Bill C-26 (Historical)

Citizen's Arrest and Self-defence Act

An Act to amend the Criminal Code (citizen's arrest and the defences of property and persons)

This enactment amends the Criminal Code to enable a person who owns or has lawful possession of property, or persons authorized by them, to arrest within a reasonable time a person whom they find committing a criminal offence on or in relation to that property. It also amends the Criminal Code to simplify the provisions relating to the defences of property and persons.

Citizen's Arrest and Self-defence Act

[Dan Harris, NDP, Scarborough Southwest, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am not sure if the member was listening. Nowhere did I say I was opposed to the legislation. In fact, we are supporting it.

What is absolutely surprising to me is to hear the member from his side of the floor, the Conservatives, now saying that judges should be able to apply their judgment. Time and time again we have seen the government attempt to make changes to actually take that discretion out of judges' hands with mandatory minimum sentences. That is the kind of thing that takes the law out of the hands of the experts and the people who should be applying sentences, who should be taking into account the circumstances of offences, criminal history, behaviour of individuals and reasonableness of the judgments being made.

This is the government that is taking that discretion out of judges' hands. I think it is a little hypocritical to hear the member make that kind of statement now.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, the Liberal Party critic talked about how we support the bill in principle. There is fairly widespread support in the House. Most Canadians see the value of passing the bill.

In previous questions I have asked about the need for an educational component for certain sectors, in particular the retail or the commercial areas, to make sure people are aware of what citizen's arrest really entails. Would the member comment on what he feels is important in an educational component on citizen's arrest?

[Dan Harris, NDP, Scarborough Southwest, ON]

Mr. Speaker, we as a society can do a better job of educating the public on a whole raft of different issues, not just citizen's arrest, but preventive health, tax code or a number of situations.

However, I would like to turn it back to the member and ask, if the Liberals feel that the bill is lacking in this kind of way, have they proposed, or will they be proposing, amendments to insert such language into the legislation?

[Lysane Blanchette-Lamothe, NDP, Pierrefonds—Dollard, QC]

Mr. Speaker, thank you for allowing me to ask a question. Earlier, one of our colleagues said that she suspects the NDP cannot stand up for victims. My colleague's speech, which I just listened to, gave a fine example of how all parties can work together to come up with measures that will truly help victims.

We are not talking about victims' revenge; we are talking about real tools to help people defend themselves. I would like my colleague to comment on that a little.

[Dan Harris, NDP, Scarborough Southwest, ON]

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

It certainly shows the kind of results we can achieve when the parties work together. If we work together, we will have better laws. When the members opposite accuse us of all kinds of rather silly things, when the Minister of Justice, or the Minister of Public Safety, say things like “you are either with us or with the criminals”, it does not help us do our job. Furthermore, such comments have no place here in the House.

[Mike Sullivan, NDP, York South—Weston, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate this opportunity to speak once again to Bill C-26.

It now appears that the bill is being framed as sort of the victims versus the offenders by the other side. I would like to clarify our party's position on victims versus offenders.

The bill came from our party in the first place through the member for Trinity—Spadina. It was an attempt to turn an offender who was really a victim away from being an offender. How does that work? It is where someone who was a victim of a crime, attempted to arrest or stop a person who committed a crime and he became an offender, according to the police, because he had unreasonably detained someone.

This bill is all about that. It is to try to regain the balance between victims and offenders. The bill is now one of the very few in this Parliament to have had actual agreement on amendments at committee. Many bills have gone through committee that have had zero amendments approved by the other side.

That leads me to comparisons between this bill and other bills which have created victims, by the other side, and in which the amendments we have proposed have been outright rejected. I am of course referring to Bill C-31, which has elements of this bill in it all over the place. People who flee countries, where those people are victims of crime or who have their own personal well-being threatened, to come to a safe country are themselves victims. They are the victims of crime in those countries. They are the victims of persecution. They are victims in any imagined sense of the word.

