Thank you, Mr. Chair and committee members, for the opportunity to speak with you today. The Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network is a national non-governmental organization, an NGO, with special consultative status with the United Nations. Its mission is to promote law and policy that help with HIV prevention and care and to oppose law and policy that hinder it. I'm afraid I have to say that Bill C-15 falls into the latter category, and today we're here to speak to you about a number of problems with Bill C-15 and why, in our view, it should not proceed.
I've shared with the committee members a copy of our brief and some additional material. I hope you have a chance to read it, and I'd be happy to speak to anything in that material. You'll also find in the material that we've given to you a copy of a letter signed by almost 150 organizations and individual experts from across Canada who share our concerns with Bill C-15. This includes front-line AIDS organizations, people who work on the front lines providing addiction treatment services, and people who work with prisoners and ex-prisoners. It includes leading academic researchers. It includes the Centre for Addictions Research in B.C., and it includes the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health based in Toronto. All of them share our concerns with Bill C-15.
In our view, Bill C-15 is both misleading and misguided. It is misleading particularly in the way it's been presented to the Canadian public. Bill C-15 creates minimum prison terms for a variety of drug offences involving any quantity of a number of controlled substances. It's presented to the public as getting tough on serious drug crimes, and in particular on producers and traffickers of illegal drugs, and it's presented as a bill that will help ensure the safety and security of neighbourhoods and communities.
The objective of enhancing public safety and security, of course, is laudable, and we share it. However, the means chosen, as embodied in Bill C-15, are not, and it is misleading to present Bill C-15 as in any way likely to achieve these objectives. In particular, let me note the fundamental premise that we can draw a clear distinction between traffickers, the dealers that are supposedly targeted by Bill C-15, and users, the addicts, the people with drug dependence, who are supposed to be helped under our national anti-drug strategy. There is no such bright-line distinction, and in fact many people with addictions will engage in small-scale trafficking in order to support their addictions. There is evidence of this from any number of jurisdictions, including those here in Canada. These are the people who will be most easily targeted for prosecution under Bill C-15, the people who will, if the experience in the United States and indeed here in Canada is any guide, be the ones who will end up in prisons. They will be the ones who bear the brunt of mandatory prison terms for drug offences.
So it's misleading to suggest that Bill C-15 is going to make our communities safer and that it is going to target only supposed drug dealers. It's going to hurt those it professes to help most. However, it's also misguided in other ways, and I'd like to suggest that Bill C-15 is ill-advised on a number of fiscal, public health, and human rights grounds.
First of all, it removes judicial discretion in sentencing and imposing prison terms for drug offences in a very broad range of circumstances, including a number of non-violent offences, inviting sentences that are unjust given the circumstances of the offence. It sentences a crime rather than an offender, which is contrary to fundamental sentencing principles already recognized in Canadian law.
Secondly--and this should be, I think, of primary concern to this committee--the available evidence, and there is a lot of it, indicates that mandatory minimum sentences, particularly for drug offences and particularly including imprisonment for people who are convicted of drug offences, do not reduce the problems related to drug use, and they do not reduce drug use itself. In fact, Justice Canada commissioned its own review of the evidence a number of years ago, in 2002, and came to this very conclusion. In fact, the jurisdictions that have the most experience with mandatory minimum sentences for drug offences, including mandatory prison terms in the U.S., are now moving away from mandatory minimum sentences. Across the political spectrum, across the range of research there is an emerging consensus that these mandatory minimum sentences do not work for drug offences. They cause injustice, and in fact all they cause is a dramatic increase in the number of people in prison.
That brings me to my third point. Incarceration is extremely expensive, and this should also be of concern to all of the committee members and to all members of Parliament. It's going to be particularly expensive for the provincial governments, who are going to bear the primary cost of the enforcement of mandatory prison sentences. Many of those who are subject to mandatory prison terms under Bill C-15, if enacted, will receive mandatory terms that fall under the two-year threshold for doing that time in a federal prison. It would be interesting to know what the actual cost implications are, especially for the provincial governments, of Bill C-15. I would imagine that provincial governments might have something to say about the federal government passing legislation for which they will have to pick up the tab.
