With all my experience in broadcasting, I've never been able to do very well without a microphone.
Thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity to speak here today. It's a beautiful day, and I salute you members who are sitting here when there's a gorgeous day going on outside. All the best to you.
The Surrey Board of Trade is bringing a slightly different perspective. We're bringing the perspective of the business people of our city. We represent some 1,300 member-businesses and 3,600 business owners. We operate in the second-largest city in the province. We are severely impacted by the gang and drug violence and the drug- and alcohol-addicted chronic offenders who tarnish the appeal of one of the most desirable and beautiful cities in the country. Surrey is often the butt of jokes because of crime. It is negatively impacting the city and its people, who are doing spectacular things with this community.
Ottawa, we have a problem. The justice system isn't--it's a legal system that for a myriad of reasons, at least in criminal law, has strayed far from the original tenet of ensuring law and order, dealing with wrongdoers, discouraging others' bad behaviour, providing a measure of protection for society from such individuals, and so on. It seems that the criminals are the only ones who have the rights here.
One of our members asked me recently, after 12 or 13 break-ins, “Where are my rights as an honest taxpaying citizen to operate my business and my life free from criminal interference? What about my right to a safe community and my right to have the so-called justice system work, not exclusively for the criminals, but for the people and the society who pay for it?” That's a pretty hard one to answer. There's a major discontent in the land with this broken system. So here are four priority proposals we would like to bring to you.
The first two proposals that we endorse are disclosure codification and lawful access, which were put forward by the B.C. government. We have talked with the various people involved with these, and we endorse them strongly.
Disclosure codification is necessary in order to subject defence requests for disclosure of materials that are outside the investigative file to a rigorous procedure to justify reasons for materials sought.
On lawful access, we need to amend the Criminal Code to modernize our current means and technology. We need to require telephone and Internet service providers to include interception capability in new technology; require telecommunications service providers to make customer name and address information available on request; require service providers to ensure that existing specified information on a particular subscriber is not deleted; and modernize part 6 of the Criminal Code on interception of private communications to reflect current technologies.
The next piece we bring forward is on prolific and chronic offenders. It is really a problem for our business community. The greater volume of crime in our society is committed by relatively few perpetrators, who amass records of 50 to 150 or more crimes, primarily to feed drug habits. The government must amend the Criminal Code, with appropriate guidelines for the judiciary, to ensure that sentences reflect the record of the individual and not simply the crime before the court at the moment. Judges must distinguish between the first-time offender and the prolific or chronic offender, and treat them differently.
It is stunning that many chronic property offenders receive an average sentence of 101 days for their first offence, and only an average of 25 days for their 35th conviction. What's wrong with that picture? I ask you that. That information comes from the Vancouver Police, by the way. These offences must not be treated as petty.
Here's another issue, and it's a perception one. These repeat offenders drive businesses away by their ceaseless predation. It's not petty when a business must spend hundreds of thousands of dollars just to repair damage or to protect themselves against crime. It is not petty when a community's reputation is sullied by such crime.
Some people ask who would want to locate a business or home in an area where there's a reputation for high crime. Surrey is a place we're proud of, and we're trying to get that fixed.
At the same time, it's critical that substance abuse treatment be provided for prolific offenders to break that cycle. These programs must be available wherever the offender is, and that includes remand and provincial jails.
The last issue is judicial accountability, and there's a lot of feeling on this in our community. The vast majority of judges are competent, concerned individuals who do their utmost to discharge their duties appropriately. My comments are not addressed to them. We have, however, seen some decisions that leave the public agog and gasping for air.
We feel the judiciary appear to face very little internal and virtually no public accountability for their decisions, apart from what you see in the press. We don't want the courts to be hyper-reactive to the public, but neither can we simply accept decisions that in some cases result in serious damage, death, and destruction of lives and businesses, by failing to adequately protect witnesses, victims, and the public at large.
Many engineers carry the liability for their work through their whole careers, and most professionals are liable for their decisions and actions. Yet if a judge releases an individual on bail, conditional sentence, or whatever and there are violent consequences, where is the accountability for that jurist? Is it not reasonable that there be some method to call that individual to account?
It's about restoring the public's confidence in the system. We call for a carefully selected committee of legislators, academics, legal professionals, and the public to examine this issue and devise a method for a performance review of judges. We don't want to suggest what the mechanism should be, only that a solution be developed and implemented.
Those, ladies and gentlemen, are the four points the Surrey Board of Trade wishes to bring before you.
We thank you very much for the opportunity.