This bill is from the 43rd Parliament, 2nd session, which ended in August 2021.
David Lametti Liberal
Second reading (House), as of April 13, 2021
(This bill did not become law.)
This is from the published bill. The Library of Parliament has also written a full legislative summary of the bill.
This enactment amends the Criminal Code and the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act to, among other things, repeal certain mandatory minimum penalties, allow for a greater use of conditional sentences and establish diversion measures for simple drug possession offences.
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.
Bill numbers are reused for different bills each new session. Perhaps you were looking for one of these other C-22s:
Karen Vecchio Conservative Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON
Madam Speaker, I rise on a point of order.
I too am sitting in my parliamentary office, and although I am in a different building, I too have had some connection problems. This is a very important speech that I have been trying to listen to. For many of us, it is a very personal speech, and I would really like to hear it, but the sound has been coming in and out, I am afraid.
Criminal CodeGovernment Orders
The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès) Alexandra Mendes
We will ask the minister to resume, because the interpreters have not complained yet, so we have been able to get the interpretation done.
Criminal CodeGovernment Orders
An hon. member
It is not the interpretation.
Criminal CodeGovernment Orders
The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès) Alexandra Mendes
David Lametti Liberal LaSalle—Émard—Verdun, QC
Madam Speaker, I remind the House that I have taken all decisions based on the health and safety of my employees, following regulations and meeting the needs of my constituents, as well as Canadians across the country in my portfolio.
I will provide an overview of the Bill C-22. The bill would repeal MMPs for all drug offences, which were enacted by the previous Conservative government in 2012. It would also repeal MMPs for certain offences involving the use or possession of firearms and a tobacco-related offence. We know that MMPs do not deter these crimes or keep people and communities safe. In eliminating these MMPs, Bill C-22 would restore judicial discretion, reduce the time and money spent on needless litigation, and address systemic barriers to equality.
We have always held that serious criminals should be treated seriously. As such MMPs will remain for the most serious offences including murder, child sexual offences and firearm offences linked to organized crime.
These changes go hand in hand with the proposed measures in Bill C-21, an act to amend certain acts and to make certain consequential amendments with regard to firearms, to increase maximum penalties for certain firearms offences related to gun smuggling and trafficking.
This would allow judges to issue stricter sentences for the most serious gun crimes, including gang-related violence, while enabling a broader range of options for lower-risk and first-time offenders, including alternatives that could help prevent them from becoming hardened criminals behind bars. This is critical to helping keep our communities safe.
With Bill C-22 serious crimes would be sentenced seriously and proportionate to the gravity of the offence and degree of responsibility of the offender.
The second area of proposed reforms I would like to discuss focuses on realigning the conditional sentence regime with the purpose for which these sentences were originally intended, namely, to address the overreliance on incarceration for less serious non-violent crimes. A CSO is a sentence of incarceration of less than two years that may be served in the community under strict conditions. It is only available if a judge is satisfied that doing so would pose no risks to public safety.
Bill C-22 would repeal a number of restrictions brought in by the former Conservative government on the availability of CSOs. The additional restrictions have limited judges from imposing CSOs in appropriate cases. The current restrictions have resulted in more people being sent to jail and more charter challenges and have contributed to the over-incarceration of indigenous persons, in particular.
In July 2020, in the case of the Queen v. Sharma, the Ontario Court of Appeal struck down the provisions in the Criminal Code limiting the availability of CSOs for offences punishable by a maximum term of imprisonment of 14 years or life, or 10 years if drugs were involved. The court noted that these limits on the availability of CSOs undermined the remedial purpose of the Gladue principle in the Criminal Code by limiting a judge's ability to impose fit sentences to take into account the circumstances of indigenous offenders, including the well-documented impacts of colonialism and residential schools.
Bill C-22 seeks to reform the CSO regime in a way that would allow courts to order sentences other than incarceration in appropriate cases that focus on restorative justice principles. We have heard a strong and positive response from the legal community to these proposed changes. These changes would have real, measurable results. Again, CSOs would only be available for those facing sentences of less than two years and where the judge is satisfied that there is no risk to public safety. They would not be available for more serious offences, including murder or attempted murder, torture, advocating genocide, and criminal organization and terrorism offences punishable by a maximum term of imprisonment of 10 years or more.
