Mr. Speaker, a number of victims and family members of victims testified at committee. There was a woman from Alberta who was part of a Mennonite group who worked with victims and the criminal justice system. Her son had been murdered. She believed that we should have a proper criminal justice system, but she also believed that our system ought to be based on rehabilitation. She was not out to get somebody put in jail for the longest period possible as part of retribution. She believed firmly that rehabilitation was extremely important. The witnesses were not all on one side or the other. People had varying views. I have the greatest sympathy for anyone whose child, spouse or parent is the victim of a violent crime. We heard from a woman whose son was shot dead in the street.
We on this side of the House abhor violent crime. We abhor the use of guns, the proliferation of guns in our society, illegal guns, shotguns that are sawed off and used to commit crimes. I would like to know more about what our police forces are doing to stop the illegal importation of guns. I would like to see a report on that.
It is shocking when we hear about the criminal acts that are occurring in our cities. Some are arbitrary acts. A passerby is murdered for no reason except that the person happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The number of illegal guns that are available is an evil that has to be dealt with. There are people who think it is great to pack a pistol, but that is not the kind of society we aspire to in Canada. We need to ensure that our police forces are enforcing that.
A lot of people in government talk about deterrence and long sentences. All of the criminologists and experts, whether they be university professors, people who studied criminology, or people working in the field, testified that the greatest deterrence is the certainty of being caught. We need to support our police forces. If people think they are going to be caught and punished for a crime, that acts as a deterrent more so than the fact that they are going to get nine months or twelve months versus six months. People do not read the Criminal Code before they commit a crime. They do not sit down and decide on what crime to commit. That is a fact based on research and evidence. Mandatory minimum sentences rarely act as a deterrent, but the certainty of being caught is a deterrent and someone will be less likely to commit a crime.
This is an important problem at issue here. We like to urge the government from time to time to do things, and this is a good way of doing that. We should have evidence-based decision-making. If our government is seeking to change laws and incur significant additional expenses for our criminal justice system and for our provinces, then it should at least be based on some evidence showing that it will work. We heard time and time again from the experts that these laws will not be effective in reducing the number of criminals, in reducing the amount of recidivism. They will not make our streets safer.
Rehabilitation is not just about the individual. As a member of society, I want somebody who is convicted of a crime and goes to jail, who is under the supervision of Correctional Service of Canada, to be rehabilitated for me. For the individual's sake I want him or her rehabilitated because that is a good thing. I want the person to be a productive member of society, but I also do not want the person to go around committing further crimes.
Rehabilitation is not only about doing good for the criminals. It is not about coddling criminals, which some like to say from time to time. Rehabilitation of an offender is about making our streets and communities safer and reducing the number of crimes that are committed. Rehabilitation is an important societal goal because it helps to make a better society. It helps to make our communities safer.
If people do not understand that, then they are not using their heads. Evidence-based decision-making is about using one's head. It is asking what works and what does not.
I do not get any pleasure from seeing someone commit a crime and then go to jail for a long time. Obviously, we want justice to take place. Someone who commits heinous crimes deserves serious and significant punishment. However, we have to be mindful of the fact that we cannot have a system that relies overwhelmingly upon punishment and retribution and does not recognize the importance of rehabilitation.
The Quebec experience is one which I believe ought to be a source of study by the Government of Canada. What Quebec is saying is that it regrets very much the moves that have been made by the federal government in dealing with the Youth Criminal Justice Act. Quebec has said what I just said. In the long term it is ultimately society as a whole that benefits from long-term protection. It is this notion that imposes an obligation to reflect on the way to detain, rehabilitate and reintegrate a young person so that he or she becomes a productive member of society, since the purely punitive consequences imposed will inevitably come to an end. A society that disregards the circumstances underlying a person's criminal behaviour cannot claim to be adequately protected for the future.
If one does not try to ameliorate the circumstances underlying a person's criminal behaviour, one cannot protect oneself in the future because one has not done anything to try to prevent those circumstances from causing further crime to take place. There are different ways of saying the same thing, but the point is that if a criminal is rehabilitated, one protects society. If one rehabilitates a young person, not only does one protect society, but one gives that young person a positive life, one that can improve over time.
In this bill there is a whole series of factors that are taken into consideration for increasing the length of sentences under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. I talked earlier about the arbitrary nature of these things. As the number of marijuana plants increases, for example, one starts adding to the mandatory minimum sentence. I think the Canadian Bar Association has made the submission, quite correctly, that the number of plants in and of itself bears no relationship to the seriousness of the offence in respect of the responsibility for the crime by the person who is charged with it.
We have an arbitrary system unfortunately, one which takes away and shows disrespect for a judge's rights and duties. One of a judge's principal duties is to focus on providing a sentence that is fit for the crime, fit for the criminal, fit for the circumstances of the offence and the offender.
Judges, the criminal courts and lawyers spend a lot of time on that. In fact, in many cases, the criminal trial amounts to a sentencing hearing, because a large number of offenders plead guilty. There is a system of disclosure now that is valuable. When someone is charged with an offence, before the person is even required to make a plea in some cases, the crown is required to disclose what information it has on which it is basing the charge.
