to be thrown out. However, if he wants to put all that credit on the 29 or 30 New Democrats, I am certainly willing to take some of that credit, but I think it is misplaced.

The reality is that the Liberal Party still does not get it. The Liberals misrepresented what they were here to do. They did not deliver on an early childhood education program. They did not come through with an environment program. They ran out of the red book for 12 or 13 years. One of the greatest pieces of electoral spin in history was that they just stripped the cover off the red book each election, put a new date on it and ran with the same issues again.

When the Liberals were in their final dying days, we remember the pathetic example on television of the former Liberal prime minister begging the people to give him until Gomery, to give him 30 days to 60 days and then he would call an election. He begged people to give his government a chance.

The election happened 30 days before that. However, in that period between the 30 days when we helped bring down that corrupt government and the former prime minister would have had his election, that was the moment when the Liberals took every unfulfilled promise that was ever put in the red book and flung it across the country as some great fulfilled national vision. No wonder the Canadian people threw them out.

[The Acting Speaker, Andrew Scheer]

I just want to remind hon. members about the rules in the Standing Orders relating to relevancy. I hope that all members, both in their questions and comments and in their speeches, stick as closely as possible to the actual substance of the bill.

I think we have time for one more question and comment. The hon. member for Burnaby—New Westminster.

[Peter Julian, NDP, Burnaby—New Westminster, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I enjoyed the presentation from the member for Timmins—James Bay. As always, he makes a lot of sense. Hopefully, members in the other three corners of the House will listen to what he said.

We had under the Liberals repeated promises that were always broken, whether that was the child care promise that was broken for 13 years, the aboriginal rights promise that was broken for 13 years or a whole variety of other promises that were broken.

Now we have the Conservatives who made a bunch of promises that they are now breaking and, in fact, on what they are attempting to bring through the House now in terms of justice. The member pointed to a number of measures that the Conservatives could have taken if they had been serious about being smart on crime but they did not.

Does the member believe that the Conservative government governs in the same way that the former corrupt Liberal government governed?

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Mr. Speaker, that is such a wide open question, but I will try to stick close to hand to the subject of crime. There are not enough hours in the day for us to go through all the shenanigans of 13 years of Liberal corruption. I am sure the folks back home would love me to do an itemized list.

However, at the end of the day, the problem with what the former government failed to deliver and what it created was a major disconnect between what the Liberals said they would do and what they would actually do. I always take my advice from the best orator in history, the carpenter in Galilee, who said make your “yes” mean yes and your “no” mean no. We do not need spin. We do not need a message. We do not need it to be a wedge issue. We just need to stand and say that we will or we will not do it. The Liberal Party believed it never actually had to do it.

That brings us to the question of crime. We were sent here to enact laws and some of those laws have to do with crime and making sure that gangs are not running wild, that gun violence is being contained and that our police have the resources to deal with that. Our job is to listen to the problem and bring in legislation that actually works, make our “yes” mean yes and our “no” mean no.

Unfortunately, what we have seen here is a political game that has been played out where substantive issues of crime are being reduced to the wedge issues, being reduced to cheap spin and spin-doctoring and sometimes very paltry efforts at attacks by backbench members in the government party against other members who are actually doing their job.

If the government were trying to be different than the old corrupt Liberal Party, it would come forward with a simple plan, make it work and get on with the nation's business. Unfortunately, I have not seen it make that step yet.

[The Acting Speaker, Andrew Scheer]

It is my duty pursuant to Standing Order 38 to inform the House that the question to be raised tonight at the time of adjournment is as follows: the hon. member for Davenport, Justice.

[Peter Julian, NDP, Burnaby—New Westminster, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I am going to pick up where the member for Timmins—James Bay left off in terms of Bill C-2 and setting the context for what is very clearly hypocrisy from the Conservative government on justice issues.

