Justice Committee on May 4th, 2009

[Philippe Lucas]

Without going back to court. Or you may go back to court, but the full term of the sentence is imposed at that point, through the failure, which triggers the full term of the sentence. And having lost the right to appeal, you will serve the full term.

Only 14% of people who go through the drug court system successfully go through the entire system. So 85% of people go back into the prison system due to failure or dropout.

Now, it's the equivalent, absolutely the moral and ethical equivalent, of punishing a cancer patient for failing their chemotherapy. Addiction, by its very nature, is going to be a waxing and waning of substance use. Many people will fall off or try to quit a few times. I don't know if you've ever tried to quite cigarette smoking. We'll quit a few times before getting successful treatment or before getting out of substance use. So the system itself just entrenches our current prohibitionist approach.

There is some great research on the Canadian drug court model system. I'm happy to make it available to this panel. I recommend Benedikt Fischer's examination from 2003 and John Anderson's study from, I think, 2004. They both looked at international drug courts and the lack of evidence to support their efficacy, both in Canada and internationally.

Thank you.

[Dominic LeBlanc, Liberal, Beauséjour, NB]

Mr. Chair, if there's any time, could Mr. Perks...?

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Fast]

You have half a minute.

[Gord Perks]

Very quickly, without being facetious, what I need is not necessarily more drug treatment courts but more basketball courts.

It's very important that we begin to invest in communities where drug use and a variety of concurrent disorders are serious problems. Drug treatment courts do not do the prevention work that is necessary. They don't build the resilience and social skills necessary to say no.

I urge you, as I said at the end of my presentation, to think about reinvesting the money that would be spent on the incarceration system into other social goods that help to prevent drug use in the first place.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Fast]

Thank you.

We'll move on to Monsieur Ménard, for seven minutes.

[Réal Ménard, Bloc, Hochelaga, QC]

Thank you very much.

I have a question for Mr. Paradis and another one for Mr. Oscapella.

The Bloc Québécois is totally against this bill. We will vote against it. For the last few years, we have maintained that it's illogical to demand minimum sentences. I wouldn't have hoped, even in my wildest dreams, to hear evidence as convincing as yours, Mr. Paradis. I hope that you will leave a written submission with us and that the clerk will have it quickly translated. We will circulate it widely.

I would like to hear some more from you. You have been a judge. You are not a member of the Parti québécois and you are not a great supporter of the Bloc either: you are a magistrate and you have practised law. I would very much like you to enlighten some of our friends here, in this room, who stick to a somewhat dogmatic logic and refuse to acknowledge reality.

You have told us that minimum sentences don't discourage people. Please expand on this idea and the fact that the volume of drug offences exceeds the volume of firearm offences, and so on.

I would then ask you to leave me some time to put a question to Mr. Oscapella.

[Jerome Paradis]

Mr. Ménard, if you don't mind, I'll keep answering in English. I have lived 45 years in Vancouver, and I am afraid I'd waste time trying to find the right words in French.

[Réal Ménard, Bloc, Hochelaga, QC]

We have a translation service. Don't worry.

[Jerome Paradis]

Thank you.

I made the point that courts will be more clogged. We're not dealing with the occasional gun crimes--really, they are occasional, believe it or not--or crimes associated with the use of firearms. Even impaired driving cases have gone down quite steadily in the last 10 years because of the social disapproval that's been attached. But the Provincial Court of British Columbia dealt with 50,000 cases between 2000 and 2005.

With that kind of volume, if we take away the guilty pleas...and that's what I'm saying will happen. People will be less likely to plead guilty because they want to avoid that minimum six months, one year, two years, or three years. They will plead not guilty. They will put everything on the table, what I might call a shotgun defence, and it will take a huge amount of court time to go through all of those cases while everything else waits--and all for no good reason, as everyone here has pointed out.

I have to add this: it occurs to me, after listening to everything I've listened to here this afternoon--I haven't heard these individuals speak before--that it's dispiriting that you're even considering this law.

Thank you.

[Réal Ménard, Bloc, Hochelaga, QC]

We will circulate your brief in all regions, including in Quebec, of course.

You say that if this bill were to pass, the President of the United States would get two years, since he has admitted to having used cocaine in the past. Could you please expand on this example, in order to demonstrate the excessive nature of this bill.

