I called the Chief Justice of Quebec and I spoke to him about a number of topics. He told me that, last year, 45 criminal cases had been heard by Superior Court judges across the province. We're talking about 45 cases, whereas I'm convinced that thousands of those cases are heard in the Court of Quebec, Criminal Division. More than 75% of accuseds plead guilty in Provincial Court. I say Provincial Court to cover Canada, provincial courts.
If the goal is to get harsher sentences and to tighten up the criminal law—I said that in my interview, but that wasn't published—the Prime Minister is indeed entitled to have that objective. I might be in favour of it, but I think he is not going about it the right way. That won't get done by appointing police officers who will put on a list the names of judges who practise virtually no criminal law. At the Tax Court of Canada, they practise none at all. The situation is the same at the Federal Court: they do patents. What can you say, they don't do any at all.
At the Superior Court, this is a very small minority of cases. I gave you the figure that the Chief Justice gave me: 45 cases last year across the province.
That's not the way to go about achieving one's ends. At the federal level, the way to have an impact on criminal law is legislation. I understand that he's frustrated because he's the head of a minority government. He can't implement his policy. I'm not giving an opinion on his policy. I won't interfere in that, because I'm neither for nor against it. I have ideas, but I don't know his policy well enough. I understand his approach of wanting to look elsewhere because there are legislative obstacles, but he's looking in the wrong place, in a pointless place. Ultimately, he won't be able to do it by appointing judges to the Superior Court who he thinks will be harsher.
I'd like to say something on that, Mr. Chairman. I've been in the profession for more than 50 years. I knew one Crown attorney who did his job, who was very effective as an attorney and sought sentences that were tougher rather than not tough enough. When he was appointed to the bench, he went to the extreme: he completely changed. Another example is that of Judge Lagarde, who wrote the Criminal Code in French, the annotated code. Police officers didn't want to testify before him because he was merciless with them as witnesses. He never believed them. Perhaps he was right, since he had been a Crown attorney, but I don't think so. He went too far. Judge Lagarde really went too far. You can't predict a judge's conduct.
I knew one judge—I won't name him—who was pickled at 10:00 a.m. He arrived in court completely drunk. He was appointed to the Provincial Court bench. He stopped drinking the day of his appointment, and he became, in my opinion, one of the best judges we had ever had at the criminal court of the time, the Court of the Sessions of the Peace. I won't name him because of my first remarks.
The committee wouldn't have put him on the list of candidates, but nevertheless... So it's impossible to try to predict the conduct of a person who takes a judicial oath. There could be three police officers on the committees, in my view, but that's a matter of perception. I'm not in favour of doing it that way for reasons of perception. I believe that police officers are able, as the saying goes,
to rise up to the occasion, and rise up and do their duty as it should be done. I have confidence in that.
So I'm saying that it's a useless change and it's an unfortunate change, because its purpose has been explained in the House, it will achieve nothing in terms of getting stricter sentences, and it sends out a bad perception to the population. The population might be behind that kind of thing, because I think—and I'm not in the polling business—that if a poll were taken, a majority would say that the judges are not sentencing severely enough. I think the general population.... But when you look at a sentence, you must be very careful before coming to the conclusion that it's too lenient, because unless you've been involved in the case, you get it second-hand through the press and you don't necessarily get all of the facts that the judge got.
But there are sentences, in my opinion, that you don't need to know more of, that were, in my opinion and in my experience, really too lenient. That reveals that some judges should not be sitting in criminal law and should be assigned to other kinds of cases. But in some provinces that's not easy to do as the chief justice, or the chief judge does not have enough judges. He has to use his judges in all kinds of fields. In a large province like Ontario, the chief justice can pick and choose and have people who know their criminal law to sit. In certain other provinces, not only P.E.I., everybody has to do a little bit of everything and has no choice.
But I say that it's the perception in the public that the government is trying to get more severe sentences. As Mr. Ménard has raised, I'm saying he's not trying to influence the list of judges who deal with the criminal law and he will not achieve his goal. I'm not saying I disagree with his goal; I'm not saying that, but I'm just saying that he will not achieve his goal by having done that.