Answer her question.
An Act to amend the Criminal Code and the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (trafficking in human organs)
This bill was last introduced in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session, which ended in September 2019.
This bill was last introduced in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session, which ended in September 2019.
Considering amendments (Senate), as of May 14, 2019
(This bill did not become law.)
This is from the published bill. The Library of Parliament often publishes better independent summaries.
This enactment amends the Criminal Code to create new offences in relation to trafficking in human organs. It also amends the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act to provide that a permanent resident or foreign national is inadmissible to Canada if the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration is of the opinion that they have engaged in any activities relating to trafficking in human organs.
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.
Randy Boissonnault Liberal Edmonton Centre, AB
Madam Speaker, I am going to answer the question, if the heckling will stop.
What I can say very clearly is that the hybridization of offences would provide the courts with the tools they need to make sure that we respect our obligations under Jordan's principle. Nobody wants to see criminals on the streets because they did not get their time in court within two years. Principles of sentencing would not be affected by Bill C-75. That is section 718 of the code. Members can look at it.
Hybridization would be another tool for prosecutors, and they would be able to use it.
Michael Cooper Conservative St. Albert—Edmonton, AB
Madam Speaker, Sheri Arsenault lost her 18 year-old son, along with two other young men from Edmonton, at the hands of an impaired driver. She came to the justice committee and pleaded with Liberal MPs not to reclassify, not to hybridize, the very serious offence of impaired driving causing bodily harm.
The member for Edmonton Centre rightfully supported our amendments to not reclassify terrorism- and genocide-related offences. The member said, in relation to those offences, “Let's be serious.... We're talking about terrorism. We're talking about very serious offences.”
What does the hon. member have to say to Sheri Arsenault? Does he not consider impaired driving causing bodily harm to be a very serious offence?
Randy Boissonnault Liberal Edmonton Centre, AB
Madam Speaker, if the member for St. Albert—Edmonton were to go back on the tape, he would also see that I was very clear about his comment to the committee and said “hogwash and poppycock” on his politicization of a very serious matter in Bill C-75.
I have met with Ms. Arsenault. I have met with George Marrinier. They are constituents. Quite frankly, that member knows, as members on the other side know, that this is not a sentencing question. We doubled the fines for impaired driving to 14 years. I can tell members that this is going to help us respect the Jordan principle.
The member can be upset about this, just like I am, but this is going to help us in the administration of justice.
The Assistant Deputy Speaker NDP Carol Hughes
Order. Order. The hon. member for St. Albert—Edmonton had an opportunity to ask the question. He may not like the answer, but he should be respecting the House and waiting if he wants to ask another question.
Questions and comments, the hon. Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice. A brief question, please.
Arif Virani Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, Lib.
Madam Speaker, I compliment the member for his work on the justice committee and also in his role as special advisor on LGBTQ2 issues.
We are nearing the one-year anniversary of the historic apology to the LGBTQ2 community by the Prime Minister on November 28 of last year. An important component of that apology was the expungement of records. Could the hon. member explain why the bawdy house and vagrancy amendments passed at committee helped inform and complete the work of that apology in terms of addressing LGBTQ2 discrimination?
Randy Boissonnault Liberal Edmonton Centre, AB
Madam Speaker, I thank the parliamentary secretary for his leadership on this file.
It is very clear, and the Prime Minister was clear in his apology, that we had work to do on the bawdy house provisions. The committee unanimously agreed to repeal them in Bill C-75, including the vagrancy provisions.
Gay men were charged, arrested and now have criminal convictions for simply going to meet other men in bath houses or gay clubs. This change would allow future additions to happen to expunge in legislation so that those records could be expunged.
Daniel Blaikie NDP Elmwood—Transcona, MB
Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise and put some thoughts on the record with respect to Bill C-75, which is the government's response, we are told, to the Jordan decision, which had to do with lengthy delays in the criminal justice system in Canada. The ruling maintained that cases had to be dealt with in a certain amount of time or the people accused of committing a crime would be off the hook. We have seen across the country instances of people accused of very serious crimes not being tried in court because of a failure to meet deadlines.
It is quite important, I think, that both the government and Parliament take action. This is a long-standing complaint, and not just in some of the most serious crimes and trials. We have also heard from Canadians who have had occasion, one way or another, to deal with court proceedings, especially if they are victims or the families of victims, that they are often outraged at the amount of time it takes to get justice. Of course, justice delayed too often is justice denied. The Jordan decision emphasizes that even more so and raises the stakes in terms of being able to deal with issues in a timely way. If we do not do so now, we will face a situation of people never being tried for the crimes they are accused of having committed.