The member for Timmins—James Bay talked about some of the areas where the Conservatives have taken no action or actually cut back on funding. That is an important starting point because if the government was really serious about tackling crime issues, it would take the NDP lead on being smart on crime. It would take the whole spectrum of measures that need to be taken to reduce crime rates and the number of victims in society.

Indeed, though there are some measures in this bill that the NDP can support, the reality is that this seems to be more political spin than an actual attempt to deal substantively with criminal justice issues and lowering the crime rate.

I will be addressing some of these points later on, but let us look at what is not in Bill C-2 and what has not been part of the Conservatives' justice platform since they were elected.

There is nothing to deal with youth at risk. We know that $1 invested in preventive crime measures actually saves $6 later on in policing costs, penal costs and justice costs. Yet, the Conservative government has done virtually nothing to provide support for youth at risk programs.

With regard to addiction programs, we know that certain countries have managed to achieve reduction rates of about 80% in addictions, particularly drug addicts. Countries, like Switzerland, have made very substantive leaps forward in reducing the number of addicts.

We know that when we reduce the number of addicts, we essentially reduce the crimes committed by those addicts in their addicted frenzy, trying to find their next fix. Many innocent Canadians get hurt and yet the government has done nothing to put in place addiction programs to lower the addiction rate and reduce the crime rate at the same time.

We have seen an utter failure by the government in supporting community policing. It talked about increasing the number of police officers, however, it has done absolutely nothing substantive to support communities from coast to coast to coast that are looking for funding for community policing.

One of the two communities I represent, New Westminster, has an extraordinarily high cost for policing that was passed on to the federal government. The federal government did nothing to support the community of New Westminster and its extraordinarily high policing costs that were undertaken because of actions by the government.

It is the same with the other community of Burnaby because of the refusal by the government to restore the cutbacks that we saw under the previous Liberal governments for the RCMP, where there was a shortage of front line police officers. There is no support for community policing or for the overall crime prevention measures, whether it is safety audits or other community initiatives to reduce crime.

What the government does is it shovels billions of dollars out the back of a truck to the corporate sector in tax cuts. We are talking about record levels of corporate profits and all the government can do is shovel money off the back of a truck to the corporate sector rather than provide support for community policing, youth at risk programs, addiction programs and crime prevention measures.

The government funds none of those programs. It just shovels money to its corporate friends. It is the same old, same old. That is exactly how the former Liberal government acted. We see, generally speaking, no concrete measures being taken.

In terms of the international initiatives undertaken by the government, we see a clear contradiction with the purported aims of Bill C-2. Even today in question period there was a refusal by the government to stop crimes against humanity in Darfur. There was a refusal to do anything about that.

Yesterday, at the trade committee, Conservatives and Liberals were working together to ditch the NDP motion that would put an end to the trade negotiations taking place with Colombia. This is extremely important because we know the Colombian government is linked to crimes. There were summary executions, hundreds of them this year by the Colombian military. Dozens of trade unionists were killed by paramilitaries connected to the Colombian government and yet, instead of the government saying these crimes must be punished and taking a stand, it is actually rewarding the Colombian government linked to crimes against humanity by negotiating a trade agreement.

That is symbolic of just how hypocritical the government is. People can commit crimes. They just have to do it in dress suits or be connected with a right-wing government and then it is all right.

That just does not wash with most Canadians. They understand the hypocrisy that when a Colombian regime, paramilitaries, or the Colombian military commits crimes against humanity, commits murder, instead of being rewarded with a trade agreement, the Canadian government should be condemning them.

That is the hypocrisy between how Conservatives act when somebody is in a dress suit or when somebody is in a military uniform in Colombia, as opposed to how they purport to act by bringing this legislation forward.

Let us look at the process around Bill C-2, which is another symbol of the hypocrisy of the Conservative government.

Sixty per cent of what was in the bill was before the Senate. We have seen with this Senate, though it is Liberal-dominated, that it has done absolutely nothing to stop the Conservative agenda. Liberals work in cooperation with the Conservatives.

