I was going to speak much more quickly, but I'll speak slowly so that people understand.
I'm a provincial director, as well, of the Criminal Lawyers' Association. This is an association of just over 1,000 criminal lawyers from the province of Ontario. I'm the representative of the Criminal Lawyers' Association to the Canadian Council of Criminal Defence Lawyers, and as such I'm a director of the CCCDL. The Criminal Lawyers' Association of Ontario has also submitted its own brief to this committee and I commend it to you.
I've been practising criminal defence law for 25 years in the city of London, and I have appeared at all levels of court throughout Ontario. My perspective here today is that of someone who has the knowledge of criminal law as practised in this province. I've represented persons charged—sometimes acquitted, sometimes convicted—with crimes involving guns, and any insights I have come from that point of view.
I obviously adopt what Mr. Trudell has said, but in my own capacity here I've looked at the legislation and there are a few points I'd like to make and a few questions I'd like to ask. That's what criminal defence lawyers tend to do: they ask questions. My first question is, why? Why this legislation? What is it hoping to accomplish?
Well, at first blush, what it's hoping to accomplish is to get tough on serious crime. That is the phrase we've heard many times over the past little while. But does it do that? Let's look at this in a deeper way.
Why has gun crime increased, if it in fact has? Why is gun crime a problem that needs to be addressed? Will this legislation answer the question as to why? I submit to you that it does not.
I represent people who are charged with gun crime, and I look across at them, sometimes through the bars of a jail cell, sometimes across my desk, and I always ask myself, why did this person commit this crime, if in fact they're guilty? Why are they charged with this crime? What is going on here? That is the root problem that we have to get to before we have the kind of safety that is sought as a result of this legislation.
There are various levels of criminality, even with gun crime, and there is a root cause to that. That is not being addressed. Until it is, I'm going to submit to you that all this is going to do with the passage of Bill C-10 is to in some way instill a sense of false security over people. We have to understand why crime is being committed.
Let's look back 30 years in this country. We did not have, apparently, the level of gun crime then that we do now. We had the same Criminal Code and we had a Criminal Code that had no mandatory minimums. In the mid-1990s, the Liberal government passed some mandatory minimums of four years for robbery and one year for possession of certain firearms. We still have the problem. The question again is, why?
The reason, perhaps, is that we have to study, we have to consider, what we can really do not just to punish crime but to stop it from its root level. We have to understand the issues of poverty, of education, of social welfare. Those are much broader issues than perhaps what this committee can do, and they are much more expensive issues from the point of view of a parliament. They are expensive issues because they cost a lot of money to implement. Social justice programs, anti-poverty programs, increased education, understanding how our children are socialized into accepting the fact that gun violence may be acceptable is what we really need to do in order to stop this.
A number of years ago it was socially acceptable to smoke in this country. We still have smokers, but the way smoking was cured was not by any punishment but because it was made socially unacceptable to do that.
Impaired driving has decreased. The punishments have increased, but if you look around, one of the reasons, of course, is that it has become socially unacceptable to be that person who gets behind the wheel and might harm someone.
So we have to ask ourselves—and I don't have the answers—why is it attractive to use guns? It's not because the Criminal Code is soft. My clients don't commit these kinds of offences because they think they're not going to be punished. They don't consider that. They consider being caught.... You've probably heard this from other persons who've made submissions before this committee and elsewhere, but it is the fear of being caught that perhaps is the greatest deterrent, not the actual punishment itself.
So what I'm saying is, to just impose mandatory minimums and arbitrarily believe that maybe if we make it five years, seven years, and ten years, that will work, I submit to you that there's really no evidence of that.
Even if you do pass the legislation on that basis, you're still not getting to the problem of why, as in why this horrible incident happened in Toronto on Boxing Day. It didn't happen because someone said, “Oh, we're soft on crime, so I might as well go and shoot up the streets.” I think it would be extremely naive for anyone to believe that was the cause of it, or to think that the corollary of that, imposing a stiffer penalty, if one isn't considering the consequences of crime, will have an effect. We have to understand why those young men may or may not have been there, what was going through their minds, and why that was acceptable. Why is it that gun violence is tolerated? What is the root cause of that? That is the greater issue that requires the kind of consultation and study we are talking about today.
Two things I'll point out in support of my position. One, you're all familiar with New York City, of course. A number of years ago, I don't think any of us here would have considered venturing into Times Square in the evening. Now Times Square is perhaps one of the safest places in the United States. Why? It isn't because mandatory minimum punishments were imposed. It's because the police presence in Times Square was expanded greatly. There are police officers every 100 feet, and they have a police precinct there.
So it's the fear of being caught and it's the presence of the police that deters crime in that instance. I point that out because it reiterates the fact that it is the detection of crime that is important.
One item in the bill that I would point out specifically as one that may be problematic to you is proposed section 230, dealing with murder. This bill creates the new offence of breaking and entering to steal a firearm. It now says that culpable homicide is murder where a person causes a death during the course of certain offences, and that is one of them. It also includes the offence of robbery under section 343 of the Criminal Code.
I think it's incumbent upon the committee to realize that some years ago, the Supreme Court of Canada struck out robbery, in a case called Vaillancourt, as being available for this constructive murder section. Consequently, I believe and would submit to you that including this section concerning break and entering to steal a firearm would likely meet the same fate. What does that say? It says that, similar to what Mr. Trudell said, had there been, before this, the kind of consultation that we are suggesting, it would have been a very simple matter for someone to have pointed out that the section is probably unconstitutional on its face with respect to those two sections, one already being struck down.
Frankly, it's sloppy in terms of the way the matter has been drafted. That didn't have to be in there from the beginning. This goes back to our position that if we consult about these matters ahead of time....
We are criminal defence lawyers. We defend people who are charged with crimes. But we're also citizens of this country. We also have families and homes and properties. We have a stake in having a safe Canada. We are here to assist. Our message for you today is that we're still prepared to do that, but Bill C-10 is not going to get you the result you want in terms of safe streets.
You have to consult more. You have to look at the root causes of crime. That's what has to be dealt with.