I would now like to turn my attention to describing the third set of important legislative reforms proposed by Bill C-22, which support our commitment to public health-centred approaches to drugs and substance use.
Bill C-22 aligns with amendments proposed by Private Member's Bill C-236, an act to amend the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, in terms of evidence-based diversion measures, with certain technical amendments. I would like to thank the member for Beaches—East York for his private member's bill and his leadership in this area. We agree that these changes to treat addiction as a health issue would improve the state of the criminal justice system in Canada, particularly as we examine better approaches to dealing with the opioid crisis, and believe that changes like these may very well help save lives.
Substance use is first and foremost a health issue. Bill C-22 would enact an evidence-based diversion framework in the CDSA with a set of guiding principles informed by Canada's drugs and substances strategy, as well as principles adopted by the United Nations and the World Health Organization. The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, on February 19, released a statement in support of C-22's treatment of drug possession offences. It is clear that we must move toward more effective ways to address public safety concerns relating to substance use.
These reforms are also inspired by the successful approach used in the Youth Criminal Justice Act. They would require peace officers and Crown attorneys to consider alternatives to charging and prosecuting. That includes diverting individuals to a public health agency before proceeding with a charge or before proceeding with a charge once laid. It is worth noting that prosecutors and law enforcement work together in determining which charges to lay in a specific situation and, as such, extending this requirement to both would help ensure that appropriate discretion is exercised.
The reforms proposed would encourage the diversion of simple drug possession cases away from the criminal justice system and focus on the needs of the individual.
Another important benefit of these reforms is that individuals would not have the stigma and the legal costs associated with being charged with a criminal offence. Moreover, these reforms are consistent with the director of public prosecutions' August 2020 guideline that requires prosecutors to pursue diversion for simple drug possession cases.
These proposed amendments will support my 2021 supplementary mandate letter commitment to divert first-time, non-violent individuals charged with simple drug possession at an early stage.
These proposed legislative reforms will generate several long-term benefits to the criminal justice system, including overall cost reductions, and will lead to more effective responses leading to less recidivism. I am confident that Bill C-22 strikes the right balance. Indeed, it has been applauded as much-needed legislation. It responds to long-standing calls for reforms by the Quebec Bar and the Canadian Bar Association.
Our changes reflect several calls to action made by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, calls for justice by the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, and recent calls by the Parliamentary Black Caucus.
Moving forward, we will do more. We have committed to support the application of Gladue principles and Gladue report-writing in the criminal justice system. We have also committed to supporting community justice centre pilot projects across Canada, which will provide more culturally appropriate services to address root causes of crime. Finally, we have noted our support for the implementation of the impact of race and culture assessments, which will better inform sentencing decisions, as they will be based on an understanding of the systemic inequalities faced by racialized groups such as Black Canadians.
In advancing these reforms, I am conscious that some stakeholders and parliamentarians may believe that Bill C-22 does not go far enough or, for others, it goes too far.
Bill C-22 is an important step that advances evidence-based reforms, which will alleviate some of the negative trends plaguing our criminal justice system. It will ensure that sentencing judges are better able to consider the entire context, circumstances, and seriousness of an offence when they impose a sentence.
The time has come to break with the past, the so-called tough-on-crime policies of the previous government, whose only benefit has been to make politicians look tough. We can do a better job and we will.
Criminal CodeGovernment Orders
The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès) Alexandra Mendes
Questions and comments, the hon. member for Red Deer—Mountain View.
Earl Dreeshen Conservative Red Deer—Mountain View, AB
Madam Speaker, I just want to refer the minister to a BC Civil Liberties Association report, which states:
Today, there are approximately 50 offences carrying a mandatory minimum sentence of imprisonment in the Criminal Code, the vast majority of which came into force in 1995.
Mandatory minimums were the hallmark of former Liberal governments. What political party was governing Canada in 1995?