Very often the jig is up because the person was caught red-handed or the evidence is very clear, or the person made a statement acknowledging guilt and handed over the stolen goods, et cetera. The question is not whether or not the person is guilty. The question becomes what a fit sentence would be. The crown prosecutor and the defence counsel will go before a judge and argue based on precedent, based on the law, based on other cases, based on the circumstances, what is a fit sentence for the crime. That becomes what the trial is all about. The trial is to determine the appropriate sentence for the individual.
Any judge will say privately, because judges do not have political opinions, that sentencing is very important for judges and they do not like to have their discretion narrowed to the point that they cannot fashion a sentence that is fit for the crime.
There is talk from time to time about some courts letting offenders get off lightly. I practised law for a long time. I was admitted to the bar in 1980. I did not practise criminal law exclusively, but I did a fair bit of criminal law work and studied it in university and law school. I read up on the subject and follow sentencing over time. Occasionally there are sentences which are shockingly high in some cases and shockingly low in others. That is the nature of the system. We have checks and balance for that.
We have an appeals system. If the provincial court judge gives a sentence that is out of whack, the person can go to the Supreme Court which decides whether it is right or wrong. If the person does not like that, the person can go to the Court of Appeal. There have been cases where sentences have been considered by the Supreme Court of Canada. The purpose of that system is to ensure that within an appropriate range of sentences a judge is not giving an inappropriate sentence.
That is a function of our judges that they value very highly and they are very good at it for the most part. Human nature being what it is, not every sentence is exactly right, but that is what the appeal process is for. The overall thrust of this legislation is that something is wrong with our system, that somehow it is broken, that judges do not care about crime, that they do not take the victims into consideration.
We now have victim impact statements which are new in our law. They were brought in for the very reason of giving victims a say in the process. Some people felt that the criminal trial process was all about the offender. Well, it is all about the offender, because he or she is the person who is before the courts and who is expected to pay the punishment for the crime, if he or she committed it. Victims have a role. It was shocking when the victim was regarded simply as a witness and sometimes was not treated with respect. The victim would not be allowed in court while other people were giving evidence. Sometimes the victim would be thrown outside the courtroom to wait with the family and friends of the perpetrator.
This was shocking. It took some time before the victims' basic human rights were treated with respect and dignity. A person was the victim of crime, yet the whole system seemed to revolve around the crown prosecutor, defence counsel, judges and police, everybody but the victim. That has changed. In our province we have victims service organizations that assist victims of crime through the process.
As I mentioned earlier, I was engaged in a series of cases where I was not involved in the criminal process directly, but in the civil process. We sued governments, religious orders and individuals who were responsible for sexual abuse. These people were also prosecuted in the courts. In the courts, in order to recognize the needs of victims, there were counsellors available to help the victims confront the fact that they were sitting in a room next to the person who had abused them as a child some many years ago and that affected them on an ongoing basis.
I learned about PTSD. It is a very well-known acronym these days: post-traumatic stress disorder. We hear about it mostly when we talk about returning soldiers who have been to Afghanistan. We hear about it in the context of people who suffer from that kind of trauma. We recognize now how debilitating it is for soldiers in combat. When I started learning about it in 1989, I would not say that it was unheard of, but there was an awful lot to learn. The victims of child sexual abuse in this case were all suffering from PTSD. I learned a lot about it.
Those people, the victims of crime, were witnesses in the prosecution of the perpetrators of those crimes. They came to be treated with dignity and respect because the system responded to their needs and made counselling available. The system became sensitive to them.
Not only that, when convictions were obtained, when sentencing took place, those victims had an opportunity to come forward and give a victim impact statement and talk about the effect the crime had on them. In the civil suits, we took note of all of the effects that came from post-traumatic stress disorder, the need for rehabilitation and the effect on their lives because they were victims of a particular crime. Those people are suffering to this day from post-traumatic stress disorder that goes back to the time when they were young boys of 8, 9, 10 or 12 and they were victims of child sexual assault.
The place of victims is extremely important in our criminal justice system. It has advanced considerably. On this side of the House, we are very aware of that. We are very concerned about victims. I do not want that ever to be forgotten in this House. I do not want members opposite to say, “What about the victims?”, with the implication that we do not care. We get that from the other side time and time again. They would say that they are fighting for the victims and we are fighting for the criminals. That is nonsense.
We are fighting for justice. I will acknowledge that the other side is too, but it has a funny way of doing it. The Conservatives have a despicable way of doing it from time to time. However, their notion of justice is wrong-headed in many respects. It does not take into consideration some of the facts that I am talking about here today.
What we really want is a system of justice that is fair and reasonable, but one that will also protect society best. We want to reduce the number of crimes, criminals and victims. There are different approaches to doing that. We believe that our approach has been proven to be better.