However, if these people arrive here by the wrong method, they immediately become an offender, according to the government. If they are victims of human smuggling, they are imprisoned and are considered to be offenders.

We need to turn those things around. This is a situation that cannot be allowed to stand. Unfortunately the votes on Monday meant that those bills are now off to the Senate and perhaps they will become law.

We have a situation where the other side is accusing this side of being soft on offenders and hard on victims, and the exact opposite is true. The government has determined that people who are victims will be made offenders. The immigration bill is but one example.

That is an example of a bill where the parties actually did work together. The previous Parliament actually passed a bill that was praised and lauded, that struck a balance between people being victims and being offenders.

However, now we have a government that is insistent on its ideologically driven anti-immigrant agenda that will now treat potential immigrants who come here by magic, because they found a way to get here when they were unable to get here any other way, as criminals.

In addition, those individuals who did everything right, who acted in accordance with the law, who applied to come to Canada years and years ago are now going to be treated as criminals because they are having their money given back to them and are being told “Sorry, we did not get to your application 10 years ago, and we are never going to get to it. You have to apply again”. Those people are being made into victims by the government. We are treating people horrendously.

I also want to talk about how this bill has a possibility of creating a vigilante system. We will support it, but I want to be very clear that we do not support anything which takes Canada further into the sort of American mentality of “shoot first and ask questions later”. We do not agree with that kind of mentality.

I was in a high school in my riding last week. In that high school was a bunch of Grade 10 students. They were 13 to 15 years old. I asked them how many of them owned an illegal handgun or knew someone who owned one. Half the class put up its hand, and that is not unusual. When I asked them why all these handguns, their immediate answer was for self-defence, that they had to defend themselves against others in their communities who had handguns.

What is the government doing about the proliferation of handguns that I find in my riding? There was a drive-by shooting last night and someone was shot just last week in the same neighbourhood by illegal handguns that have arrived in my riding.

What is the government doing about the proliferation of weapons of destruction, of killing? It is removing border protections. It is laying off border services people. It is cutting the number of sniffer dogs that might stop these guns from coming into the country in the first place.

The Conservatives have decided it is better to have guns come in and to--

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

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. I have been listening to the member talk on Bill C-26, which is about citizen's arrest, and he has been meandering all over the place, covering all sorts of different legislations and bills with which we were dealing. He talked about Bill C-31, which would improve the refugee act. Now he is talking about illegal handguns and border services. He is absolutely not talking about the subject at hand, Bill C-26, which would enhance citizens' protection.

[The Acting Speaker, Bruce Stanton]

I thank the hon. member for his intervention. It is true that the members are encouraged to ensure their comments are pertinent to the question before the House. Members will also know they are given a great deal of freedom to explore different ideas and eventually bring them back on the subject. I am sure the hon. member for York South—Weston was getting to the point.

The hon. member for York South—Weston.

[Mike Sullivan, NDP, York South—Weston, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I thought I did mention the point. The point is we do not want this bill to become a further direction. We do not want it to take us further toward a “shoot first, ask questions later” situation. Part of the bill is about self-defence and the definition thereof. I was trying to point out that I already had a situation in my riding where many young people believed that owning a firearm was a matter of self-defence. They believed they had the right to own firearms. I am sure we have heard some members opposite talk about that right. There is no such a right, but members opposite have said that.

Now these children, having heard this, believe it is their right to have a firearm to defend themselves. Part of the bill is about changing the definition of “self-defence”. It is in the news. It is something we cannot avoid. We are now facing this explosion of very young individuals who believe they need to own handguns. They get it by illegal means, I will grant that, because it is not legal.

However, I was astonished, as I think the members opposite should be, to discover that half of the 13- to 15-year-olds in that classroom had handguns or knew somebody who did. This is an astounding number of individuals of that age group.

Those same people are now being made victims, and that is part of where this is coming from. The bill starts with the premise that the person who is being robbed is a victim and should not be the offender. What we are trying to establish, and what I am trying to point out to the government, is that many of the bills it has brought forward in fact create victims of people who do not need to be made victims. We are trying to protect victims.

