Madam Speaker, I want to provide a quick warning before I speak. My testimony today contains a lot of graphic facts, and I may struggle getting through it.
I ask my colleagues, my friends and Canadians who are listening to stop for a moment and close their eyes. We can imagine we are a new RCMP constable in northern British Columbia. We are in our car on a dark isolated highway. It is late November, it is cold and it is just past 9 p.m. There is a light dusting of snow that covers the road in front of us as we drive down the dark deserted highway. Spruce and pine trees line the side of the road, illuminated only by the glow of our headlights.
Just up ahead, coming out of an old abandoned logging road, we see another set of lights, an old GMC pickup, and they veer onto the road in front of us. It picks up speed and is driving erratically. We wonder where it was. Why was it down there? Who is in it? Where is it going, and what was it doing down that road? As the questions flood into our minds, suspicion gets the best of us. It is probably a poacher, we think. We make the call, decide to pursue and then pull them over. It is a routine stop on a dark deserted road in the middle of the winter. We cannot possibly imagine that we are about to stumble upon one of Canada's most notorious serial killers.
On November 27, 2010, at approximately 9:45, a rookie police officer by the name of Aaron Kehler was patrolling off of Highway 27 when he noticed an old pickup truck pull out onto the highway from an old remote logging road. Constable Kehler knew there was nothing down that rugged road and thought it was odd that somebody would be down there late at night in the middle of winter. Seeing the truck veer, speed off and drive erratically, Kehler decided to pull the vehicle over. Constable Kehler's routine stop would lead to the arrest and eventual conviction of Canada's youngest serial killer, Cody Legebokoff.
Legebokoff was convicted of killing four women in my riding of Cariboo—Prince George. When the RCMP pulled him over, the first thing they noticed was the blood smears on his chin. A quick examination of the cab of the truck revealed a pool of blood on the floor. Searching the vehicle, they found a bloody wrench, a multitool, a monkey backpack and a wallet that contained a children's hospital card with the name Loren Leslie on it.
When the officers asked Cody about the blood on his face, he said he was hunting deer and had clubbed one to death. RCMP called a wildlife conservation officer with tracking skills. They followed Cody's tire tracks and then his footsteps into the bush. They made a horrifying discovery. It was not the body of a bleeding deer. It was the body of a 15-year-old girl. It was the body of my friend's daughter, Loren Donn Leslie.
I will fast-forward to four years later.
We can picture ourselves in a small, cramped courtroom filled with media, the victims' families, the accused and 11 of our peers. We can try to imagine listening to the gruesome details of what I have just discovered, of how Legebokoff raped and brutally murdered 15-year-old Loren, 23-year-old Natasha Montgomery, Jill Stuchenko and Cynthia Maas. The trial lasted almost four months. We can imagine sitting through that, day after day of gruesome testimony: brutal blunt force trauma, penetrating knife wounds, a broken jaw and cheekbone.
Jurors heard testimony that one of the victims was found with her pants around her ankles and that she died of blood loss and blunt force trauma. All four women were badly beaten before they died. DNA from one of the victims was found on a pickaxe inside Legebokoff s apartment. Natasha Montgomery's body has never been found, yet her DNA was found 32 times in Legebokoff's apartment, on clothing, on bedsheets and on an axe.
Jurors in this trial listened to the unspeakable acts. They listened for days, weeks and months. When the trial ended and Legebokoff was convicted, they had no where to turn. They had no one they could legally talk to. They had no help to deal with the trauma they experienced reliving these horrific crimes.
I want to commend Senator Boisvenu and my honourable colleague from St. Albert—Edmonton for their work on Bill S-206. I agree with the hon. colleague who spoke earlier and said this bill has taken too long.
For decades, mental health issues have been pushed to the back burner. Men, women and our society in general have viewed mental health through a skewed lens. We have been raised to believe that mental health issues are a weakness of character, a weakness of person and a weakness to be hid and swept under the carpet. Thankfully, in the past few years we have all come to realize that this is not true and that mental health is just as important as physical health. Without mental health, we have no health.
Although we are slowly making progress, there is more that can be done. My latest motion to create a national easy-to-remember three-digit suicide hotline, 988, has finally been approved by the CRTC and will be up and running by fall of next year. However, 988 is just one tool in the tool box. It is not a panacea for all the problems facing us.
The bill before us today is another instrument that can and will help those who often suffer in silence. As the law currently stands, jurors are bound by the jury secrecy rule. They can never reveal what was said and what evidence they were subjected to. They have nowhere to go and nowhere to turn. If they are having trouble dealing with the psychological trauma they have been subjected to, the law forces them to suffer alone. This is not right.
During a study of this issue in the 42nd Parliament, the justice committee heard testimony from another friend of mine, Mark Farrant. Mr. Farrant was called to serve as a juror for another very graphic murder trial here in Ontario. He was subjected to autopsy photos, detailed photos of the victim and the crime scene and detailed photos of the wounds. It was a very incredibly violent homicide.
In his testimony, Mark explained:
As a juror, you are extremely isolated. You cannot communicate with anyone in any form about the events in court or even really with other jurors. I would leave the court in a trance, not remembering even how I got home. I would stare blankly into space during meetings at work or at home while my three-year-old daughter tried desperately to engage with me. My then pregnant wife, who had such an engaged husband during her first pregnancy, now had an emotional zombie in me, unable or unwilling to communicate.
I expected these feelings to subside as I left the courthouse on the day the verdict was delivered. I expected to experience a period of re-acclimatization as I re-entered my life, and then I would be fine. I expected that there would be a thorough discharge and debrief prior to being dismissed, and that perhaps a counsellor would be present who could direct us to services or mental exercises, or indeed talk to us. There was nothing.
My feelings didn't subside. They intensified and deepened. After the trial, I cut off communication with all friends and family, only interacting with colleagues at work, and then only superficially. I became hypervigilant around my kids, refusing to let them walk alone, even a few steps in front of me. I became unable to handle crowds and public spaces. My diet changed. I was unable to look at and prepare raw meat without gagging, something that persists to this day.
Images would haunt me day after day, an unrelenting bombardment of horror. My daughter's red finger painting would hurtle me back to the scene of the crime and I would stare transfixed, seemingly out of space and time. Sometimes I would just start to cry for no reason at all. Intimacy with my spouse was impossible, and I found myself either sleeping downstairs on some kind of vigil, or sleeping in my children's rooms at the foot of their doors, if I even slept at all.
What Mark went through was life-altering. What Mark and his family went through is unacceptable. What Mark and thousands of jurors have endured should never happen again.
Bill S-206 would end this. Bill S-206 would carve out an exception to the jury secrecy rule. It would allow the disclosure of the deliberation process by jurors to a health care professional bound by confidentiality.
Jury duty is a core component of the Canadian justice system and enshrined in our charter and Criminal Code. Jurors are core to the administration of justice. Jurors will continue to serve our communities and must witness graphic evidence and horrific crimes as part of their civic duty, but we must afford jurors access to the same mental health support and quality of care available to first responders, health care professionals, legal counsel and even judges. Sadly, in some provinces and territories, jurors are offered no support at all or the bare minimum of care.
This is long past due. We need to pass this legislation now. It will save lives.
