Bill C-4 (Historical)

Sébastien's Law (Protecting the Public from Violent Young Offenders)

An Act to amend the Youth Criminal Justice Act and to make consequential and related amendments to other Acts

This enactment amends the sentencing and general principles of the Youth Criminal Justice Act, as well as its provisions relating to judicial interim release, adult and youth sentences, publication bans, and placement in youth custody facilities. It defines the terms “violent offence” and “serious offence”, amends the definition “serious violent offence” and repeals the definition “presumptive offence”. It also requires police forces to keep records of extrajudicial measures used to deal with young persons.

Sébastien's Law (Protecting the Public from Violent Young Offenders)

[Rick Norlock, Conservative, Northumberland—Quinte West, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it seemed that I was listening to the member ad infinitum.

I thought we were talking about Bill C-4 for a while, but he strayed off to prison farms. What he does not realize is that very few people are finding work in the animal husbandry business because, as he and I both know, farmers are struggling.

My riding is home to Canada's largest federal penitentiary, and I can tell the member that a lot of good things are happening with the people who are serving time there. They are learning trades. Some of them are actually getting their ticket as sandblasters for instance. In some cases they are finding jobs before they leave prison. They are learning a trade while they are in jail. They are getting an education so that they can get a better job to provide for themselves and their families. I could go on and on.

The member for Malpeque should avail himself of the statements of Professor Martin of the University of the Fraser Valley who appeared before the justice committee. He said that sentencing does provide a deterrent.

I wonder if the member for Malpeque could tell the House when the protection of society should be given consideration when sentencing young offenders. Is he of the opinion that the protection of society should be continued?

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Mr. Speaker, in response to the last point, the protection of society is extremely important and it should be given consideration all of the time in fact.

However, there are many ways of considering that protection of society. One of them is having governments at both the federal and provincial levels work on the preventive side, providing child care and daycare, which the Conservative government took away, for instance.

The other way to protect society is to do what was suggested earlier, have rehabilitation programs in place so that people in the prison system come out rehabilitated. What the government is emulating is the system in the United States which is to build more jails and throw people into them.

The member for Northumberland—Quinte West talked about other skills. They are important. Of course those other skills are important, but what is also important is what people learn by working on the farm.

I know there is a government over there that does not care about farm policy. I believe the member said that farmers are struggling. It is no wonder they are struggling. They are struggling because last year the government spent $900 million less on farm safety programs than it did the year before. The hog industry is in trouble. The potato industry is in trouble. The beef industry is in trouble. We have a government that just does not care.

The Conservatives do not care about farmers any more than they care about the people they throw in prison. It is unacceptable and sad.

[Paul Szabo, Liberal, Mississauga South, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the member has raised some interesting perspectives on an approach to crime prevention and the related public safety issues.

I want to remind him of a comment by the member for Marc-Aurèle-Fortin. His characterization was that the government is not interested in reducing crime, but rather in trying to win votes by using slogans like “We are tough on crime”.

The member is well aware of what the government has done. We have seen these bills circulating and circulating and then Parliament is prorogued and the government introduces them again at different stages. The government is not really attempting to get any of them through. There does not seem to be a commitment.

I must admit that if a slogan were to be adopted by this place, it should not be a matter of being tough on crime but rather of being smart on crime.

The member gave some examples of the experience of the United States versus Canada in terms of its incarceration rates, its level of public safety and the quality of crime prevention.

I wonder if the member would care to comment.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Mr. Speaker, the question goes right to the point of the difference between the official opposition and the current Conservative government which is that we want to be smart on crime. We want to improve bills so that we have less crime, that when the people who commit crime come out of the prison system they are rehabilitated, that within the prison system itself there is the training systems and policies to work with people to make them better and more productive citizens in Canadian society.

The member is absolutely right. He mentioned that the government really is not about reducing crime, but is really about trying to win votes, something we have not heard much of here lately. Some of these bills have been introduced three or four times. It was not the official opposition that prevented them from getting through. It was the Prime Minister himself with his prorogation of Parliament. The Conservatives went to great lengths to try to blame it on the Liberal dominated Senate, but there was only one bill that was slowed down by the Liberal dominated Senate and the government tried to allege all of them were.

Now we have a Conservative dominated Senate, but the government still has not brought all the bills forward. The Conservatives are still dragging their heels. It comes back to what we talked about earlier, the culture of deceit. They want to be able to find another reason to go to the public to blame those big bad Liberals and try and message that we held them up, when really it is the Prime Minister who prevented them from getting passed and the Conservatives have not even introduced some of them.

