Thank you.
On behalf of Aboriginal Legal Services of Toronto, we appreciate the opportunity to present our position on Bill C-9 to the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights.
ALST has appeared before the Supreme Court of Canada on a number of occasions to address issues surrounding the sentencing of aboriginal people. We are also very active on the ground in justice issues. In 1999 we developed the community council, the first urban aboriginal and restorative justice program in Canada. We were also involved in the development of the Gladue Aboriginal Persons Courts in Toronto. Our Gladue caseworkers provide detailed Gladue reports to judges in Toronto, Hamilton, Brantford, and elsewhere in southern Ontario.
Our work has resulted in the imposition of many conditional sentences in circumstances where a jail sentence would otherwise have been a certainty.
We wish to make it clear at the outset that in our opinion, Bill C-9 is a retrograde move. It will not only worsen the already significant aboriginal over-representation in Canadian prisons; it will also result in less safe communities.
To put this issue in perspective, it is important to keep in mind a few statistics. The issue of aboriginal over-representation in prison was one of the motivating factors behind Parliament’s sentencing reforms in Bill C-41 and specifically in the introduction of paragraph 718.2(e).
Yet despite all the concerns expressed over aboriginal over-representation, the situation continues to get worse. From 1997 to 2001, the percentage of aboriginal people in jails in Canada rose from 15% to 20%. By the end of 2003-04, one in five men admitted to custody were aboriginal, while almost one in three women were aboriginal.