The Conservatives essentially have a functional majority in Parliament because the Liberal members have given up their right to be a member of the opposition. They sit on their hands. They do not protest anything. They accept anything the Conservatives hand out, and essentially those justice bills were in the process of being passed by the Senate.

The other chamber passed the softwood sellout, which was clearly not in Canada's interest, in 72 hours. This justice legislation would have been passed, but instead, the government withdrew it, took all the legislation back and now is resubmitting it to the House. It was a delay of months. If that is not hypocrisy, I do not know what is.

Essentially, they were right at the finish line, as we were with the softwood sellout winning in American courts. We were at the finish line and the government said, “No, we do not actually want this stuff to pass now”. It prorogued Parliament and reintroduced the bills in order to have the same debates all over the place because it is not really serious about taking action on justice issues. The Conservatives are not serious about community policing or crime prevention measures, dealing with addiction, or dealing with youth at risk. No, they are not serious about that, but they want to pretend that they are, so they are going to reintroduce all this legislation. Now it is here before us today.

The Conservatives said they wanted to deal with dangerous offenders. That is part of what they wanted to do. They said that this bill would deal with it, and as the member for Abbotsford well knows, because he has been doing the same kind of mailings into my riding that the member for Timmins—James Bay mentioned earlier, this legislation will be thrown out under a charter challenge.

It is important to note that the NDP submitted amendments at committee and in this House, and has been consistently saying to the government that since it knows it will be thrown out under a charter challenge, since it knows this legislation cannot work, because we do live under a Constitution, since it knows that, let us do the smart thing and remove the caps on dangerous offender designation.

Let us look at what is in the bill. I will read it because it is important for Canadians to know the intense hypocrisy of the government. It says:

--an application under subsection (1) not later than six months after that imposition;

It is repeated in paragraph (b):

--that is not later than six months after the imposition of sentence--

It is still in the bill, the limit of six months. Is that important? Yes it is. The balcony rapist, Mr. Paul Callow, who was released because of these provisions that are currently in the Criminal Code, continued by this Conservative government, was released into the community because there was no provision in the Criminal Code for designation later in sentence of a dangerous offender.

That is important because in this case, this individual did not go through the required treatment programs, and this individual reportedly and allegedly assaulted a nurse in prison.

Under this Conservative justice bill that is before us now, the same situation can arise tomorrow, next week or next year because the six month deadline for the designation of a dangerous offender still exists.

It is not as if the government did not know. The member for Windsor—Tecumseh, who has been voted by all members of this House as the most knowledgeable member of Parliament in this Parliament, told the government repeatedly, warned the government and sent letters. He went to committee and he brought forward the amendment.

Liberals and Conservatives, obviously not having the slightest understanding of what was actually in the bill, refused to adopt the amendment. Then it was brought forward to the House. There was the same rejection from Liberals and Conservatives.

Therefore, we are now looking at a bill that allows the exact same circumstances that happened earlier this year to happen again because the government does not seem to be serious about criminal justice issues.

When we take a smart on crime approach, we have to look at everything: crime prevention measures, funding for that, funding for community policing, and changes to the Criminal Code that actually address the issues. We do not look at changes to the Criminal Code that are simply there as make-up to pretend that we are doing our job.

Perhaps the most egregious aspect of this whole process of putting forward legislation, of pulling back the legislation, of putting forward the legislation again, refusing to heed the advice that the government received from committee representatives and witnesses who appeared before the government, and refusing to heed the advice of the most knowledgeable member of Parliament in the House, as voted by members of the House of Commons, is that we are back to exactly the same situation that we were in last spring with no capability to provide for dangerous offender designation later in the sentence. That is the appalling thing about this whole process.