David Lametti Liberal LaSalle—Émard—Verdun, QC
Madam Speaker, I thank the hon. member for his apparent change to being critical of mandatory minimum penalties, which I can glean from the question.
Mandatory minimum penalties simply have not worked. We have focused in this bill on mandatory minimums that result in the over-incarceration of Black and indigenous Canadians, in particular, and that have served to clog up the criminal justice system. They are not helping anybody. They were simply fuelling the ideological tough-on-crime narrative, which has not proven to be true empirically, has not served our communities, has not made us safer and not helped victims.
Randall Garrison NDP Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke, BC
Madam Speaker, the minister knows that my question is going to about why he has not gone a bit further. Why are we still talking about criminal penalties for the personal possession of small amounts of drugs when all health authorities recognize that we should treat addiction and drug use as a health problem, and not as a criminal problem? Why be so timid? Why do we not just move to eliminate those criminal penalties altogether?
David Lametti Liberal LaSalle—Émard—Verdun, QC
Madam Speaker, I thank the hon. member for his dedication to this issue. Like him, I feel that there is a serious question that needs to be studied here, particularly in light of the very serious opioid crisis in various parts of the country. I also understand and agree with the idea that we ought to treat health problems as health problems, and not as criminal problems.
What I was doing here, and I hope the hon. member will understand this, was attacking one part of that, the part that revolves around criminal sentencing, so I stayed within those parameters. This is not to preclude larger debates from happening in other areas, which I would welcome.
Judy Sgro Liberal Humber River—Black Creek, ON
Madam Speaker, let me congratulate the Minister of Justice for bringing forward this bill. I know he has put a tremendous amount of work into it.
It is extremely important that we look for more diversion programs, more opportunities to decrease the number of people throughout our cities who are in jail for miscellaneous things and who have criminal records that will prevent them from getting viable work later on.
When we talk about diversion programs, I would be interested to hear from the minister some examples of where he thinks the diversion program could be better played out in the justice system.
David Lametti Liberal LaSalle—Émard—Verdun, QC
Madam Speaker, during the 2019 election, I met with leaders of the Black community in Toronto, at a meeting in Scarborough.
They were univocal in asking us to support the kinds of programming they did. Around the table, there were ministers, in the religious sense, other community workers and ex-convicts who were working in their communities. They were developing programs that worked with kids, after-school programs that kept kids out of gangs.
They said that they wanted me to get these kinds of programs supported so that we would not send kids to jail, because when we send them to jail, they just end up becoming hardened criminals.
In the fall economic statement, we have supported community justice pilot projects in cities like Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal, precisely to target these cultural communities and to give police officers and prosecutors alternatives to divert people from the criminal justice system.
Andréanne Larouche Bloc Shefford, QC
Madam Speaker, I thank the hon. minister for introducing Bill C-22.
I used to work for a community organization focused on alternative justice. We worked on preventing crime among young people who sometimes had drug problems. We obviously quickly learned that criminalization was not a solution in some cases. What these people needed was more support. Public health plays a very important role in this issue.
However, would the minister agree that the federal government should be sending money to the provinces so that they can ensure that these struggling young people and young adults, who will not have a criminal record, will get the support they need from public health?
David Lametti Liberal LaSalle—Émard—Verdun, QC
Madam Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for her question.
I am working with my counterparts across Canada. The principles in this bill could obviously apply to other bills. I am prepared to work with my counterparts in Quebec and across Canada to find the best and fairest solutions.
Rob Moore Conservative Fundy Royal, NB
Madam Speaker, some of these so-called minor offences to which the minister refers are: robbery with a firearm; extortion with a firearm; weapons trafficking; importing or exporting, knowing it is an unauthorized firearm; and using a firearm in the commission of an offence. What these offences all have in common is that each and every one of them had a mandatory prison sentence, as it should, assigned to them before the Conservatives took government.
I appreciate that the hon. minister and I will not agree on a soft-on-crime approach, but I wish he would be upfront with the fact that these mandatory minimums are Liberal mandatory minimums. Would the minister at least admit that?