Mr. Speaker, as always, it is a real honour to stand in this House and represent the people of the great region of Timmins—James Bay.
When we talk about crime bills, crime prevention and crime strategies, it is unfortunate that much of the rhetoric in the House of Commons has not been to deal with the substantive issues but sometimes to create black and white caricatures or set up windmills. This is difficult because the issue of crime and law is complex and the solutions are sometimes not as simple. This is why the judges do need discretion in being able to interpret action and being able to interpret circumstances.
However, I find this has been a good instructive debate for Canadians to participate in and to watch, because we are trying to find a balance regarding the protection of ordinary citizens. This is something that communities have done from time immemorial.
For example, I live in the great little community of Cobalt, Ontario, where people look out for each other. I remember late one night I was coming home from a trip with my family and my little kids. I drove up in my beat-up little Toyota Tercel hatchback, which may not be the ugliest car ever built, but it was certainly in the top five. Barrelling in the driveway behind me was a big pickup truck with double wheels on the back. It sounded like a tank. Out jumped Bruce Miller, a big guy from Sherman Mine. He said, “Who goes there?” I almost fell over, and then he said, “Oh, it's you. I knew you were away. I just wanted to make sure when I saw the lights on at your house that nobody was robbing you”.
That is what neighbours do. We need to be able to say that it is okay for neighbours to check in on neighbours, that it is okay to stand up in a public square when something is wrong and say, “There are no police here, but a crime has been committed”.
In saying that, we have to be careful. We have seen in the United States where politicians fan the flames of vigilantism and horrible tragedies result, like the Trayvon Martin shooting in Florida. If we look at it, we wonder how could it be that a self-styled vigilante armed with a gun can patrol a neighbourhood and, when the police tell him to stand back, he believes his life is at threat. Under Florida law he only had to believe that. It is completely subjective. Issues of subjectivity do have a value in dealing with perception of violence or perception of threat, but they are not the only thing. We cannot just say, “I didn't like the looks of him. He seemed like a bad guy, so I shot him”. Yet, that is what is considered okay in the Florida legislature.
We have seen some of the crazy gun laws in many American states that think people should be able to carry a gun, a concealed weapon for self-defence, that they should be able to carry a weapon into a hospital because it is a citizen's right. That kind of over-the-top response creates dangerous situations.
I am looking at Bill C-26 from the sense of how we strike the balance between civic protection and ensuring that we are not putting people at risk. It is not about putting the so-called criminals at risk, but also the people who want to intervene. It is very difficult to intervene in a situation that could escalate. People need to have a sense of the ground rules. When the police are watching, they are certainly telling us to be careful about how we go about this.
There has been good discussion at committee. There has been good cross-party conversation.
On the issues of criminal justice, I had the great honour in the 1980s as a member of the Catholic Worker Movement to work with men coming out of prison and to live with men and women coming out of prison in the streets of Toronto. I saw a steady pattern in terms of recidivism. There were addictions. Addiction was probably the highest single cause of people committing crime. There were basic issues, such as a lack of a stable environment in which to actually get one's life together, and then there was plain stupidity.
I have known many cons through my work. Contrary to what we see in the movies, they are not criminal masterminds. That seems to be an oxymoron. Contrary to what my Conservative colleagues sometimes point out as these evil bandits who have to be locked up, sometimes they just make really stupid choices. I have talked to them about their choices.
I think that when we are looking at criminal policy, we have to remember that by far, the vast majority of people who end up in jail have made really bad choices. Should they be punished? Certainly. As a society do we need to have a plan to pull them back? Even more so.
I remember my friend, Robert, who died recently. In his day, Robert was a huge, massive expense on the health and criminal justice systems because of his horrific level of alcoholism. At the time, we could not get Robert into even a rooming house. There was no public housing. I remember the Conservative government of Mike Harris, and many of his old gang are on that side of the House now, telling us that social housing was a failed principle.
It was not a failed principle. We needed to get a guy like Robert a place to stay. Once we actually got him into secure housing, he sobered up. At that point he was never again a burden on the medical system or on the criminal justice system. I think he was 20-some years sober before he died. We needed to find ways to get men like him out of crisis, and it was possible.
That is where social policy comes in. If members believe that government should not be in the business of ensuring some level of social housing, then people like Robert will fall through the cracks. If people have levels of addiction, they might break into a car and get whatever change they can.
Last year I was moving and my car was broken into, probably because of the Oxy epidemic. Normally my beat-up old Chevy does not have much in it worth taking, but I was in the process of moving. There was a vacuum cleaner that my wife had given me. I did not mind sharing my vacuum cleaner with the criminal underground of Ottawa. I could have accepted that. That was in the car. There were a couple of brooms. They could have had them. But my God, my Bob Dylan collection, original vinyl, was in the back, as were my grandfather's favourite Scottish and Irish records. I have not brought forward a private member's bill about mandatory minimums for people who steal vinyl. I did manage to get some of it back. I went to the record store. I did not get any of my Bob Dylan collection; that was gone, but I got the Clancy Brothers and Kenneth McKellar records back.
I said to the guy, “Listen. These are my grandfather's records. They were stolen out of my car.” I do not think they could have even bought one Oxy pill. I said, “I do not mind paying for them. I just want the records.” The guy said, “We were only selling them for 50¢.” Being Scottish myself, I would have spent $5, maybe even $6 on each of those records.
I am not saying this to make light of the situation. Perhaps if I had been at the house that night and saw the guy stealing my records, I would have run out and stopped him. I would have at least tried to offer him the vacuum cleaner instead.
When I go home at night through the market I have seen some situations that have started to escalate. I am not out with the late, late night crowd because parliamentarians are always in bed at an early hour, so I do not see any of the stuff that happens outside the nightclubs. However, it tends to be my perception that we are dealing with people with addictions, and sometimes people with addictions do desperate things.
The question is, if someone sees something happening on the street, such as a shakedown, an escalation towards violence, what as a citizen does the person do if there are no police there? There is the question of someone intervening, such as a shopkeeper intervening and stopping someone from stealing by saying, “You cannot do this. I am going to hold you until the police come.” That is a reasonable citizen's response. That is a reasonable societal response.
In terms of the larger of issue of what people do when they see relentless situations, particularly when there is drug addiction and people are resorting to crime, we need a larger societal response. That is why I talked about the interventions and about the lack of treatment centres in northern Ontario. We do see levels of addiction, mostly involving Percocet and Oxy. There is no place for people to get treatment. That is an issue.
We cannot just leave it to the citizen to address the crime problem. We cannot just leave it to the jails. We need a larger, more comprehensive view. We have not had a holistic view of crime and crime response in this Parliament.
We will be supporting this bill. It is one little piece of a much larger puzzle. I am more than willing to take questions from any of my hon. colleagues.