One of the things we are doing is trying to help pass this law, which would actually protect victims. However, there are other laws that have come to us that would make victims out of ordinary law-abiding people, and we are opposed to that.

It was the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Finance who brought us to that portion about victims versus offenders in the discussions on the bill.

What we hope to do with this law should not become something more than it is. We hope to allow individuals to protect their personal property and to hold somebody, but we do not want to create a system of vigilante justice where individuals believe they have the right to use firearms on other individuals.

[Brian Jean, Conservative, Fort McMurray—Athabasca, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I know the member is new to this place, but he asked a very important question. He asked how he could solve the problem in his riding. I have a proposal for him.

The Safe Streets and Communities Act brought in tougher sentences for organized drug crimes and mandatory minimum sentences for violent offenders. It increased penalties for sexual offences against children and ended house arrest for serious crimes. We have the opportunity to put people in jail for committing serious crimes for a certain amount of time, keeping them off the streets and keeping citizens safe. Instead of voting against that and opposing our legislation to keep serious criminals in jail, New Democrats should support it. This is how to do that. It takes years to do it and he has the opportunity to support our legislation and keep criminals in jail where they belong.

[Mike Sullivan, NDP, York South—Weston, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am really glad the member opposite raised that issue. I asked the same high school students if they were afraid of being incarcerated with mandatory minimums for the possession of firearms and other crimes. The answer I got was what I expected. They do not read the law before they commit crimes. They do not determine, as somebody has suggested, that there is a mandatory minimum for growing six pot plants, which they were all surprised to learn. That is not how the criminal system works in Canada. The criminal system works because of desperate people doing desperate things or people who feel they have to defend themselves and do desperate things. That is not the kind of Canada we want.

If the member opposite suggests the law that creates mandatory minimums will somehow reduce the number of victims of crime in our country, he is very much mistaken.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, the member touched on an important issue regarding guns and weapons in schools. I used to be an education critic in the province of Manitoba. Most schools have a zero tolerance policy when it comes to weapons in schools. After all, our youth should have a sense of safety when they are in their schools, knowing there will not be knives and guns found in lockers. I was surprised at the degree of availability or general knowledge of illegal handguns.

Could he expand a bit on that point? Does he feel that type of weaponry is actually on school premises? Does he feel there should be a zero tolerance on weaponry in schools?

[Mike Sullivan, NDP, York South—Weston, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I absolutely believe there should be a zero tolerance for weapons in schools. That goes without saying. I am not suggesting that these individuals are bringing firearms to school. I am suggesting that there is a proliferation of firearms of which parliamentarians should be aware. Certainly, in lower-income ridings, such as mine, poverty and desperation take us to a whole different level. We also have a situation in which illegal firearms come into our country through a very porous border and we should not support a government that wants to reduce the protections at the border and make it easier for firearms to get in.

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

Mr. Speaker, I am struck by the discussion about firearms. When we think of firearms in our country, we think about a criminal act of not storing them safely. Business owners will not be in a position to have loaded firearms available if someone comes in to take over the store because they have to store their firearms in a separate place from the ammunition. Safe storage is under the Criminal Code.

The other point I want to bring up is with regard to the police. For instance, police officers will say that the most likely gun they will be injured or killed by are their own guns. In fact, their bulletproof vests were designed to repel a slug from their issued firearms.

When we talk about increasing the supply of firearms in our country, would the member not agree that it will take a lot of examination to see whether this bill fits in all of that?

[Mike Sullivan, NDP, York South—Weston, ON]

Yes, Mr. Speaker. Part of why I am bringing this up is to try to draw attention to the fact that this bill creates a knowledge, appreciation and clarification of the laws around self-defence. We are trying to ensure the laws that talk about self-defence are not used by people to create a vigilante system that will end the lives of many of our young people.