Our responsibility as parliamentarians is to judge, on balance, this piece of legislation being presented by the government, which was not greatly amended at committee. I know the hon. member for Victoria and the NDP caucus did a lot of great work on this bill and made a lot of proposals at committee that were not accepted by the government, so this really remains a government package of reforms. Our duty as parliamentarians is to decide whether, on balance, this is going to address the issues that were raised in the Jordan decision and expedite our legal processes so that Canadians can expect to get justice through the courts.
One of the ways the government could have done that prior to presenting any legislation in this House would have been to act swiftly to appoint federal judges. It has been an ongoing story of this Parliament in terms of the failure of the justice minister to ensure that the roster of judges is full. We have heard many times in this House that the government ought to have been acting more quickly. Vacancies remain on the bench. The fact of the matter is that even if we have perfect laws, which we do not now and will not after Bill C-75 passes, if we do not have judges to hear the cases, it matters very little what the laws on the books are. It is the judges who hear the cases and the judges who make decisions.
Thus, it is incumbent upon the government to move more quickly on this. It has been three years now. Surely the government is not going to make a case that Canada does not have people qualified to hold those positions. The people are out there. It is a matter of the government making it a priority to actually make those appointments happen. Saying it is a priority is not enough. They have to actually appoint those judges. I do not want to hear government members getting up to talk about how important it is to them. I will wait to see when those positions are filled. That is the true test of how important it is for the government, and so far, it has not been very important.
The other thing we know is that if this is the government's signature justice reform, which it appears to be, a contributing factor to what is at stake with the Jordan decision is the issue of mandatory minimum sentences. That issue was very popular with the previous Conservative government. For a wide range of criminal charges, they brought in mandatory minimum sentences. We know that those are problematic in a number of ways. I think they are problematic in principle.
The fact of the matter is that no two crimes are the same. There are different circumstances depending on the particular crime and who is involved. The people best qualified to make decisions about what is an appropriate time to serve, along with other measures, such as addictions treatment and whatever else is factored into sentencing, are the people who hear the cases. I do not think it is for Parliament to pre-judge, for any case or set of cases, what the appropriate punishment is. That is why we have judges, people who are trained in the legal profession and have seen many different cases and are able to discriminate.
It is appropriate to entrust that work to judges, for whom it is a profession. Mandatory minimum sentences are about taking that away. One of the side effects of that, particularly in cases of smaller charges like minor drug possession and charges of that nature, is that when people know there is going to be a mandatory jail sentence of two, three, four or five years, it is really a disincentive for them to plead guilty. We have tools in order to make sure the most serious cases are heard in a timely way, and that murderers and gang members are not getting off easy because of the Jordan decision. One of those tools is to take some of those smaller cases and plead them out. People are not going to do that if it means serious jail time.
Again, there are people in the courts and the police force who are involved in making those kinds of decisions when they have that discretion. It is important to leave it to judges, prosecutors and the police to prioritize those cases, precisely to make sure that the worst ones and the ones they have the best chance of getting a conviction on are tried. Those people then get justice, and the courts are not bogged down with other kinds of cases without any ability to make a judgment call about what is relatively more or less important.
That was a major problem with changes to the justice system that we saw in the last Parliament. Outside of the Conservative Party and people who supported them in the last election, there was a pretty broad consensus that those things had to be repealed. We do not see that here. That is an obvious thing that is not in this legislation. It would have helped with respect to the Jordan decision, and would have been important to do on principle anyway.
One of the other things the bill does is establish hybrid offences between the provinces and the federal government. There is real concern that this is going to mean we are going to improve federal court wait times at the expense of provincial court wait times. This is classically Liberal, in a certain way.
I do not want to be too partisan about it, but I remember the nineties, when the federal government decided it was going to balance the budget at all costs. It made deep cuts to the health and social transfer. That ended up on the ledger of provincial governments, which now did not have the same funding for health services and other services that they were providing to their populations. Those governments went into deficit or had to take other measures, whether it was cuts to services or raising taxes, in order to be able to maintain what had theretofore been supported by the federal government.
For as much as the federal books looked better, there was only one taxpayer, and those people paid it at the provincial level instead of at the federal level. What looked good on the federal government did not ultimately make a difference to Canadians. They paid for it, either through higher taxes at the provincial level or through serious cuts to service.
