Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise to speak to the bill. I should note that I will be sharing my time with the member for LaSalle—Émard.
I do want to start on what I recognize is a negative note. Most of what is in the bill is indeed positive. However, the bill is extremely limited in its understanding, both of the needs of victims, and the responsibilities of society through government to help victims. If we are all going to be supporting it going to committee and possibly voting for it at third reading, I think we have to make sure that the hype does not outdistance the reality. Much work will need to be done on deeper issues around victimhood than the bill addresses.
I may not go as far as leading lawyer Clayton Ruby has gone in calling this “shallow symbolism”. However, I would agree with the first victims ombudsman, Steve Sullivan, when he commented, on April 3, to CBC, that the government has over-promised and under-delivered in this bill. Not to get into the crazy game of grading bills, but I guess I will. He said that he would give this a C-plus or a D-minus, without even looking at what the government had been promising in advance. The hype in advance means that he would probably give it an even worse grade.
By way of introduction, I would also note that a victim's mother, who spoke on Global News, said something that I think is extremely eloquent. She said, “Beyond the sentencing stage of the process, the victims basically fall off the face of the earth”.
That is not to say that is entirely true about the bill, but that is generally the situation when it comes to how victims, including the family members of immediate victims, friends, and even the community, the neighbours of victims, are treated in our society. This does not have to be the case. There are societies where a much more coordinated, holistic, and robust response to the pain, the grief, and the trauma caused by crime is dealt with more effectively than in Canada.
One of the reasons that it is not dealt with that effectively here has to do with one of the virtues of our country, which is federalism. That means that by and large this has been left as a kind of social service in the philosophy of the federal government. The federal government gets involved in sporadic funding for post-crime victim support, but it is just that; it is funding, and it is not an attempt to truly create a national framework.
I first became aware of a limitation in the government's approach to victims of crime when early after being elected, I was on the justice committee, considering a bill that would increase offender surcharges. A number of members of the committee clearly stated that between surcharges—that is, ensuring that the perpetrators of crime pay—and provincial programs, the federal government's responsibility for assistance, which includes the need for programs and funding, basically ends.
I felt then and I feel now that this is a highly inadequate view. It does not understand our jurisdiction, federally, over crime and criminal law. It basically leaves victims after the court process, in terms of jurisdiction to create programs, and completely buries that responsibility, as I said before, within ad hoc spending power involvement.
I do not want to say there is nothing in the bill. There is an addition to this philosophy of perpetrators paying, in sections 16 and 17 of Bill C-32. These are new restitution provisions that bring our criminal law closer to some civil law models, where every victim has the right to have the court consider making a restitution order against the offender. If that order is made by the judge, the order is entered as a civil court judgment that can be enforced against the offender. This is a welcomed provision.
However, everyone will recognize that it has limits. It would require offenders to be capable of paying. It would be the same problem that we have with surcharges, in that it would be a very inadequate way to ensure we are focusing on the victim and that there is compensation.
The restitution feature would only add another element to that, which would be far outdistanced by situations in which offenders and perpetrators who are convicted would not have the resources. Therefore, the idea of a restitution order would have no meaningful impact on the kinds of compensation that could help victims to deal with trauma and grief and pick up the pieces after their own victimization following a crime, or that of a loved one.
At around that time, I began to interact with a very inspiring woman in my constituency. Joan Howard lost a son over ten years ago, in 2003, to gun violence. He was shot dead with a handgun in the hallway of a building in Toronto-Danforth.
Kempton Howard, after whom a park is named in our riding, was a role model to countless teens, through his volunteer work in Eastview Neighbourhood Community Centre's Boys and Girls Club. He was a moderator of a junior leadership program, an after-school children's program leader, a summer day camp counsellor, and a youth basketball coach. He was also a recipient of the Youth Ontario Volunteer Services Award.
Joan spent many years dealing with the trauma and the long-lasting grief, and then she began to ask herself what she could do. She has done many things. She has become part of a peer support system, which I will talk about briefly, if I have time.
More recently, we have joined together for a petition campaign that has been tabled on many occasions in the House. That petition asks the House of Commons to better understand that victims of crime, especially crimes of violence and crimes involving guns, include the loved ones of the direct victims. As a consequence, we need to create a meaningful countrywide system of public support for the loved ones of murder victims, as well as for victims of crime who survive the crimes against them, and ensure adequate funding for such a system.
Reverend Sky Starr runs an amazing program called Out of Bounds, with the thematic subtitle of “grief support from the inside out”, which involves the mutual peer support model. Between Joan and Reverend Starr, I have become inspired, or at least better informed, about the need to take trauma and ongoing grief seriously, as something that destroys lives and whole communities.
To that end, we had a teach-in here on the Hill, on December 10, 2013, which happened to be international Human Rights Day. It was a seminar on the Hill, to which a number of MPs from all parties came. Actually, the Conservative Party did not come, but the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice did send a staff member. The staff member seemed to have been extremely moved by what he heard and learned. We hoped that this session would go back to the parliamentary secretary and then to the Minister of Justice to factor into the coming victims bill of rights. Unfortunately, I do not believe that was the case.
That said, I do not think that anything in the victims bill of rights precludes us from moving forward in the future on a better understanding of the basic points that Reverend Starr made during that seminar. She outlined three crucial needs. First, there is a need for sustainable funding for grassroots organizations and resources to help organizations find funding opportunities to actually help victims. Second, trauma-specific policies are needed to deal with the lack of trauma support that currently exists in communities. Third, the recognition of grief as a mental health issue has to be first and foremost a starting point. The grief and trauma that flows from gun violence, in many ways, is very particular and very long-lasting.
I will end my comments by paying tribute to another member of my community, Jonathan Khan, who was shot dead on the Danforth with a gun. I attended his funeral in a synagogue in North Toronto only a few months ago, and again had occasion to realize how easily lives are destroyed, not simply the lives of those killed, but those who survive them.
The only thing that propels people forward are support networks. We, as a society, need to help create those support networks and not rely only on families.
