Thank you very much. Thank you.
I'm not sure who decided to invite me here, but I know it was not because of anything I did in mathematics. I am also a practising lawyer with Roach, Schwartz and Associates in Toronto, and I'm also an adjunct professor of law at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law. So I do have a more direct interest in these matters than the other title might suggest.
I should like to make some general points you might find useful in considering this bill. One point I should like to start with is that, in general, criminal law should be certain, if possible, and shouldn't be changed very often unless there's good reason to change. But there should be a really good reason, if you're going to change the criminal law, and I don't see the reasons that have motivated this bill as being good.
One of you was asking Attorney General Bryant about the evidence to support the need for this bill, and I would hope you would all continue to ask that question very loudly, because what is the reason for this bill? Well, the bill itself has some “whereases”--and hopefully those would speak to the matter--and the “whereases” indicate that Canadians are entitled to live their lives in peace, freedom, and security. Nobody is going to argue with that.
They also indicate that gun crime is on an increase. That should be a matter of some evidence. That should be looked at. Maybe it's true, but it should be looked at. Different kinds of crimes do rise and fall from time to time.
Then the bill indicates that we want to promote the values of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. That's nice, but then it says:
AND WHEREAS these measures include legislation to impose higher minimum penalties on those who commit serious or repeat offences involving firearms;
There seems to me to be a disconnect. You need a couple of other “whereases” if you want to justify that conclusion, such as “Whereas there's been a problem in sentencing with respect to firearms offences....” Is there any evidence of that? Don't judges regard firearms offences as very serious already? Is there any evidence that suggests they don't impose serious enough penalties for that?
And then you would expect some evidence that more serious penalties tend to deter crime, and we know that most of the studies by criminologists are in the opposite direction. People don't think about the penalty as they're committing a crime. They think about the possibility of being caught, and the possibility of being caught does deter crime, but they don't think if it's only six months now, they'll do it, but if you pass this and it's amended to one year, they won't do it. Nobody thinks like that when they're committing crimes, and the studies show that.
So what is happening here? When this bill was introduced in May, the Minister of Justice talked about tackling crime and restoring confidence in the justice system and so on. It seems there are some political issues here, and many people believe it's popular to promote the idea of harsher penalties and so on. There is some question about that. That's even been studied. There's a study that suggests maybe it's not as popular as some of you may think. It seems that politicians in all parties seem to think that.
So I would ask you to look at the reasons here, and look at some evidence, before you change things. There is a problem with mandatory minimum sentences because they do interfere with the discretion to be proportionate. How much they interfere depends on how high the minimum is and the nature of it and so on. But with any mandatory minimum sentence, as the Latimer case showed us all, for example, even with respect to murder, there are possible problems in particular cases. As to how serious, it depends upon the circumstances. But you shouldn't just do it without some good reason to do it. As everyone is aware, we have a Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and that limits the ability of Parliament to impose punishment. It has to be consistent with the charter. Section 12 of the charter prohibits cruel and unusual punishment, and, as you all know, it has been considered with respect to minimum sentences, and sometimes it has been held to be cruel and unusual and sometimes not.
But what the Supreme Court says is...of course, the Supreme Court defers to Parliament, to some large extent. So the only way they will interfere with a law like this, strike it down, is if they hold that it's grossly disproportionate. That's what the cases say, Morrisey and Latimer and so on. If the sentence is grossly disproportionate, then it is cruel and unusual punishment and it should be struck down. Do you want sentences that are just disproportionate, not grossly disproportionate? Why do you want disproportionate sentences? That's what you are introducing if you have minimums. You will, in some cases, at least, be introducing disproportionate sentences. If they're found to be grossly disproportionate, they will be struck down. Who knows how these provisions you have in Bill C-10 will fare in the courts. Nobody, I don't think, can give you any assurance as to what's going to happen. How they fare will depend on particular cases, on the particular facts of those cases, and so on.
One thing you can be sure of is that there's going to be an awful lot of charter litigation about this. There will be an awful lot of it. There will be a lot of time, energy, and money spent.
You know, it is easy to design a hypothetical case where this would be grossly disproportionate. A little while ago you were talking about cottage break-ins. Some kid of otherwise good character, a 19-year-old young man, breaks into a cottage, urged by his friends. They grab a bag and run away, and in the bag is a shotgun. Will that kid have a mandatory minimum sentence of one year? That's going to be grossly disproportionate if it's as good a kid as the one I'm thinking of. Then that kid will, if he has the funds to do it, fight it, and there will be charter cases and so on. But why do it? Why enact it in the first place? Shouldn't a judge in that case be able to say to the kid, “You're going to be given a conditional sentence”? Why not? Do you want to put that kid in jail for a year, really? Do you really want to do that?
As I said, there are a number of studies that show that the severity of punishment doesn't deter crime. We have a distinguished criminologist at the University of Toronto named Anthony Doob, for example. I'm sure that those of you who care about these things know his name. He had such a study in the year 2003, consistent with many other studies.
If you want to deal with the causes of crime, deal with them. And there are things to deal with. There are situations in which many 19- or 20-year-old kids in Toronto, for example, see it as a better future for themselves to join a gang and sell drugs than to try to get a decent job, because they don't see the prospects of decent jobs and they see the prospect of that gang right around the corner.
There could be larger studies about these issues that might really result in reduced crime. In particular, the whole question of drugs is something that should be looked at. I would urge you.... It's not part of this bill, but it is part of this bill in a way, because a large number of firearms offences are in connection with drugs. We all know that in movies in the thirties gangsters were shooting it out with respect to the prohibition of liquor. A lot of the shootouts in Toronto are with respect to gangs fighting over turf for drugs, for selling drugs. I would suggest that if you really want to cut down on some of this crime, look in other directions.
This legislation is going to lead to enormous costs. There's this hearing and its cost. There will be a huge amount of charter litigation emanating from this over the years. There's going to be a problem with guilty pleas. No lawyer is going to plead someone guilty to a charge like this if he's facing a minimum of three years, a minimum of five years. There will be many more trials and many fewer guilty pleas.
Then there's a particular peculiarity about the way the bill is structured that's going to lead to a real mess, too. For consecutive offences, as you know, you get higher penalties in various ways here, right? But “consecutive” is defined in terms of when you're convicted. It's not in terms of when you committed the offence. So if somebody committed two different offences like this, they'll be jockeying as to which one should be tried first, because some of them have more serious penalties as a second offence than others. That's even discussed in the legislative backgrounder here. They give an example.
You should think about it. Do you really want to put that mess into the Criminal Code?
This means, for example, that if an individual illegally imported a firearm and subsequently committed breaking and entering to steal a firearm but was convicted on the break and enter charge first, the second offence would be importation. As a result, the individual would receive a minimum sentence of five years, whereas if he was convicted of the other one first, it would be a minimum sentence of three years. Suppose he commits these offences within a couple of weeks of each other—that happens in real life from time to time—it's creating a real mess with that whole definition. That's just one of a number of issues that are going to play themselves out day to day in the courts if this bill is enacted as it is.
I really think you should go back to the drawing board and have some serious study about all these issues. There's no immediate urgency. You don't have to pass it this week. The only reason to pass it this week, or next week, or this year is for political reasons. If you want to look at this in a serious way, you need some serious study of the consequences of minimum sentences and other possibilities for reducing the use of firearms.
Those would be my submissions to you. They are quite different from any of the positions of any of the political parties, but I hope you all would consider them to whatever extent it may be useful.
