Statutory Release Reform Act

An Act to amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act and to make a consequential amendment to the International Transfer of Offenders Act

This bill was last introduced in the 41st Parliament, 2nd Session, which ended in August 2015.

Sponsor

Steven Blaney  Conservative

Status

Second reading (House), as of March 27, 2015
(This bill did not become law.)

Summary

This is from the published bill. The Library of Parliament often publishes better independent summaries.

This enactment amends the Corrections and Conditional Release Act to
(a) establish that a person who receives a particular sentence for an offence set out in Schedule I of the Act is, for the purposes of determining his or her statutory release date, a person-at-risk;
(b) establish new rules to determine the statutory release date of an offender who, after he or she becomes a person-at-risk, receives a sentence of two years or more — or two or more sentences that amount to two years or more — for committing an offence, or offences, set out in Schedule I of the Act, and ensure that the offender’s statutory release date cannot be earlier than six months before the end of their sentence; and
(c) require that the Correctional Service of Canada provide the police with information that is relevant to an offender’s risk of reoffending if the offender’s statutory release date is determined in accordance with the new rules.
The enactment also makes a consequential amendment to the International Transfer of Offenders Act.

Elsewhere

All sorts of information on this bill is available at LEGISinfo, an excellent resource from the Library of Parliament. You can also read the full text of the bill.

Corrections and Conditional Release ActPrivate Members' Business

April 28th, 2015 / 8:05 p.m.
See context

NDP

Randall Garrison NDP Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC

Mr. Speaker, I know that I have very limited time tonight, but I do want to chime in on this debate because I think, with all due respect to the very honourable intentions of the member for Saint John, it is never really a good idea to craft legislation around a single incident. As the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness referred to, this is another case of common sense. As we all know, common sense is not all that common and quite often, it is quite wrong about what works in the criminal justice field.

Unfortunately, what we have here is a government that often prefers to prey on fear rather than do what is most effective. We know what works with offenders, and that is a gradual supervised reintegration into the community. What the bill would do, despite its good intentions, is interfere with that process for far too many offenders and ultimately, inadvertently would result in more victims.

The police already have the power to release information on those offenders who present a threat to the public. That standard is quite an important one, and that is the one the bill would change. It says that the standard would now be that if there is public fear or public interest, the information should be released. However, what we have to accept is that the police already have the power to do this when it is a question of public safety, and they already do this when public safety is at risk.

I would argue the bill is both dangerous and unnecessary.

We know what kinds of things work, and I just want to give a short example as I am very quickly running out of time.

We know when sexual offenders are released back into the community that a program called CoSA, Circles of Support and Accountability, really works. What the Conservative government has done as of March 31 is it has cut all the funding to the CoSA programs around the country. This means that they are beginning to close down slowly. These are programs that surrounded the offenders with support and people, largely volunteers from the faith community, who monitored what they did in the community. They have very high success rates, between 80% and 100% success.

This program, which was something that was actually very effective in preventing more victims in the community, was eliminated. Instead, we have the proposal coming forward in the form of a government bill, Bill C-56, and we have this private member's bill which, as I said, unfortunately, is unnecessary and would be dangerous to the successful reintegration of offenders into their communities.

Statutory Release Reform ActRoutine Proceedings

March 27th, 2015 / 12:05 p.m.
See context

Conservative

Diane Finley Conservative Haldimand—Norfolk, ON