Bill C-35 (39th Parliament, 1st Session) Committee on April 25th, 2007

[Lynn Barr-Telford]

This is covered on the slide. This is your pink line.

Ten years later, in 2004-05, they represented more than half of all adults in custody, and this surpassed the proportion of offenders in sentence custody, shown in light blue, for the first time.

These percentage increases you see on the slide translate into an increase in the average number of adults on remand or other temporary detention from 5,485 to 9,916 adults between 1995-96 and 2004-05. Over that same time period, the average number of offenders in sentence custody decreased from 14,240 to 9,830 adults.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bernard Patry]

Mr. Lee.

[Derek Lee, Liberal, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

Could I ask you, please, to define for me what “non-sentence custody” is?

[Lynn Barr-Telford]

Non-sentence custody includes remand, pretrial detention, as well as other forms of temporary detention for other purposes, such as an immigration hearing and so forth. So these are individuals who are awaiting an appearance.

[Derek Lee, Liberal, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

You have data here from immigration holding tanks.

[Lynn Barr-Telford]

Other temporary detention—

[Derek Lee, Liberal, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

Including immigration, yes.

[Lynn Barr-Telford]

Other multiple things are included in that, but these are our remand and other temporary detention counts.

[Derek Lee, Liberal, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bernard Patry]

Mr. Petit, you can ask a question.

[Daniel Petit, Conservative, Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, QC]

My question is about temporary detention. For a person who is detained before his trial, this period of detention counts double once the trial is over. Have you accounted for the fact that temporary detention counts double, meaning that the time spent in prison is reduced?

[Lynn Barr-Telford]

The information that you have in the graph here shows you the proportion, and I've given you the count of individuals who are in non-sentenced custody as well. Our data in this particular case do not in any way refer to time served, for example, as you were speaking about.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bernard Patry]

We're going to keep going. I don't know if you want to read your next slide, and it's going to be the last slide, and then we'll go to a Q and A after.

Mrs. Barr-Telford.

[Lynn Barr-Telford]

The next slide that you see documents the length of time served in remand following release from the remand facility. The footnote to the slide notes excluded jurisdictions. We've seen an increase in the length of time spent in remanded custody over the past decade, and this is an important factor in the changing composition of the provincial-territorial custodial population.

Between 1995-96 and 2004-05, the proportion of adults who served less than a week in remand decreased from 66% to 53%. The proportion of adults who spent between 30 days and three months in remand during the past decade increased from 10% to 15%. The proportion who served more than three months in remand nearly doubled, going from 4% to 7%.

To summarize, we see that robbery with a firearm makes up the large majority of Bill C-35 offences, and the rate of robbery with a firearm is down about 50% over the past decade. There were 871 cases disposed of in adult court in 2003-04, with a Bill C-35 offence identified, and robbery accounted for over 40% of these cases. The overall conviction rate for cases with a Bill C-35 offence was 40%, and 31% where the Bill C-35 charge was the most serious offence. Adults in non-sentenced custody represented more than half of the adults in provincial-territorial custody in 2004-05.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bernard Patry]

Thank you.

We're now going to start with questions and answers. It will be 10 minutes per party, and you can divide your time with your colleagues, if it's possible.

We'll start with Mr. Murphy, then Mr. Bagnell and Madam Jennings.

[Brian Murphy, Liberal, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

I really just have a few rapid-fire questions on clarification.

You started out by saying you can't give us statistics on who's on bail. I understand that you can figure out who was convicted of robbery and so on, these offences. I understand that. The second last slide tells us that you can tell us how many people, or what people, are in certain types of custody, sentence custody or non-sentence custody. Why can't you tell us the purple line? In the French translation it's a different colour. I didn't know that colours translated differently. But I like the French translation because there's more red in it. I just thought I'd put that down.

Seriously, you can tell us how many people are on remand or other detention. I understand that it could be people on “24-hour sleeping it off” charges; people under section 4, at least in New Brunswick, mental instability and that sort of thing. But for the vast majority of that lower line of remand, does it not have to be people in remand awaiting trial who didn't get bail? There might be a bunch of people who haven't had their bail hearing yet. The law says you have to have your bail hearing pretty quickly, so most of these people have been denied bail—isn't that right?—if they asked for it, and everybody asks for it.

[Lynn Barr-Telford]

On the statement you began with, we do not have data on bail, so we do not know how many individuals were awarded bail. What we do have are counts of those who are in remand or other temporary detentions, so those who are in custody and awaiting an appearance. That's what we have information on.

[Brian Murphy, Liberal, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

You don't take stats of who actually gets bail after a bail hearing.

[Lynn Barr-Telford]

No, we don't.

[Brian Murphy, Liberal, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

I understand that.

And you have no specific record of the people who are remanded for those other reasons that we spoke of.

[Lynn Barr-Telford]

Mr. Grimes will explain to you how we deal with this within our courts data.

[Craig Grimes, Project Manager, Courts Program, Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics, Statistics Canada]

The courts information we have is based on the docket system.

[Brian Murphy, Liberal, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

So what goes in.

[Craig Grimes]

Yes, what goes in. What's unknown to that system is whether or not the individual is in remand when they make their first appearance. So that causes a problem with our trying to get a number identifying the total number of individuals in remand or on bail.

We have information on appearance types, but it's the scheduled reason for appearances.

[Brian Murphy, Liberal, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

I think I get it. It's just left for us to surmise that most of those are people who've been denied, but there's no empirical evidence. You have to know how the system works. I understand that.