Madam Speaker, because this is my first speech in the 44th Parliament, I hope the House will indulge me to spend a minute to thank the good people of Cowichan—Malahat—Langford for again putting their trust in me and sending me to this place for a third time. It is a privilege to be here, and I carry that trust on my shoulders every day. I could not be here if it were not for an amazing campaign team, an army of volunteers and the support of my family. Being here, I really feel the weight of the responsibility of being the voice for approximately 100,000 people on beautiful Vancouver Island.
I am very pleased to be rising today to speak to Bill C-5, which tries to start the conversation on serious criminal justice reform. It is a conversation that we have been waiting for in Canada for quite some time, and it begs a question: Why are we here as members of Parliament?
I am not here to make a fancy video for an email fundraiser. I am not here to launch serious attacks against the government or for a great clip. When it comes to a subject as weighty as this, we each have a responsibility to treat the subject matter before us with the seriousness and responsibility it deserves.
In the 42nd Parliament, I was honoured to serve as my party's justice critic. When dealing with subject matters involving the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act or the Criminal Code of Canada, and when we know that the decisions we make and the reforms we pass in this place have real-world consequences for people, it adds another layer of gravity to the debate and the deliberation.
When I look at Bill C-5, I see the intent of the government. It also had an intention in the previous Parliament, which was interrupted by an unnecessary election call, but it honoured that part of its mandate to bring forward criminal justice reform. As to whether it goes far enough, that is the question before us. I would argue no, it is indeed an important first step, but this bill makes me realize there is so much more that could have been done.
We talk about low-hanging fruit. This fruit is almost on the ground compared to what could have been achieved. The Liberals should find it in themselves to seize the moment and be bold, because I do not think they realize that a significant percentage of Canadians out there are asking us as parliamentarians to seize that moment, to make that once-in-a-lifetime change that would have a significant effect on people's lives.
I want to walk through sections of Bill C-5, and I am going to start with the part that deals with mandatory minimum reform. I have sat through a significant part of the debate on Bill C-5 on Monday, yesterday and today, and I have to disagree with the Conservatives' position. I am hearing terms like “hug a thug” or “criminal-first agenda”, and they not do justice to the seriousness of the subject matter before us.
If we here to follow evidence-based policy-making, the evidence all around us, in peer-reviewed journals and examples from countries all around the world, shows that mandatory minimums simply do not achieve their stated objective. They do not deter crime. They do not reduce rates. In fact, they have been such an abject failure in terms of expanding prison populations, many states around the world have started to roll them back, even in Texas. Texas has decided that system does not work.
We do not know what motivates people to commit crimes. The reasons are as varied as the individuals themselves. Do we think that someone who is about to commit a crime will stop for a single moment to think they had better not do it because they could possibly be put in jail for 14 years as punishment? No. The punishment is not a deterrent. The heat of the moment is often what motivates people to commit crime.
I think that the approach of mandatory minimums, its philosophical underpinning, is a lack of trust in judges to make the right decision. In our corner of the House, we believe that judges are the only ones who understand the facts of the case, the unique circumstances of the individuals and the factors surrounding the crime that was committed.
The Criminal Code, lest we forget, already has provisions which allow judges, through subsection 718.2, to take aggravating factors into account. Judges can look at the severity of the crime, whether it was perpetrated because of racially motivated hatred or whether it was against a person with a disability. They can take all of those factors into account and can increase or reduce the sentence as necessary.
We cannot have a one-size-fits-all approach to criminal justice because no two cases are the same, and no two individuals who appear before a judge are the same. I have every faith that, if a hardened criminal who has not learned his or her ways and is again appearing before a judge for a similar crime, that the judge is going to be fully capable of looking at the individual's record and doling out the appropriate punishment.
I will leave it at that because the part I really want to focus my attention on is the part that would amend the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act.
Bill C-5 would add a declaration of principles, and a warning and referrals section. In my mind, these are good, important first steps, but they come nowhere near the importance of actually moving towards full decriminalization.
My home province of British Columbia is the epicentre of the opioid epidemic. Communities in my riding of Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, particularly Duncan, are seeing the effects of this every day. It is an epidemic that, over the last six years, has left a wake of carnage. It has destroyed families, and loved ones are gone forever, for something that we had the power to prevent through good policy-making, but have so far failed to do so. That is what I was talking about when I referred, in my opening remarks, to missed opportunities and not seizing the moment to implement bold policy.
Warnings, referrals and a declaration of principles is in no way a replacement for the decriminalization that we need to go. I am very thankful that I am in a caucus with members such as the member for Courtenay—Alberni, who today introduced a bill to do just that, because, if the Liberals are not going to go that way, we are going to show Canadians the path we could have taken had they elected a New Democratic government.
The reason this is a problem is that last year, the public safety committee released a report on systemic racism in policing in Canada. The bill before us would give far too much discretion to police officers, and there are so many racialized Canadians, Black and indigenous people in Canada, who have a fundamental distrust of the police. They are still having problematic interactions with the police. However, the bill would give police officers the ability to make the decision as to whether to engage in a warning or a referral, or to press criminal charges. I do not believe that is right. The City of Vancouver, the Province of British Columbia, the City of Toronto and the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police all support decriminalization, and they are calling for this bold move.
To conclude, I would like to see the government take the bold step of referring Bill C-5 to committee before we get to the second reading vote, which would allow the committee to study the bill and possibly expand it beyond its current mandate. If we have a second reading vote and then refer the bill to committee, the mandate of the committee will be severely limited. I am asking government members to allow this to happen so we can hear from the experts, expand the scope of the bill and truly get ahead with the bold criminal justice reform this country so desperately needs.