[Mark Warawa, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of the Environment]

Mr. Speaker, I listened intently to the member and he talked about anything but Bill C-4 and went off topic continually.

He talked about this government going after the votes on justice issues. After looking at his comments carefully, he is suggesting Canadians do not know anything about justice issues, that the Liberal Party does not agree with Canadians wanting safer communities. He is suggesting the Liberals know how to be smart about justice issues like two for one credit for violent offences. Canadians said absolutely not and this government changed that. Why would the member call that type of ridiculous attitude toward justice smart and say that Canadians do not know what they are doing about justice issues? Why would he disrespect Canadians in the way that he is doing? He needs to stand up for the victims, not just the offenders.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Oh my goodness, Mr. Speaker, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of the Environment is certainly off the wall today, but it goes to the Conservatives' point about messaging. They want to try and attack the Liberals rather than own up to their own responsibility that they have not dealt effectively with this issue since they came to government.

As I have said, this party on this side of the House does believe in smart policies to deal with crime. We do believe in penalties, but we also believe in pensions and the social side. The government just withdraws all the money it can from social programs whether it is with Status of Women or child care and daycare, whatever it may be. It does not assist the families who need assistance so that youth can be more productive members in society. Instead, the Conservatives go right to the penalty side.

I had better add in this point because it is an important one. Frank Addario of the Criminal Lawyers' Association said that there is no evidence that more severe punishment does anything to reduce recidivism among youth. He is an individual who should know. What the Government of Canada has to do is listen to some of those folks who work within the system and build better policies around what they say rather than its own attitudes that do not make a lot of sense.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have this opportunity to speak to Bill C-4, An Act to amend the Youth Criminal Justice Act and to make consequential and related amendments to other Acts.

Let me say from the outset that I have very serious concerns about this legislation. That will not come as a surprise to many people given my concerns about the approach of the Conservative government to criminal justice issues generally. I have expressed that concern on many occasions here in the House.

There is a body of opinion, some represented here in the House and more broadly in the community, that the Youth Criminal Justice Act does require some tweaking. It is not an old piece of legislation but it is a piece of legislation that does need attention. There are people who think some minor aspects of it need some attention. However, I think the bill before us goes way beyond tweaking and way beyond fixing the small problems with the act that need attention. The bill contains some very significant changes.

Here is how some of the bill's key provisions have been described.

The bill would make protection of society the primary goal of the act. The bill adds denunciation and deterrence to the sentencing provisions. That is a very significant addition. The bill would require the court to consider lifting the publication ban on the names of young offenders convicted of violent offences when youth sentences are given. It is very important to note that the government has also changed the definition of violent offences and serious violent offences in this legislation.

The bill would require police forces to keep records of extrajudicial measures used to deal with young persons in order to make it easier to identify patterns of reoffending. I will speak about that later.

The bill proposes to detain youth charged with a serious offence while he or she awaits a trial.

The bill would allow custody of young persons where they have committed an indictable offence for which an adult would be liable to imprisonment for a term of more than two years and has a history that indicates a pattern of extrajudicial sanctions.

Finally, among other provisions, there is a provision that would require offenders under the age of 18 who are sentenced to custody to be placed in youth facilities only, even if they receive an adult sentence.

The last provision in this legislation is the one that is clearly supportable. It marks a huge turnaround for the Conservatives. It comes after they blew it in the last election when folks in Quebec in particular made it clear that they thought youth should not be doing time in adult prisons. That was a significant issue in the last federal election campaign.

I am concerned, however, that the burden of implementing this provision falls to provincial governments, and the federal government has not indicated if it will assist them to assure it is fully implemented. Without that kind of assistance, it could easily be an empty promise.

Even the best part of this bill, ensuring that youth are not sentenced and serve time in an adult prison, could very well be inoperative without a specific commitment from the government to assist provinces to implement that provision.

I do have very serious questions about other provisions in the bill.

Our justice system has always held that youth must be treated differently with respect to criminal justice issues. Children are not adults. We assume they do not have the same maturity as adults. We know they rarely appreciate the consequences of their actions when they break the law. The distinction between how we deal with adults and youth and child criminals must be maintained and not weakened. This is an important principle of our criminal justice system.

It is particularly true when we limit the rights of children in other ways. For instance, we do not allow them to participate in the democratic process in this country until they are 18.

If we are treating children as adults in the criminal justice system, we are not giving them a say in developing the rules of that system until they have become an adult. That is an indication of the unfairness of this kind of proposal.

The bill would make a significant change to the goals of the Youth Criminal Justice Act. This bill would place protection of society as the primary goal of the act rather than accountability for the youth who are convicted, rather than the promotion of rehabilitation, and rather than support for crime prevention.