It is appalling to hear the hypocrisy when crimes are committed internationally. The Conservatives simply say, “That's fine. You can commit a crime. You can commit a murder if you're a member of the Colombia military. You can do these things. We don't care. At home we are going to pay lip service to some aspects of dealing with criminal justice issues, but by no means all of them and by no means in the comprehensive way that is required”.

That is the net result of what we have before us. Some of the elements I have supported and some of the elements other NDP members have supported, but the process disappoints me enormously. The process points to the fact that the government is not serious about these issues. What it wants to get is political spin out of this. It does not want to deal in a concrete way with all aspects of the criminal justice system,

Perhaps the clearest hypocrisy is that the government surely does not want to change its priorities of forking out, shovelling out, billions of dollars to the corporate sector in tax gifts. It certainly does not want to change that focus to actually adequately funding the programs that will reduce the number of victims.

In other words, if there is a victim, there are certainly some enforcement measures in the bill, but the government does not do anything to actually reduce the number of victims through youth at risk, through addiction programs, through community policing, or through crime prevention measures. That is the most appalling thing.

I would like to move on to one of the other elements. Today in the Ottawa Citizen it was revealed that the federal Minister of Justice has received studies prepared by his own department that indicate that his own criminal justice measures will not work.

I will read this into the record because I think this is very relevant to the debate we are having on Bill C-2. Some of the provisions of Bill C-2 are improvements, but generally speaking the overall so-called crime fighting agenda of the government is designed for political spin. It is not designed for the kind of practical measures that do make a difference. The article by Richard Foot states:

[The] federal Justice Minister is pressing ahead with plans to create mandatory minimum prison terms for drug crimes in spite of two studies prepared for his own department that say such laws don't work, and are increasingly unpopular as crime-fighting measures in other countries.

That is from the study for the minister himself: minimum sentences are not an effective sentencing tool with regard to drug crime. That is one conclusion of these reports prepared for the justice department itself.

The report states in regard to mandatory minimum sentences that “while they show success in deterring firearms or drunk driving crimes”, and those are measures we have supported in this legislation, “particularly among repeat offenders, they appear to have no impact on drug crime”.

Of course, the justice minister did not respond to any requests for interviews on this particular subject.

I think this begs the big question. If some of the measures that are most effective in reducing the crime rate have not been considered by the government, and in fact most of the measures we have outlined today that actually do reduce the crime rate have not been considered by the government at all, and if the departmental studies that the Minister of Justice gets in his own department indicate that some of his legislation is flawed, the question is, where are the Conservatives getting their advice?

The government had recommendations from the most knowledgeable member of Parliament in this House, the member for Windsor—Tecumseh. He indicated very clearly that what was needed was the provision for later in sentence designation of dangerous offender. He indicated that it would have an effect and avoid the kind of loopholes that led to the balcony rapist being released into our community of New Westminster with no support whatsoever. He was put into a homeless shelter and, of course, according to the rules of the homeless shelter, it put him out onto the streets every day.

We can imagine the impact on our community of that kind of wrong-headed approach to criminal justice measures, yet not a single member of the Conservative caucus and certainly not the justice minister, no one within the Conservative caucus, actually took action to close that loophole. As we saw, the loophole is very much still there. This legislation that the justice minister is bringing forward and which the Conservatives say we should adopt still has the loophole.

So the Conservative political spin about actually dealing with that issue is very clearly nothing but spin. The studies indicating that some of the other legislation coming forward is ineffective come from the justice minister's own department.

If what is very clearly here in place is legislation that does not do what it is purported to do, that does not deal with the issues it is supposed to deal with, then we have to ask the question, what is the real agenda here? The real agenda appears to be trying to have this Conservative government campaign on crime and justice issues without having done a whole lot on those issues.

The government has flawed legislation, admittedly flawed legislation, that it has not worked to improve. In fact, there is legislation that was almost passed but that the government has now pulled back. The former justice minister was fired because of the admittedly poor nature of some of the legislation coming forward.