[Prof. Eugene Oscapella]

Thank you, Mr. Ménard.

Like my colleague, Mr. Paradis, I feel more comfortable in English. So, if you don't mind, I'll also continue in English. Thank you.

The example I was giving with Mr. Obama—and this could have applied to George Bush as well—is that under our current law—

[Réal Ménard, Bloc, Hochelaga, QC]

I wouldn't be sad if Mr. Bush went to jail, but I wouldn't want to see Mr. Obama there.

[Prof. Eugene Oscapella]

I don't think it's likely that they would be imprisoned.

Under our current law, merely giving somebody a drug—you don't need to sell it to him—constitutes the offence of trafficking. Mr. Obama admitted that at one point he used cocaine. If he had been in Canada and he had been 18 and shared some cocaine with a friend who was 17, a minor, or if he had done this near a school, that would be a mandatory minimum sentence of two years' incarceration. That means federal penitentiary. That does not make sense to me. Look at the tremendous potential that we would have lost with this man. He has gone on to offer tremendous promise to the United States and many other countries as well. That could have been the consequence of his being subjected to a law like this. He wouldn't even properly be allowed into the country. He's a head of state so we allow him into the country, but because he admitted drug use in the past, we could turn him away at the border. This makes no sense whatsoever. This is a problem that could also have applied to Mr. Clinton or Mr. Bush.

This is how absurd our laws are. I look at my own class of capable, intelligent students. Of course, there are good and bad ones, but by and large I am pleased with them. Some of them could get caught up with this law.

[Réal Ménard, Bloc, Hochelaga, QC]

I think that Mr. Lucas wanted to add something.

[Philippe Lucas]

It's just a brief anecdote.

Our previous Prime minister, Paul Martin, used to tell how his wife had baked marijuana brownies for a party. Sadly, according to Bill C-15, this would have been considered a form of distribution. If she had been arrested and tried, she would have been given at least two years in prison for this crime. This shows that, sometimes, even the slightest of crime can...

[Réal Ménard, Bloc, Hochelaga, QC]

Do you know if Paul Martin ate a piece of these brownies?

[Philippe Lucas]

He claims that was his only drug experience. His wife had made brownies and passed them around at a party. Under the Canadian definition, that is trafficking of marijuana. And that would have kicked in Bill C-15 and a mandatory two-year minimum imprisonment.

[Prof. Eugene Oscapella]

He was given one but he didn't inhale it.

[Jerome Paradis]

Exactly.

[Prof. Eugene Oscapella]

Would you like to take a brownie, Mr. Chair?

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Fast]

I'll take it under advisement.

Ms. Davies.

[Libby Davies, NDP, Vancouver East, BC]

Thank you very much.

First of all, I really want to thank the witnesses who came today. You have all been quite amazing, just your knowledge about this issue, and particularly to Ms. Small, who's come to tell us about the experience in the United States. I think it's so important that we understand what this bill is about, and that there has been a whole lot of experience. We should be learning from that and not repeating it.

You heard from Mr. Ménard that the Bloc doesn't support this bill, and it won't be any surprise to you to learn that the NDP does not support this bill for all of the reasons that you've given. In fact, we voted against it at second reading. So I feel we're at this very critical point. We can all do the math in this room. If there were three parties opposed to this bill, we could defeat it.

I've been listening very carefully to the questioning. I am very concerned, just hearing the questioning about the drug courts and that somehow this is the saving grace of this bill and that maybe we should be supporting it. I'm really actually speaking to my colleagues here in the Liberal Party. This bill is about mandatory minimums; it's actually not about drug treatment courts. That's been thrown in as a little caveat that maybe will make it slightly more humane. If we want more drug treatment courts, if that's the course of action that the government wants to take—and I don't happen to support them for the reasons that are being given--we could easily do that. It doesn't have to be through this bill. So I want to put that point out there.

The question that I really want to bring out, and maybe ask people to elaborate on, is who this bill is intended for. I think we'll hear from the Conservative members that this is about getting tough on these gangsters and the big dealers. It's about going after those guys, and it's not intended to go after you or you. But the reality is so much different in terms of who it really is directed to.

