Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
I want to point out that although I've just come from the University of Oxford, I'm not some presumptuous British academic coming to give some opinions. I lived in Canada for 35 years. It's a great country and I miss it greatly. I'd like to put that on the record.
I've been following the debate about conditional sentencing for 10 years, since its inception in 1997, and I'm quite sensitive to the question of circumscribing the ambit. In fact, the first paper I wrote in 1997 talked about ways you could reduce the scope of the sanction.
Is it a good idea? I think I'll go straight to the question of ambit and Bill C-9 by saying that it may be a good idea, but I think you want to have a more compelling case before you than just a few cases: “Did you hear about the sentence in Windsor? Did you read about the conditional sentence that was imposed?” I think it would be nice to have a really good research record. You don't have that. Unfortunately, we don't have that. The CCJS presentation from a couple of weeks ago raised more questions than it answered. So before you take the step of curtailing judicial discretion, in quite a radical way I'll argue, I think you might want a better case.
However, if we accept for the moment that it is a good idea to circumscribe the ambit of the conditional sentencing regime, the question then becomes, well, is Bill C-9 the appropriate vehicle? And here I'd argue that no, it's not. It's not going to get you what you want, if you want to circumscribe the ambit of the sanction; it's going to create a lot of problems.
Let me explain. The first point has been made by many witnesses, so I won't say much about it. It really is over-broad. I have the document here from a Mr. MacKay of the Parliamentary information research service. If I'm counting right, there are 162 offences there. That's a lot of offences. If the purpose of the bill is to reassure the public or to ensure that victims don't get demoralized when this sanction is imposed, then you want to focus on those cases and only those cases. If you take a conditional sentence off the table for uttering a fraudulent document, I don't think too many members of the public are going to be picketing Parliament Hill. They're concerned about a much smaller range of offences. Unfortunately, Bill C-9 paints a very broad brush--it's very broad.
The second thing is that it attempts to screen out the most serious cases, and it does so with two very questionable and curious filters, as I would call them. The first is the statutory maximum penalty. The statutory maximum penalty is a very unreliable guide to the true seriousness of an offence, as we've just heard. In the report of the Canadian Sentencing Commission, discussed in this very room twenty years ago, the commission made the point that the maximum penalty structure is thoroughly chaotic and needs overhauling. So to pick out offences on the basis of the statutory maximum penalty is not a good idea.
The second point about the statutory maximum penalty takes me to the issue of proportionality. A lot of people have come here and said we need more proportionality in sentencing. These judges have lost sight of proportionality. That's fine. I'm a big fan of proportionality, and I'm very glad that Parliament codified the principle in 1996. What people seem to forget is that proportionality has two branches. The first branch is how serious the particular crime is. The second branch is the culpability of the offender for the offence. That's not me talking; that's section 718.1 of the Criminal Code. If you identify an offence by the maximum penalty, or even by the name of the offence, you have an idea of the seriousness of the crime but no idea of the culpability of the offender. In fact, you're losing proportionality by that route.
The second filter is the decision by the prosecutor to proceed by way of indictment. That is a very bad way of filtering cases, for two reasons. First of all, the prosecutorial decision to proceed by way of indictment will be based upon the file communicated to the prosecutor by the police. That's evidence that has not been tested in an adversarial proceeding. You're only getting half the battle, as it were. You're getting a version of the facts based upon material that has not been subject to an adversarial proceeding. That's number one.
Number two is there's no comparison with the degree to which a prosecutorial decision is going to be subject to review. In order to have a prosecutor's decision reviewed, the standard is very high. This decision will be made out of the public arena. You will not be able to review it; it will be in the shadows. That's one of the things we've always talked about: bringing justice out of the shadows and into the daylight.
The prosecutorial decision to proceed by way of indictment is based upon one version of events that hasn't been subject, for example, to cross-examination and is not really subject to review in the same way that a court can review. The person best placed to determine the seriousness of an offence and the degree of culpability of the offender is a sentencing judge, and he or she should make that determination.
This doesn't mean you can't give a judge or a court some steer. And that's why I think the presumptive approach that Paciocco and other people have suggested is probably a much better one.
The other problem with Bill C-9 is that it creates a clear anomaly: you take the conditional sentence off the table, but you leave probation on the table. What's a member of the public supposed to think of that? The court can't impose a conditional sentence of imprisonment, with curfews and strict reporting requirements and an expeditious procedure to respond to breach, but it can impose probation. That's a real anomaly that's going to play very poorly in the newspapers.
I fully agree with a previous witness that what courts are going to do, in some cases, is say: “Before Bill C-9 I could impose a conditional sentence of imprisonment. I can't do that now, but I don't want this individual to go to prison, so how about a pretty lengthy probation order? I was thinking of a conditional sentence in the range of six to eight months, prior to Bill C-9. Well, we'll have a long probation term of three years. There's no statutory bar to the imposition of a curfew as a condition of a probation order. Well, I'll put a curfew on the guy and extra reporting requirements.”
So the court will turn the probation order into a de facto conditional sentence order, and the effect of Bill C-9 will be to disturb and distort a perfectly good rehabilitative sanction.
There is a place for both sanctions in the sentencing tools available to a court in Canada. You need both.
My last point is, I think it's important not to intrude into judicial discretion unless and until you really have to. Parliament, of course, took away judicial discretion with respect to the offence of murder, where we have a mandatory penalty. But for lesser offences, to take a sanction off the table and tell the judges of this country that you know better than they do what kind of sentence is appropriate in which particular cases is I think a mistake. It's an expression of non-confidence in the judiciary, and I think probably you should be aware of conveying that message.
Thank you very much.