Unfortunately, we had a Conservative government in the nineties, and we paid for that in terms of serious cuts to services. We lost nurses and teachers, and the federal government sat pretty while pretending it was not responsible for that. At the end of the day, its budget cuts did that.
We are gearing up for the potential for something similar, where the federal government will say, “Look at us. The wait times for the Federal Court are way down.” However, we have the potential to see those same waits happening at the provincial level, because people who at one time would have faced a charge at the federal level will now instead face a similar charge at the provincial level. We will not get rid of the wait times; we are just shifting the burden from the federal books to the provincial books.
For anyone paying close attention, the Liberals are not fooling anybody. If our job is to make sure those wait times go down and justice is served in a timely way, it is really important that we do it in a way that actually accomplishes that and does not give the federal government a talking point at the expense of the provinces.
I am out of time, but I look forward to questions.
Arif Virani Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, Lib.
Madam Speaker, I take issue a little with the member's comments with respect to judicial appointments. The track record of this government is that we have appointed 238 new judges. Last year, the minister appointed 100 in a single year, which was the most in two decades. Because we had to overhaul the Conservatives' old process, which was not merit based, it took a great amount of time.
In overhauling the process, we have taken the stats from 30% women being appointed to 56% women being appointed. We have taken the stats and are making a bench that actually reflects the diversity of our country. Twenty of the new appointees represent racialized persons; 13 of them represent LGBTQ2 communities; three identify as persons with disabilities, and at least eight are indigenous.
I would ask the member if he does not agree that the important goal is ensuring that the bench reflects the community it serves, and that we have taken entirely appropriate measures to overhaul the process.
The Assistant Deputy Speaker NDP Carol Hughes
I will remind the member that he is to address his questions to the Chair and not to individual members.
The hon. member for Elmwood—Transcona.
Daniel Blaikie NDP Elmwood—Transcona, MB
Madam Speaker, of course we want a bench that is reflective of the Canadian population in general, but I do not agree with the idea that it would take three years to develop. I do not think it ought to have taken as long as it did for the government to appoint the judges that it has.
The other side of that is to look at vacancies. As much as Liberals want to talk about the number of judges they have appointed, the fact is that there are a still a great number of vacancies, and judges have to be appointed in order to fill the bench.
If I am hosting a dinner, for instance, for which I need 500 plates but the caterer delivers 150, I tell the caterer there are 350 people without a meal. If he then says he would like to focus on the 150 people who have a meal, that is all well and good and I can understand why the caterer might want to do that, but it is not an acceptable answer.
Michael Cooper Conservative St. Albert—Edmonton, AB
Madam Speaker, I want to ask the member for Elmwood—Transcona about hybridization. He mentioned it in terms of the download that will result on our overburdened provincial courts, which handle 99.6% of criminal cases in Canada. In addition to that, the timeline to prosecute cases before a delay is deemed presumptively unreasonable would go from 30 months to 18 months.
Perhaps the hon. member could comment on that. It seems that on top of downloading cases onto provincial courts, it is actually going to increase the risk of having more cases thrown out rather than fewer.
Daniel Blaikie NDP Elmwood—Transcona, MB
Madam Speaker, my colleague will know I do not have the same legal background as he does. However, even without a legal background, if we look at this bill, and these measures especially, from the point of view of whether this is ultimately going to reduce delay, we would still be dealing with the same number of charges. They would just be dealt with in a different place. Therefore, I do not see how that, in and of itself, contributes to a reduction in delay.
The member is quite right to point out that the timeline for having things dealt with under the Jordan decision is shorter in provincial courts than it is in the Federal Court. It would not diminish the number of cases that need to be heard, nor any of the work that goes into trials. If it is shortening the timeline on top of that, then the question is how this contributes to reducing delay and ensuring that cases are not thrown out because they have not been heard within a reasonable amount of time. I just do not see how this meets that test.
Ali Ehsassi Liberal Willowdale, ON
Madam Speaker, it is my honour to address the House today in discussion of Bill C-75. As members are aware, Bill C-75 represents our government's commitment to ensure that the criminal justice system continues to serve Canadian citizens in the most efficient, effective, fair and accessible manner possible.
Through Bill C-75, our government is fulfilling its promise to move forward and modernize the criminal justice system and address court delays. Due to the failures of the previous government, court delays have persisted within the criminal justice system. Court delays are not a new problem.
However, our government recognizes we can and must do better. Since 2015, we have heard from countless stakeholders, community members, lawyers and other individuals regarding the need to reform the criminal justice system.