So to hear from VANDU, in terms of who you think this bill will really target, is very important. If you would like, say some more about that, and the same with anybody else who has anything they would like to say--Deborah as well. Maybe I'll just put my question to Ms. Livingston or Mr. Lampkin and Ms. Small. If this bill passes--I was going to ask who are the victims of it--who is it targeted to? Is it the kingpins--are those the people who are going to get caught--or is it the person on the street?

[Ann Livingston, Executive Director, Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users]

There's a term that's used for arresting people who use drugs in our neighbourhood and it's the low-hanging fruit. So there's a sense of shooting fish in a barrel. There's a contained number of people who are severely addicted who obviously possess drugs. With the gang violence that has occurred in Vancouver recently, and the headlines, and the constant calling for more policing, I question who's a gang member. At what point is someone so small a dealer that they're not considered a gang member? No one ever says who that is. That's what we see in our neighbourhood, a sort of pyramid scheme of drug dealing where many, many people who are addicted to drugs are paid solely in drugs to sell drugs that they don't own and that they don't get the profits of. They're simply like a clerk. They sell drugs; the money has to be given to someone else. These are people who are easily arrested. We see this currently. This is who gets arrested. These are the massive numbers of arrests.

I brought this along. I don't know if it's of any use. It's the Vancouver Drug Use Epidemiology. Jane Buxton has done a fabulous job of putting all of the heroin and cocaine busts.... We actually have one from 2005, one from 2007, and there's one coming again in 2009. What it does is it ties the arrests to the.... The other thing that's in here, obviously, is epidemiology, the number of HIV cases, hepatitis C. And there's a very intelligent overview. So should you ask yourself the kind of question you're asking, it's in there, along with the data from drug courts. She calls them expensive, ineffective, and continuing. They've decided, of course, that doesn't matter; we're going to do drug treatment courts.

So that's what I would encourage. I can leave these for people.

[Libby Davies, NDP, Vancouver East, BC]

Ms. Small.

[Deborah Small]

Thank you.

I want to respond quickly to three points that have been made in discussion here.

First of all, I have to disabuse people of the idea that Obama would ever have been arrested and subject to mandatory minimums. He used drugs in the U.S. during the period of mandatory minimums, but the truth of the matter is that drug law enforcement is not equally targeted at people who use drugs. It's targeted at the poorest people, at the most vulnerable people. The fact that he was affluent, from an affluent background, going to an Ivy League school, ensured that he was not very likely to be targeted. Police don't do drug raids at Harvard. I know, because I went there, and I had lots of friends who used drugs, and the cops did not come looking for us. Okay? But where they will do drug raids is in public housing and low-income communities.

One of the things I didn't have time to make a point of is that the history of drug law enforcement in New York is that while drug use is pervasive among every socio-economic group, 95% of all the people incarcerated for drugs in New York have been poor African Americans and Latinos—95% of them. No one has ever argued to me, not a police person, not a prosecutor, or anyone else, that 95% of the people who bought, used, or sold drugs in New York were poor African American and Latinos, but that's who ended up behind bars.

I used to head a drug treatment program that served women in Harlem. The majority of the women who came to us—some 70% of them—particularly the ones who came to us through the criminal justice system, had histories of sexual or physical abuse; two-thirds of them were mothers; and most of them had been living on public assistance or were marginally employed. I think one of the most pernicious things about our drug laws is that the people who are targeted, the people who are affected, are always the people who are already at the short end of the stick of everything. So instead of using the laws to help people who need our help, we actually use them to punish the most vulnerable people. More than 150,000 children in New York State have been deprived of their parents for at least some part of their lives because of drug law convictions. Because of our laws now, if you're a woman who gets a sentence of two years or more, you run the risk of losing your parental rights forever, because one of the consequences of going to prison is that your kids can be put up for adoption.

So we need to actually look at who we're targeting and what the cumulative effect is of having.... We've had 36 years of this law, and the point I wanted to make about it is that the worst part about mandatory minimums is they pervert the very system of justice we're supposed to be protecting. They give people an incentive not only to go after the low-hanging fruit, but also to disproportionately target drug crimes, as if they were the most important area of law breaking. We went from having only 10% or 15%—