Of course—and here's a fourth point—incarceration carries tremendous societal costs of disrupting families, including for the children in those families, and when the net of incarceration is cast so widely as to encompass a very significant number of people convicted of non-violent offences or offences that could be better managed in the community, the cost is that much more excessive, compared to the basically non-existent benefit to be achieved from Bill C-15.
Fifth, increased incarceration generates poor health outcomes generally, in particular putting more people in prison and in particular people with addictions, and it is particularly ill-advised as a matter of public health. We know that drugs get into prisons, notwithstanding all of the efforts to date and no doubt all of the efforts that will come to keep drugs out of prisons.
Correctional Services Canada's own research estimates that about 80% of people in federal prisons have a history of substance abuse. Their own data also confirms regularly that people who have addictions continue to use drugs in prisons, including by injecting those drugs. What people don't have access to in prisons are sterile needles. This means—and we have evidence of this—that people share injection equipment in prisons, putting them at a much higher risk of HIV infection and hepatitis C infection. Therefore, it is no surprise that we see exceedingly high levels of HIV and hepatitis C infection among prisoners, which is somewhere in the order of 10 to 20 times higher than the prevalence of those diseases in the Canadian population as a whole.
Finally, let me share with you the perspective of people who use drugs. I want to share with you some text of a letter that was sent recently to the Hon. Rob Nicholson, Minister of Justice, and the Hon. Leona Aglukkaq, Minister of Health.
This is from Rosemary Fayant, who is the president of AAWEAR, which stands for Alberta Addicts Who Educate and Advocate Responsibly. She writes that AAWEAR is the provincial drug users' group in Alberta. She also facilitates a local users' group in Edmonton. They have a sister group in Calgary, which is called Grateful or Dead—I think that's pretty funny—as well as a group in Red Deer called The Next Step. There are newly-formed groups in Fort McMurray, Grand Prairie, Medicine Hat, and Lethbridge.
She says:
The groups are comprised of people who use or have used drugs in their lifetimes. ... Many of our members now have stabilized [their drug use], have had housing since their involvement with the groups, some have quit using drugs and feel a part of the “mainstream”.... As well, many of us have been incarcerated for drug offences, or drug related offences at some period in our lives.
Although all of our life stories are different, there is a common underlying theme--we all made a decision that ended up with us being imprisoned, and our lives' have never been the same since. Prisons are now places filled with gang members, violence, and there are not many, if any rehabilitative programs available.
She goes on to say:
The war on drugs in the United States has shown that it does not work, and with the implementation of Bill C-15 our provincial and federal prison systems will be overflowing with people just like in the States. Many people who have “made an error in judgment” will now be imprisoned and come out with a criminal record, and even with a pardon they will not be allowed entry into many of the countries of the world. The vast majority of people who sell drugs are doing so to support their own drug problem, and when one is ill from not having their drugs they will do anything to get them. Instead of treating people who use drugs as criminals, perhaps more thought should be put into treating them as people with a medical condition. The government should really do more to target the high level dealers, instead of wasting tax payer's dollars on the street level dealers.
Speaking on behalf of the members of AAWEAR it is a proven fact that many of us have continued to use while in prison, and there are no real programs for people with addictions within our prison systems. Until the issues surrounding drug use are dealt with, people will continue to use. Perhaps more money should be put to better use in combating homelessness, because until one has a roof over their heads they cannot address any issues surrounding their life.
We are therefore strongly urging you to withdraw Bill C-15 and refocus on the studies that show scientifically-proven approaches to addressing drug use and drug-related crimes within Canada, which are approaches that work for people who use drugs and for our communities more broadly.
And I—