There is no doubt that in criminal justice matters the protection of society has to be a key goal, but I believe that by making it the primary goal of the Youth Criminal Justice Act is a step in the wrong direction.

We must never write off young people. We must do all we can to ensure their rehabilitation after they have committed a crime. We must put the restoration of their relationship with their community after a criminal conviction as they key goal of our youth criminal justice system. If we want a primary goal or a key goal, that is the goal that should be in place.

Placing the protection of society first, especially when the current Conservative government often uses protection of society as a euphemism for being tough on crime and more punitive, runs contrary to what youth criminal justice should be about.

There has been some considerable debate already about this legislation. Here is what a recent Toronto Star editorial says on this issue:

What Sébastien's Law would do, though, is change the tone of our youth criminal justice system from rehabilitation and reintegration to punishment and public shaming.

This is particularly troubling given the likelihood that the bill will do nothing to reduce crime but may, in fact, turn more juvenile offenders into hardened criminals and cost taxpayers plenty to keep them locked up.

The government says it will “make protection of society a primary goal of the legislation.”

But legal experts argue compellingly that this can't be done by tinkering with our criminal justice system. Harsher sentences, particularly for impulsive and immature young people, do not make offenders think twice about committing crimes, says criminologist and youth-justice expert Nicholas Bala.

Contrary to the government's assertions, this view is supported by evidence both here and in the United States, the poster child for tough-on-crime laws that have cost taxpayers billions without actually helping to reduce crime.

That is what the Toronto Star said in a recent editorial. It has used very strong language to say that the bill is about punishment and public shaming, and not about rehabilitation and reintegration. It is very, very troubling.

Other commentators have also been very critical of the bill. The Montreal Gazette looked at the changes to sentencing that are included in this legislation. It noted in an editorial that it had concerns about the provision that would allow the courts to take into consideration so-called extrajudicial sanctions, and here is what it said on that specific issue:

A sentencing judge would be allowed, for example, to take into account previous “extra-judicial sanctions”—warnings or referrals to community agencies—that were not subject to a court hearing and did not result in a formal criminal conviction.

By their very nature, extra-judicial measures do not involve a careful sifting of evidence, or even the opportunity for a young person to mount a proper defence. To base a prison sentence on such informal interventions is contrary to the normal course of justice. The very goal of informal sanctions is to give young people another chance. No family would go along with extra-judicial measures if there is a risk they will be used against a youngster at any time in the future. In one fell swoop an approach that has amply proven its worth could be undermined.

That is what the Montreal Gazette, in an editorial, said about the whole issue of how the government is proposing to use extrajudicial sanctions when it comes to sentencing a young person. I think again it is very, very strong language and very troubling.

Overall, the Montreal Gazette gave a big thumbs-down to the bill. In the editorial, it concluded:

The thrust of this bill, unfortunately, is to move away from rehabilitation and toward retribution.

It also said:

This legislation still appears to be driven by ideology and political showmanship, not by research or common sense.

It says that it should go back to the drawing board.

That is another editorial board of an important Canadian newspaper that has looked at this legislation and in very strong language has criticized it and said, in fact, that it should be withdrawn because of the serious problems.

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Barry Devolin]

I must interrupt the member for Burnaby—Douglas at this time. He will have 11 minutes remaining when the House returns to this matter.

The House resumed consideration of the motion that Bill C-4, An Act to amend the Youth Criminal Justice Act and to make consequential and related amendments to other Acts, be read the second time and referred to a committee.

[The Speaker, Liberal, Peter Milliken]

Before question period, the hon. member for Scarborough—Rouge River had the floor for questions and comments consequent upon his speech. I therefore call for questions and comments. The hon. member for Yukon.

[Larry Bagnell, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

Mr. Speaker, if I interpreted the member's speech correctly, he said the government should have put this bill in with a bunch of other bills into an omnibus bill. I would definitely disagree with that. The government does that when it has a whole bunch of ineffective, poor bills it wants to pass all at once.

On the other hand, does this mean the member also thinks that Bill C-9 as an omnibus bill was a good idea? There were lots of things all in that one bill.

[Derek Lee, Liberal, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

Mr. Speaker, most of us have difficulty with omnibus bills sometimes, because they do tend to have a lot of legislation buried in them. The thing about an omnibus bill is that there is a theme that brings all the pieces of proposed legislation together. In Bill C-9, the budget implementation bill, there is virtually no theme. With the potential sale of AECL and legislation about payment cards or credit cards, it is all over the map. There is no theme.