In fact, the Supreme Court's rulings in the Jordan and Cody cases further support this rationale. As such, through collaborative efforts identified by the federal, provincial and territorial governments, Bill C-75 seeks to remedy these significant gaps and inefficiencies.
Among other reforms, Bill C-75 proposes to limit the use of preliminary inquiries for offences carrying maximum penalties, modernize bail practices and procedures in order to improve access to justice, better protect victims of intimate partner violence, provide judges with greater discretionary tools to manage cases and efficiently bring criminal matters to resolution, hybridize offences punishable by a maximum penalty of 10 years or less, and increase the maximum penalty for all summary offences to two years less a day.
Today, I will be focusing on the hybridization aspect of Bill C-75. Bill C-75 introduces legislation that provides Crown prosecutors the discretion to elect the most efficient mode of prosecution, evaluated on a case-by-case basis. This system of reclassification would reduce court time consumed by less serious offences while allowing limited resources to be redirected to more serious offences. Moreover, this legislation prevents indictable cases from being dismissed or stayed due to the system's inability to try the accused within a reasonable time frame.
Bill C-75 amends over 115 offences punishable by either an indictable offence or summary conviction. Since the proposal hybridizes all straight indictable offences punishable by a maximum of 10 years or less, criminal offences relating to terrorism and genocide are subsequently captured. These are clauses referring to section 83.02 of the Criminal Code, providing or collecting property for certain activities; section 83.03, providing, making available, etc., property or services for terrorist purposes; section 83.04, using or possessing property for terrorist purposes; section 83.18, participation in activity of terrorist group; section 83.181, leaving Canada to participate in activity of terrorist group; subsection 83.221(1), advocating or promoting commission of terrorism offences; subsections 83.23(1) and 83.23(2), concealing person who carried out terrorist activity and concealing person who is likely to carry out terrorist activity, and finally subsection 318(1), which relates to advocating genocide.
Canada is a leader among nations in the fight for universal human rights and the international rule of law. We were one of the first countries to sign the Rome Statute and the first country to ratify its membership within the International Criminal Court. Moreover, on a number of occasions, Canada has publicly denounced the actions of other governments due to their harsh treatment of their citizens, and urged their cases to be referred to the International Criminal Court for investigation, such as in the cases of Myanmar and Venezuela. Canadians are proud to live in a country that is diverse, with a global reputation as a defender of human rights.
Given the very few times that genocide and terrorism-related charges have been invoked in Canadian courts, the extremely serious nature of the issues, as well as Canada's moral obligation to continue to serve as an international promoter of justice, I am proud to inform the House that all eight clauses referred to above relating to genocide and terrorism-related offences were removed from the hybridization list. Specifically, all genocide and terrorism-related offences will continue to remain as straight indictable offences with a maximum penalty of 10 years less a day.
In its witness testimony, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs expressed its strong support for such amendments. It stated:
...terrorism [is] a heinous and potentially catastrophic phenomenon. Today, terrorist groups around the world, some of which actively seek to inspire recruits in Canada, are often motivated by ideologies infused with antisemitism. Far too many Jewish communities around the world – from Argentina to Denmark, and from France to Israel – have suffered from deadly terror attacks.
Additionally, B'nai Brith Canada expressed its concerns regarding the hybridization of offences relating to genocide and terrorism, stating:
It is inappropriate to allow these offences to be prosecuted in a summary fashion. To be treated with the seriousness which they deserve, they should continue to be prosecutable by way of indictment only.
Following the proposed amendments to remove all eight genocide and terrorism-related clauses from Bill C-75, our government will continue to send a clear, symbolic and moral message rebuking the offensive crimes mentioned above. However, I would like to strictly emphasize that the reclassification of offences does not affect basic sentencing principles exercised by courts. Depending on the severity of the case, Crown prosecutors will be required to consider a multitude of factors and ultimately decide to prosecute either as an indictable offence or summary conviction.
Before I conclude, as a member of the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, I would like to take this opportunity to offer my sincerest thanks to all the witnesses for submitting their testimony and appearing before the committee to present their expert opinions regarding Bill C-75. I can assure everyone that all recommendations and appeals put forward were carefully considered and taken into account.
Although there is no simple solution to resolve the issues of court delays, our government is taking action to introduce a cultural shift within the criminal justice system to address its root causes. We are taking important steps forward to act on what we have heard. Moreover, we are taking full advantage of this opportunity to create a criminal justice system that is compassionate and timely, a system that reflects the needs and expectations of all Canadian citizens.