One of the strangest occurrences in our committee was when we had internationally renowned experts, people who had studied at significant universities around the world, coming forward to give testimony. One of the members of the committee on the government side had a habit of ignoring all of their qualifications. Rather, he would ask if they had ever been a victim of crime. These internationally renowned experts on criminology were scratching their heads and wondering what the purpose of this question was. The purpose seemed to be that if they were not victims of crime he did not want to hear from them, that their opinions were useless. The member was not concerned that they went to Harvard or Stanford but whether they had ever been victims of crime. Frankly, I found that rather astounding. The individuals said that they were all victims of crime of one sort or another over the years and asked what that had to do with anything.
One person who had gone to these universities was an internationally renowned expert in criminology. He could provide a factual basis for his opinions. People who are researchers, who write papers and are experts are not classified as such just because they have opinions. They have done the work. They actually look at the statistical history and effects of incarceration, whether it works, where it works and where it does not work. They are able to tell us the history of the war on drugs in the United States and what effects incarceration rates have had on crime, costs, et cetera. These are people who bring their knowledge to a committee of the House to inform legislation, to ensure we are taking initiatives that work, rather than just meeting the ideological needs of someone in the House or the government.
We are not supposed to be making criminal laws and criminal justice to suit the political or ideological needs of a political party because it wants to satisfy certain opinions out there. That is not the purpose of our legislation. We are here to argue against simplistic approaches. We are here to talk about what needs to be done to make our streets safer, rather than simplistically saying that what we need to do is incarcerate people longer and have minimum sentences so that we are tough on crime. We see that as the political objective of a party so that it can go back to the public and its electors to say that it said it would be tough on crime and is tough on crime, regardless of the facts, expert opinions and experience, such as that presented by the Government of Quebec with respect to the youth criminal justice system.
We also talked a lot about the changes that were brought in and the costs. In addition to not making our streets safer, the legislation would cost a lot of money. Reporters ask us how much it will cost. I have to say that I do not know. We have heard estimates from here and there. Some provinces have said that it will cost a billion dollars, others have talked about a couple of hundred million dollars.
The government does not know either, because it never really tried to find out.
We had a report last week from the Parliamentary Budget Officer talking about one small aspect of one part of the bill, on conditional sentences. In part 2 of the bill, there is elimination of conditional sentences on all offences for which the maximum term of imprisonment is 14 years and over, and other indictable offences for which the maximum sentence is 10 years.
Conditional sentence is not meant to let an individual go free. The court has decided that an individual would be subject to incarceration, but instead of the sentence being served in prison, it would be served under the control and jurisdiction of the Correctional Services.
The Parliamentary Budget Officer looked at that provision only. The government had said it would cost the federal government nothing. The provinces did not know. The Parliamentary Budget Officer did an analysis with the help of very experienced and knowledgeable people. My colleague, the opposition House leader, who was then critic for justice, had asked the Parliamentary Budget Officer to estimate the cost of the mandatory minimums contained in the act and the elimination of the conditional sentences contained in part 2.
The Parliamentary Budget Officer did not have the resources to do all of the work on the mandatory minimums, as there were not enough staff and there did not seem to be a source of information. However, on the conditional sentences, staff got information from Statistics Canada, the provinces and the Parole Board. They concluded that this part of the act would cost $8 million a year for the federal government and $137 million more for the provincial governments.
A chart was produced as to cost by province. When these measures are estimated by governments, it is usually over a five year period. The estimate was a total cost of $750 million just for one small provision of the act.
At the briefing, we asked why costs were not estimated for the whole act. Staff said they did not have the resources to do that, but had looked for the information. They asked Statistics Canada for the number of conditional sentences and what offences they were for. They expressed some surprise that they were actually going on untrodden ground. Nobody had been there before. The government had not.
As the Parliamentary Budget Officer does not just go off on a frolic of his own, he had started off by asking the government departments concerned to give him their cost analysis of the consequences of this bill. They did not get anything. When staff went looking for the information themselves, it was a green field. Nobody had asked before, so Statistics Canada actually came up with a methodology of getting the information, going back into its databases and coming back with the information.
This is interesting, in the context of whether there be more or fewer people convicted. The Parliamentary Budget Officer discovered that by removing conditional sentences, fewer people would be convicted of crimes. Why is that? When faced with the prospect of the mandatory minimum, a person who would otherwise plead guilty as part of some plea bargain or understanding with the Crown that he or she would get a conditional sentence, would serve a longer sentence. It was statistically shown that the sentence for a person incarcerated for a crime averaged 248 days, whereas a person who received a conditional sentence was sentenced to an average of 350 days.
They would therefore be under correctional supervision for a longer period of time. Otherwise, they would serve a shorter sentence and be out in the community with no supervision. About 15% fewer people would be convicted. Thus we had fewer people being convicted under less correctional supervision for a shorter period of time. The conclusion here had to be that this was not really working. Yes, we had them in jail, and of course the cost was 16 times as much. So we paid 16 times as much for fewer people to be convicted, but they would be incarcerated and under correctional supervision for a shorter period of time.