In terms of criminal law legislation, we have seen bills in the past here and in other jurisdictions that have a themed Criminal Code amendment, and I was referring to those.

My colleague makes a good point that, when we are dealing with youth criminal justice, it is a very visible separate component of our criminal justice system. We keep it separate. That is why I styled my remarks around the theme of intervention as opposed to retribution, accountability, deterrence, these types of issues.

I recall visiting a youth boot camp in the Ontario jurisdiction. It was a very successful operation that dealt with youth. It was well run and disciplined. The young men there earned points to get the chance to go home on weekends on a supervised home visit.

I did bump into one young man and I asked him where he was going after he was out of there. It was a very sad comment because he said he did not have any family so it did not matter whether he earned any points to go home on the weekend. He said he would probably go back to the pool hall.

What a sad situation that the intervention that was there, which seemed to be having some benefit, was going to come to an end. The intervention would end and that young man would go back to a pool hall in Toronto. He was not going to go back to school. He did not seem to have any appetite for that. He was about 17 years old. I was quite saddened that the intervention that was there was going to come to an end and he was going to end up back at the same place that probably got him into trouble in the first place.

I go back to my theme of quality intervention. The better the quality, the better the outcome and the better it is for our society.

[Carole Lavallée, Bloc, Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC]

Mr. Speaker, my colleagues will notice that my voice is a bit hoarse; I have a terrible cold. I have water and throat lozenges in case I cough too much; I have everything I need. I hope I will not have to interrupt my speech.

The Bloc Québécois has serious misgivings about Bill C-4, an Act to amend the Youth Criminal Justice Act, which would toughen prison sentences for youth. This bill is part of the Conservative government's tough on crime policy.

Protecting society is the bill's guiding principle, but I will show that this is definitely not what will be achieved in the long term. The tough on crime policy will not, in the long term, protect society. The experience of California, which has been operating under this policy for 30 years, is proof. Quebec, however, with its rehabilitation policy, has the lowest crime rates in North America.

The courts ordered the State of California to let 40,000 prisoners go, 6,000 of them this past January. Are we supposed to believe that we can promote public safety by freeing 6,000 prisoners who spent many idle years in overpopulated and underfunded prisons that produce aggressive and violent individuals? That is not what Californians think.

Tougher sentencing will not enhance public safety, and I will explain why. Repression does not work. Rehabilitation does not work either because costs are soaring and there is no money for these kinds of programs.

Quebec's juvenile justice system works because of its legal aid program, rehabilitation incentive program, offender education program, probation and, most importantly in this context, the complete overhaul of preliminary intervention approaches under the 1977 Youth Protection Act. Our system is the envy of Californians.

An in-depth statistical study entitled Did Getting Tough on Crime Pay? showed that American tough on crime policies introduced since the 1980s were driven by media manipulation and false perceptions about lenient sentencing for serious crimes. Political arguments for tougher sentencing are invariably based on exceptionally lenient sentences that create false impressions about typical or average sentences.

The opposite is true in this case. Bill C-4, which the Conservatives have dubbed Sébastien's law, does not constitute a response to Sébastien's murder at all because the murderer, who was a minor at the time, is currently in jail for life. People who commit serious crimes go to jail for a long time. This proves that the current law works and that we do not need to change it. We cannot do more than that. No law can do more than that.

Unlike California—which, for lack of funding, is keeping prisoners in spaces that are too small and overpopulated with nothing productive to do, which only feeds their violence—the governments of Quebec and Canada have thus far been spending money to keep prisoners in a healthy environment, to occupy their time productively and teach them to reintegrate into society. If we were to begin overcrowding our prisons, that situation would change, as it did in California.

Just when the Canadian Conservative government is about to make the system even tougher, former journalist Art Montague and a number of associations that work with inmates are showing how the American model, which the Conservatives are emulating, is going through a major crisis that is forcing it to move more towards the kind of system that we have here. The Quebec model, as I said earlier, with its focus on rehabilitation, has the lowest crime rate.

The crisis in California is happening on two levels, socially and economically, each echoing the other. One reinforces the other, which demonstrates not only how completely ineffective tougher sentences are when it comes to fighting crime, but also how devastating it is for the economy and the quality of correctional services. A punitive approach undermines the importance of social services such as education and rehabilitation programs for inmates, which are the key to effectively reducing crime.

Many articles in the Wall Street Journal and The Economist, serious publications that cannot be called leftist, demonstrate how 30 years of tough on crime policies have led to overcrowded prisons. The California prison system is currently at 200% of capacity, with 187,000 inmates.

