Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
My name is Paul Chartrand. I teach law in the College of Law at the University of Saskatchewan.
I thank the committee for inviting me. I am here at the invitation of the committee. I belong to no political party. I have never belonged to any political party. The views I will offer are based on my experience, which includes being involved in the production of some reports and recommendations on criminal justice policy, particularly pertaining to aboriginal peoples. I cite in particular my service as a commissioner on the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, and also more recently as a commissioner on Manitoba's Aboriginal Justice Implementation Commission.
I am here at your invitation and I view my participation here as a matter of my contribution to public service.
As legislators, you have a high duty and responsibility to protect society. Whatever can be done to make our community safer, including reducing the use of firearms, is a good thing and you ought to do it. We all deplore and denounce the use of firearms in the commission of crimes. However, the matter of sentencing and the matter of administration of criminal law is fraught with emotion and complexity.
We must recognize that there are no easy solutions to complex problems. In fact, I always advise my students to be very wary of those who offer simple solutions to complex problems. I can give you examples of the danger they pose to society.
I presume that all of us wish to legislate in such a way as to promote a just and tolerant Canada. Let me ask, then, with respect to Bill C-10, is minimum mandatory sentencing a legitimate means to address the problem? My answer is no.
A second question is, will minimum mandatory sentencing work? The answer again is no.
Let me elaborate in the short time I have. It is not a legitimate means for the following reasons. First, it is arguably contrary to the law of the Constitution. Second, it is demonstrably in conflict with Canada's obligations under international human rights treaties. I cite among others--and I will elaborate if there is sufficient time in the question period to follow--the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination with respect to aboriginal peoples.
Mandatory minimum sentencing is unprincipled. It clashes with the fundamental principles of our criminal justice system. In fact, mandatory sentencing is an oxymoron. After conviction, the process of sentencing seeks to address the degree of blameworthiness. If you have seven people committing the same offence, you are faced with potentially seven different degrees of blameworthiness. All that is removed by a minimum sentence.
A very quick example is taken from a case involving an aboriginal man who used a rifle and was subjected to one of these mandatory minimum sentences. He used his rifle in defending himself against a criminal gang in his community. He didn't like gangs, but he had a rifle--he belonged to a hunting community--and he faced the mandatory minimum.
Let me go on and emphasize why mandatory minimum sentences do not work, notwithstanding what has been proposed to you by Professor Ian Lee. When I say this, I'm relying mainly on the literature that I read and on my being briefed by Canada's and other places' top criminologists, lawyers, and practitioners who work in this area every day. I must say I'm not aware of the work of Professor Lee from the School of Business at Carleton in this regard.
Why will it not work? First, it will create a much more expensive system. True, it's a political easy fix because you don't need to attach a budget to this particular legislation, but it will cost a lot on the road. All the statistics point to that. It will be tremendously expensive, and if you ask questions later on on this, I will elaborate on why it has become more expensive. First of all, I think it costs roughly $80,000 a year to keep people in jail. Obviously, if you're going to put more people in jail, it will cost you a lot more. If you set a minimum, and if judges do try to ignore what I suggested, that it's an oxymoron, then they will take the minimum to be applicable to the best offender and all the sentences will go up, ergo the costs will increase. You cannot avoid that. It will be horrendously expensive.
My next point is that it will not work, because presumably you're trying to create a less dangerous society. An earlier speaker suggested that we need harsh sentences. We have a lot of experience in the use of harsh sentences. We can cut off their hands. We can jail them forever. We can use steel pincers to pull out the flesh and pour molten tar into the wounds, which are examples of the harsh punishment that has been meted out to offenders in the past. These are historical examples. If you want to be harsh, there are many ways of doing that very effectively, but it does not work. You create a more dangerous society.
Usually people are inclined to look at the people going into jail. As you will hear with these minimum sentences, they ought to go to jail; they have to go in. So you're looking at the front door and then you don't look at what goes on inside. Essentially, I suggest to you that you're telling people to go to hell. You want to ignore them because there the place is hell.
I submit there's no evidence to support the previous contention that you need longer sentences to allow for rehabilitation. That proposition is based on the assumption that there is rehabilitation. Instead of looking at the front door, at who goes into the jail, I invite you to go and have a look at the back door. Who comes out? Every day criminals are sentenced and come in the front door, but every day criminals come out the back door. If you think you're sending dangerous people to jail at the front door, think of the kind of people you're letting out the back door. Send a 20-year-old—
I ask you when you're contemplating enacting legislation like this, think about Canada and jailing Canadians. Think of a recipient of those kinds of sentences as your son, your grandson, or your niece. They're human beings. They will come out tougher criminals. In jail they will get sodomized. They will become heroin addicts. Those are the kinds of things that happen there. They will be harsher and tougher. Being tough on crime actually results in creating and manufacturing tougher criminals. It seems to me if society can live with the people who get out the back door, surely you can live with most of the ones who go in the front door.
Finally, I want to say that aboriginal people are incarcerated...in statistics that are disproportionately higher in comparison to other people.
This will create tremendous social disruption and problems, not only for aboriginal individuals, their families, and their communities, but for the provinces. In effect, the federal government will be off-loading a lot of the costs onto the provinces, particularly the western provinces, like Saskatchewan and Manitoba, that have very high aboriginal populations. I think there are statistics that suggest that something like over 500 aboriginal people were sentenced last year. If they were subjected to this mandatory minimum sentencing, you'd have 500. So multiply 500 times 80 and so on and you get the statistics.
I want to conclude my presentation by suggesting that these complex problems can only be fixed in a holistic way. Holistic is realistic, but it's very difficult. You have to attack the root causes of crime. These are not easy to sell politically or in 15-second sound bites. The evidence all shows us--and I've been briefed on this--that you can tell when a child is about seven years old whether that child is going to go to jail. And Indian people who become reserve residents have way more probability of going to jail than of going to university.
So the way to combat crime is to combat the root causes of crime: assist children, have children's benefits, assist families, have community services and recreation, and so on. I can give you statistics on that. The Manitoba Northern Fly-In Sports Camp that the RCMP conducted some years ago would be an example of that. But the federal government can't do it alone. You would have to work not only with the provinces but with the municipal governments as well.
It's very easy to just adopt an easy fix like minimum sentences, but they're neither legitimate nor do they work. I ask members of the committee not to adopt Bill C-10, because this kind of legislation will create not a more tolerant and just Canada; it will create a meaner and nastier Canada, and I wish that my little granddaughters would not live in a meaner and nastier Canada.
Thank you very much