Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for the opportunity to present to the committee regarding Bill C-14.
You should all have before you a presentation deck. I invite you to read along with me.
Statistics Canada does not take a position on the proposed amendments. What I will present are data that may inform your discussions of the bill. Please note that the data sources are clearly indicated on each slide, as are pertinent notes about the data.
At the end of the deck you will find some supplemental information on drug trafficking and production offences and on incidents involving organized crime. Given limited time, I will not speak to that information.
Of note, we do not have information relating to the extension of the duration of a recognizance. Also, we have not included firearms-related offence data because it's difficult to speculate which Criminal Code offences police are currently using in cases involving reckless use of a firearm.
My colleague Mr. Craig Grimes will assist me in answering questions.
The first several slides provide information relating to murder committed in connection with a criminal organization. The charts here show the number of gang-related homicides and the number of homicides not related to gang activity over the last decade. By gang related, we mean whether or not the police identified the homicide as involving an organized crime group or a street gang.
In 2007, police reported a total of 594 homicides in Canada. One in five of these homicides, or 117, was reported by police as being gang related. Gang-related homicides have been increasing since this information was first collected in 1991, and you can see the increasing trend over the last decade on the chart to your left. This upward trend contrasts with the trend in the number of homicides that were not gang related, and this is shown in the chart on your right. Also, Canada's overall homicide rate has been on a general downward trend since the mid-1970s.
Firearms are used more often in gang-related homicides than in other types of homicides. In 2007, 69% of gang-related homicides were committed with a firearm, eight in ten of which were handguns. Among those homicides that were not gang related, 20% were committed with a firearm, 54% of which were with handguns.
The next slide in the deck shows the breakdown of gang-related homicides by the type of violation; that is, if it was considered by police to be first- or second-degree murder or manslaughter. The homicide survey is a police survey, not a court survey, so this does not necessarily reflect any subsequent decisions of the crown or the courts. What you can see in the chart is that the majority of gang-related homicides were recorded by the police as being first-degree murder, about three-quarters of them in 2007.
The next two slides indicate where the gang-related homicides occurred. The first is a regional breakdown. Ontario, British Columbia, and Quebec had the highest number of gang-related homicides, followed closely by Alberta.
In the next slide you can see that each year approximately 80% of all gang-related homicides occurred in one of Canada's 27 census metropolitan areas, and most of these were in the nine largest. These cities accounted for over three-quarters of all gang-related homicides in 2007. Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver had the highest number of gang-related homicides and together accounted for 53% of all gang-related homicides in 2007.
If you turn to the next slide, we'll look at youth accused of gang-related homicides. In 2007, in total, 74 youth were accused of homicide. Homicides where youth are accused often involve gangs. In 2007 there were 105 persons accused of a gang-related homicide; 34 of them, or 32%, were youth. For comparison, among all persons accused of homicide, youth accounted for 14%.
Because of small numbers, the rate of youth accused of gang-related homicide does fluctuate year over year. You can see from your graph on the left that the trend in the rate has generally been upward since about 2002.
In the next slide we'll make a transition to another of the amendments under consideration in Bill C-14: the creation of new offences regarding assaults of a peace officer. In 2007 police reported just under 9,800 incidents of assault against a peace officer. This was up from just over 6,300 a decade ago. You can see from the graph on the left of the slide that the overall rate of assault against a peace officer has been on a general upward trend over the last decade but has been more stable recently.
Most reported incidents of assault of a peace officer also involved another violation, and in 2007, 70% of them. The chart on the right shows some of the more common of these violations. In the table below that, we've separated reported assaults against police officers from those against other peace officers. You can see that most of these assaults were against police officers.
The next few slides provide some information on how the courts process cases with at least one charge of assault of a peace officer. Consistent with what we just saw from the police data, most court cases with a charge of assault of a peace officer also have other charges in the case. In fact, 90% of these cases have multiple charges, compared to about 60% for court cases as a whole. These cases tend to have several charges in them. The average is five, compared to an average of three for court cases as a whole.
The chart shows some of the more frequently associated charges in cases with a charge of assault of a peace officer. For example, almost one-third also had a charge of obstructing a peace officer, and about one-third had a charge of escape or being at large without excuse.
To go on to the next slide, not only do these cases look different from cases in general in terms of the number of charges, but they also look different in terms of their conviction rates. Cases with at least one charge of assault of a peace officer have relatively high guilty findings and relatively high guilty plea rates. They have especially high findings of guilt on more than one charge in the case.
As well, when the peace officer assault charge is the most serious charge, the proportion found guilty remains relatively high. Two-thirds of the time, a peace officer assault charge was one of the charges for a finding of guilt in the case. In comparison, most violent cases with a finding of guilt have a single guilty charge, which was about 58% in 2006-07.
To go to the next slide, cases with multiple convictions tend to be sentenced to custody more often. This is also true for cases with at least one peace officer assault charge. Forty per cent of these “guilty cases” were sentenced to custody on the most serious charge in the case. In comparison, custody was used in 32% of guilty cases overall. When a peace officer assault charge was the most serious charge in the case, 38% resulted in a custody sentence, which is similar to the use of custody in guilty cases of serious violent offences.
The average sentence length imposed in guilty cases involving an officer assault was 107 days. This is between the average for guilty common assault cases, at 51 days, and for major assault cases, at 166 days. What this data suggests is that these cases are treated relatively seriously by the courts, but it's difficult to conclude that it is simply because of the presence of a peace officer assault when so much else is going on in these cases.
The remaining slides you have within your deck are left for the committee's consideration. They're the supplemental slides I referred to at the beginning. This concludes my presentation.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.