This sort of overcrowding creates a serious threat to public safety. The 2007 Chino prison riot, where authorities stood by powerless while inmates took control of dormitory Z for more than 20 hours, is proof of this.

As the articles in the Wall Street Journal and The Economist show, prison overcrowding is having a disastrous effect on the state's budget, which already has an enormous deficit. More inmates require more resources, yet the state recently had to cut $1.2 billion from its prison system.

The State of California spends nearly 10% of its budget on its correctional system, but only 5.7% on universities. The reverse was true 25 years ago.

The United States has the dubious distinction of incarcerating more individuals per capita than any other documented country in the world. That was the finding of a 2008 study by the Pew Research Center.

California's high budget costs are forcing Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to come up with totally crazy solutions, such as having prisons built in Mexico by Mexicans to house American inmates. The Supreme Court, though, ordered him to release 40,000 inmates.

When prisons are overcrowded, it is impossible to maintain proper health and safety services. This led the Prison Law Office to file a lawsuit against the state. A federal judge ruled in favour of the organization and ordered the state to reduce the prison population by 40,000 inmates, which would bring it down to 137% of capacity, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Just recently, on January 18, 2010, a special judicial panel decided to get around the Supreme Court deadline and order the release of 6,000 inmates.

The crisis is twofold. On the one hand, the high cost of 30 years of so-called “tough on crime” detention policy has killed more sensitive prevention and rehabilitation policies. The current punitive policy has put the prison system in an untenable situation, though, forcing authorities to empty the prisons of thousands of inmates who will reintegrate into society without proper supervision, which is raising serious concerns among local authorities and community leaders in California.

The inmates will leave prison without any training, without any job prospects and without having worked on their rehabilitation. Imagine 6,000 inmates looking for a job while also looking for a place to live. These same 6,000 inmates went to crime school for years in close quarters with nothing else to do than to become more violent and fuel their aggression and rage. Six thousand people are a threat to public safety. The president of the Los Angeles Police Protective League even called this a perfect storm for public safety. Imagine what will happen when that number goes up to 40,000, as the Supreme Court is calling for.

Various media and organizations such as Prison Fellowship, feel that the soaring costs associated with overcrowded prisons in California have other adverse effects, namely budgetary cuts that affect the system's capacity for maintaining or implementing rehabilitation and education programs. In addition to being held in increasingly inhumane conditions, inmates do not receive any help in learning how to control their violence, live in society and become law-abiding citizens.

This lack of services and follow-up, both inside and outside the prison, leaves the inmates to fend for themselves and makes them more likely to end up back in prison. Tougher sentences have a negative impact on all aspects of programs that have for more than 40 years focused on preventing crime through social rehabilitation. It comes as no surprise that the rate of recidivism there is 70%, while in Quebec it is between 10% and 20%.

For all these reasons, the Bloc Québécois will conduct a thorough analysis of the study in committee in order to hear all the players involved and improve whatever aspects of this bill that we can.

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

Mr. Speaker, I have been listening to this discussion all day and what really concerns me about the Conservatives' agenda on crime, or their so-called agenda on crime, is that they continually bring forward bills that address key elements that are already within the justice system. However, they are creating the image for the public that these huge gaps exist.

In looking at many of their bills, we see that they do not even bother bringing them into the law. They run them up the flag pole, beat the drums, try to get the public angry against the justice system and then they let the bills die or re-introduce them.

The Youth Criminal Justice Act is a cornerstone. The Youth Criminal Justice Act already contains a wide degree of support for dealing with youth who are very dangerous offenders. However, the whole issue of rehabilitation and the need to treat youth separate from adults is a cornerstone principle of a modern justice system. The government seems to want to blur that. It wants to treat youth offenders as if they were the Hells Angels.

Why does my hon. colleague think the government is continually playing politics with issues that really require a cohesive and thoughtful response in order to make good public policy?

[Carole Lavallée, Bloc, Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC]

Mr. Speaker, the Conservative government's tough on crime approach is completely incomprehensible. The experience of the State of California shows that this approach is a total failure. After 30 years of tougher sentences, California has learned that this approach does not foster rehabilitation. The state has a recidivism rate of 70%.

This also shows that being tough on crime does not work. Budgets are soaring because of recidivism. The system is self-perpetuating. Requiring the state to release 40,000 inmates, including 6,0000 in January, shows that public safety has not been maintained in the long term.

The only plausible explanation for the government's insistence on adopting this unworkable approach is misguided populism. It has been proven that this approach does not work. Everything I said earlier has been documented in full. The Conservatives do not know or are unable to explain to their voters that this is a policy that just does not work. Rather than explaining that it does not work, they prefer to present this populist measure here and pretend that it does work.