Most importantly, the key components of crime prevention in lowering the crime rate and actually producing fewer victims have been ignored or cut back by this government: youth at risk programs, crime prevention measures such as safety audits, community policing funding, which has been sorely inadequate, as it was under the former Liberal government, and addiction programs.

All of those measures would make a difference. All of those measures have been ignored by the government. All of those measures have been simply put aside.

As for the priority of the government, disappointing I think to any Canadian who looked at what was being promised and expected at least that the Conservatives would put into place some realistic funding envelopes that would actually address these issues they campaigned on, instead of having that as the priority, the Conservatives have put into place a priority of shovelling billions of taxpayers' dollars into tax gifts to the wealthiest of Canada's corporations.

That is why the government's real record is so disappointing. That is why when we look at Bill C-2 we can only look at it, with some good elements, as a missed opportunity.

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I have listened carefully to my colleague from British Columbia, the member for Burnaby—New Westminster. I was astounded to hear him make the categorical statement that this legislation will be turned down by the courts. In other words, it is not going to pass muster at the Supreme Court of Canada.

That is typical. Whenever our government has come forward with legislation that is going to get tough on crime in Canada and make our streets and communities safer, the typical response we get from the NDP is that we are trampling on the rights of the criminals, of the accused. There is one word that we never hear from the NDP--

[Myron Thompson, Conservative, Wild Rose, AB]

Victims.

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Victims. Exactly. My colleague from the Conservative Party got that right. We never hear the word “victims” from the NDP. The victims are the ones who are caught in the middle.

I would suggest that the member for Burnaby—New Westminster consider his position. Again, after all the railing against this legislation, Bill C-2, which he just finished after some 20 minutes of rambling and ranting, I am astounded by the fact of what he did yesterday when he had a chance to stand and say he is against getting tough on crime. What did he do? He stood and voted in favour of the legislation. How can that be? I ask the member that.

[Peter Julian, NDP, Burnaby—New Westminster, BC]

Mr. Speaker, obviously the member for Abbotsford was asleep at the switch again, because he knows full well that the dangerous offender provisions do not do what we need to have in this legislation. Despite the fact that the NDP pushed that legislation and said to close the loophole on the six month limit, the Conservatives refused to close the loophole. So the loophole is in the legislation and the member knows that full well.

The issue is not that the Conservatives are tough on crime. They are stupid on crime, no offence, but what we essentially have here is legislation with none of the funding in place for community policing, none of the funding in place for crime prevention, none of the funding in place for addiction programs, and none of the funding that actually reduces the number of victims.

If the member had been listening, and I wish that for once Conservative members would actually listen to what is being said in this House rather than always reading from their prepared text and their talking points from the Prime Minister's Office and never deviating from that, as I say, if he had actually listened, he would have heard references at least a dozen times to victims.

To say that because the Conservatives have brought forward amendments to the Criminal Code, even if they do not do what they are expected to do, and while they have refused to provide all of the funding that actually reduces the crime rate, such as crime prevention programs and policing that they are strangling by their refusal to fund while they spend billions in corporate tax gifts, what he is doing is simply proving my point: the Conservatives are hypocritical on crime issues.

[Keith Martin, Liberal, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

Mr. Speaker, in Vancouver we have a serious problem, as we do across the country, in terms of the epidemic of HIV-AIDS and other blood-borne pathogens that kill a lot of people. Some of that, of course, is driven by the sharing of needles and addictions, particularly narcotics.

I would like to ask my NDP colleague from British Columbia whether or not his party will support our party in trying to convince the government to support not only a longer term expansion for the life of the Insite supervised injection program in Vancouver, but also--

[The Acting Speaker, Andrew Scheer]

Order. I made a comment earlier today about questions and comments being relevant to the bill before the House. I am afraid that I just do not find anything relating to Bill C-2 in the question. If the hon. member has a question relevant to the bill, I will allow it.

