Madam Speaker, before I provide my comments on Bill C-5, I want to take a moment to congratulate the Bombers on their performance yesterday in the Grey Cup. I, along with hundreds of thousands of Canadians from coast to coast to coast, take in the annual festivities of the Grey Cup, which is a great Canadian tradition, and we are very proud in Winnipeg of how the Bombers performed. The coaching staff, players and administration all did an outstanding job, winning the Grey Cup for the second consecutive year, although there was a one-year pause in the CFL. I am very proud of the team, and I know I speak on behalf of all residents of Manitoba and Bomber fans in all regions of our country.
Having said that, I am often reminded there is a great divide between the Conservative Party and the Liberal Party when it comes to justice-related issues. I approach it with a bit of a different bias, having had an opportunity in different capacities to get a sense of young people's interactions with the law.
I was the chair of the Keewatin youth justice committee for a number of years in my local community and was also a justice critic. I had the good fortune of being an MLA for a number of years and had the opportunity to be a justice critic in the province of Manitoba.
I look at Bill C-5 as positive legislation that would make a difference. Back when I was the chair of the justice committee a gentleman by the name of Gary Kowalski, who was a colleague of mine and represented the Maples, opened my eyes to what justice committees were all about.
There are youth in all our communities who at times do things maybe they should not. They will fall on the other side of the law. In many of these cases, especially in the early nineties, often 16-year-olds or 14-year-olds would go to local stores, pick up something and decide not to pay for it. They were often first-time offenders. As opposed to having local police enforcement, in particular the Winnipeg police department, lay charges against those youths, they were provided the alternative of going before a youth justice committee. If the youths agreed to participate and fulfill the disposition of whatever the youth justice committee came up with, they would not be registered as having committed that criminal offence.
I was amazed when I found out about the group and wanted to know how we could get more people engaged and what sort of level of interest there would be. When I advertised it in the community of Inkster, which was the provincial area I represented at the time, no shortage of people were interested in being these quasi-judicial probation officers, because that is in fact what we were. We were honorary quasi-judicial probation officers.
At the first meeting, we probably had 40-plus residents. The average justice committee was under 20 people, so we had to decide who would be the most interested in moving forward. Some of the personalities on the committee were fairly hard: There were harsh individuals there. When we started to see young people come before the committee, even the harshest of them all had a much better appreciation and understanding. We would see youths who stole something from a store, and as a direct result they would have to do X, Y and Z and go through the courts.
One can talk about individual youths. One could also talk about the costs to society, such as court costs and so forth. I would argue that the cases we were receiving, at least in the first number of years, were best dealt with by our justice committee.
The committee was dealing with youth who were committing offences in the community. I believe that really had an impact. I remember a librarian at one of our local schools who got to know some of the youth. The dispositions that were typically given were for community service. Whenever we met with a 14-year-old or someone under the age of 18, and that was all of the time, we also had a parent come forward. It was amazing when we saw that 14-year-old without peer pressure, without his or her friends around, sitting in a chair with a guardian who was usually a mom or a dad. That young person would kind of shrink into the chair, head down, often breaking into tears. We got that sense of remorse. There was an appreciation of the terms of the crime committed and the circumstances around it.
We all knew what impact peer pressure can have on a young mind when going into a store with a friend. It does not make it right, but hopefully we could be a little more sympathetic as a community. I would argue that because we took that community approach, we said to our young people coming before us that we genuinely cared for them, and that they had fallen on the wrong side but we wanted to help them get on the right side. I know first-hand that some of the youth who went through our program ultimately ended up working in jobs and made reference to the positive impact of the dispositions given to them. There is an alternative.
When the Minister of Justice was talking, he said that the bill was all about low-risk offenders. However, listening to some of the rhetoric coming from the Conservative benches one would think that a cold-blooded murderer was going to be let go. The Conservatives seem to have this tough-on-crime mentality, whether it is better or healthier for our communities or not. I saw that in opposition and I am seeing it again today. The Conservative Party needs to better understand that people who become incarcerated, generally speaking, are going to be released some day. It is important that our justice system is there to protect the public. The issues of public safety and rehabilitation need to be factored in. The closer we get to doing everything right, the safer our communities will be.
For political purposes, for the three-inch headlines, Conservatives have a mentality that gives the impression that as a caucus they are tough on crime, that there is a consequence for crime, and that criminals are going to go to jail for a long time. That is the impression the Conservatives want to give. What is worse, they then try to give false impressions. Their first speaker, the critic, talked about how the Liberals were saying that if people committed certain crimes they would not have to go to jail: there would be no problem with it. The legislation would pass and people would not have to go to jail.
One of the fundamental differences between Liberals and the Conservative Party is that we have more faith in our judicial system and the independence of our judges. When judges have been appointed at the federal and provincial levels, especially in the last six years, we have been very diligent in ensuring that judicial appointments were done in a way that Canadians could be very proud of. We are saying that when a judge is appointed, that judge is in a far better position than any one of us to give a disposition in the best interests of the communities we represent and of the individual who committed a crime. That is what this legislation is really about, from my perspective.
Judges are well equipped to deal with low-risk offenders and the circumstances surrounding the offences, but if we listen to the Conservative rhetoric on the other side, one gets the impression that Liberals want these people to be set free: that we want to let them go. We are saying we have confidence in our judges. We are saying that we need to recognize that systemic racism is real, it is there and we need to do something.
The Conservative Party talks about truth and reconciliation and how important it is to the party. As a government over the last number of years, we have passed laws whether on language, children, the statutory holiday or more, all dealing with the calls to action. I keep my little book with me in the chamber that talks about the importance of truth and reconciliation. In fact, it has the 94 calls to action in it.
The member from the Green Party referred to call to action 32. I will read it. It states:
We call upon the federal government to amend the Criminal Code to allow trial judges, upon giving reasons, to depart from mandatory minimum sentences and restrictions on the use of conditional sentences.
The government has enacted a number of the calls to action by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. We are acting upon somewhere around 75% to 80% of the ones we are responsible for or have shared responsibility for. It is in progress. It is not like we can click our heels and they are all done. We recognize that. That is the reason we feel it is important to get this bill passed.
Many government members would love to see the bill passed sooner as opposed to later, and we understand the Conservatives will have some concerns with regard to the legislation. I would challenge members of the Conservative Party in particular, as an opposition party, to talk to me about truth and reconciliation and call to action 32, and to tell us how and why they believe this legislation goes against it. I suggest the bill supports call to action 32. That is one of the reasons it is getting the support it is receiving, at least from the government and members of the Liberal caucus. When we talk about truth and reconciliation and establishing that relationship, which I know is so important to the Prime Minister of Canada, this is the type of legislation that will make a difference.
If members were listening to the Minister of Justice, he gave us some percentages, and so did the parliamentary secretary. I made a quick note. The parliamentary secretary said that the Black community makes up 3% of Canada's population, yet when we look at federal institutions, it makes up 7%. When we look at indigenous communities across Canada, which make up around 5% of the overall population of our country, they make up close to 30% of federal inmates. That is 30%, based on 5% of the population.
How can we not look at this call for action and react to it? Some of my colleagues across the way said that some of these minimum sentences were put in during other administrations, the odd one even referencing Liberal administrations. It is important to recognize that we have been in government for just over six years. How time goes by.