[Keith Martin, Liberal, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. The relevance, of course, is the connection between drug use and crime. I want to ask the member again if he supports the expansion of supervised injection sites across the country and also the NAOMI project, which is a narcotic substitution program that saves lives and reduces crime.

[The Acting Speaker, Andrew Scheer]

There is just very little in Bill C-2 regarding some of the issues the member has raised. If the hon. member for Burnaby—New Westminster can answer the question with some relevance to Bill C-2, I will allow him a chance to respond.

[Peter Julian, NDP, Burnaby—New Westminster, BC]

Mr. Speaker, the member for Vancouver East, who is also the NDP House leader, has been the foremost proponent of issues around Insite. I will take it through its more global context. The reality is that there are best practices around the world and the government could have learned from them.

If the government were sincere about dealing with crime issues, it would not be cutting and hacking back on funding for community policing or crime prevention programs. We know very well that $1 spent there saves $6 later on in policing costs, penal costs and justice costs. It just makes good sense from a taxpayer's point of view. It also lowers the number of victims.

If the government were sincere, it would be tackling those best practices instead of bringing forward legislation that, although it does some good things, and that is why I will vote for it, does not do nearly what is required for the government to reduce the crime rate. That is the issue. It is hypocritical, because those members are not willing to walk the talk.

[Catherine Bell, NDP, Vancouver Island North, BC]

Mr. Speaker, it is always a pleasure to sit through a discourse from my colleague from Burnaby—New Westminster. He talked about the hypocrisy of why we are at this point in the discussions today and also about the partisan politics being played around these crime bills.

I think it is important to talk about forward-looking leadership on the prevention of crime and the things the NDP talks about. I want to quote my hon. colleague from Windsor--Tecumseh. In his speech, he talked about the five parts of Bill C-2, four of which the NDP is okay with and one we are having some trouble with. He mentioned that quite eloquently in his speech.

The most knowledgeable member of Parliament, the member for Windsor--Tecumseh, said:

--the balance of the bill had provisions in it that either we had ourselves brought forward in the last election in our platform or were prepared to support the government on because we felt that it was in the best interests of Canada. It actually either protected people or met the requirement of having to make amendments to the Criminal Code where it was long past needing these amendments....

The member for Windsor—Tecumseh went on to talk about prevention and named some of those things. A little later on, he said:

--the greater majority of this bill is a bill that we looked at and said that, yes, these are good provisions, these are provisions that make sense in terms of building a fair, equitable justice system that protects our society.

I want to ask my hon. colleague if he could give us more examples of the kinds of things that could be put in place to reduce crime, examples of the preventative measures that Canadians are asking for.

[Peter Julian, NDP, Burnaby—New Westminster, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I know that my colleague from Vancouver Island North is concerned about criminal justice issues and she has been doing a remarkable job in the House of Commons.

She raises an interesting point. We are going back over the same legislation for I think the third or fourth time now. It is much the same legislation. The Conservatives insert it, bring it back to the House, put it in the Senate, prorogue the House, and then reintroduce it in a new form.

The Conservatives have been playing a shell game with Canadians. It is really tragic and unfortunate that they are playing this shell game around criminal justice legislation while at the same time cutting back on what are the key areas to actually reduce the crime rate. We have mentioned some of them: youth at risk programs, community policing programs, crime prevention programs, things such as safety audits for neighbourhoods and apartment buildings, and things like addiction programs. In other countries, all of these measures have led to a substantial drop in the crime rate.

The Conservative government seemingly only takes on legislation very much on the American model. Some of the legislation is good. Some of it is very poorly crafted. The end result is not going to be what it promised Canadians.

[The Acting Speaker, Andrew Scheer]

Is the House ready for the question?

[Some hon. members]

Question.

[The Acting Speaker, Andrew Scheer]

The question is on the motion. Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

On division.

[The Acting Speaker, Andrew Scheer]

(Motion agreed to, bill read the third time and passed)