Justice Committee on May 4th, 2009

[Jerome Paradis]

Yes. I'm sorry to interrupt, Mr. Rathgeber.

In that context, I didn't refer to the robotic exercise of mandatory minimum sentencing. I talked about 1987 and the potential for the robotic exercise of the sentencing function of a judge under a complete mandatory guideline system. Judges were opposed to that.

Judges are not opposed to specific, well-placed mandatory minimums. They have no reason to be. They are not a legislative arm of government, and they know that, and that was my point.

[Brent Rathgeber, Conservative, Edmonton—St. Albert, AB]

In fact, it doesn't result in robotic sentencing because--

[Jerome Paradis]

I didn't say it did. I was talking about mandatory sentencing guidelines when I talked about robots. All right?

[Brent Rathgeber, Conservative, Edmonton—St. Albert, AB]

Thank you, but you'll agree with me that the judiciary still has the discretion to impose an appropriate sentence; it just has a floor that it has to respect. It has a floor and a ceiling.

[Jerome Paradis]

Oh, you're speaking of guidelines?

[Brent Rathgeber, Conservative, Edmonton—St. Albert, AB]

Yes.

[Jerome Paradis]

I see. Yes, that's true.

[Brent Rathgeber, Conservative, Edmonton—St. Albert, AB]

Thank you.

Those are my questions.

[Jerome Paradis]

I will add to something Mr. Tousaw said.

I want to make it clear that Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, an American organization that was founded by five police officers who spent their lives and careers involved in enforcement of drug laws there, an organization to which I belong, agrees exactly with everything Mr. Tousaw has said about ending prohibition in the way he has suggested.

I want to endorse what he said.

[Brent Rathgeber, Conservative, Edmonton—St. Albert, AB]

I think that's clear.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Fast]

Thank you.

We'll move on to Mr. Bagnell.

Mr. Bagnell, you have five minutes.

[Larry Bagnell, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

Thank you.

Thank you all for being here. Witnesses always give us an insight that we don't otherwise have.

I want to ask all of you about the solutions on prevention, and I'm going to also get into probation if I have enough time left.

But just before I do, Mr. Perks, I was very enticed by your last words, which said you were going to tell us about your community. I want to know what you were going to say.

[Gord Perks]

Quickly, the community I represent has a number of very interesting dynamics. First, for a variety of reasons, through the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, a tremendous number of people who had been forcibly confined for mental illness were released into my community. Second, we have a high proportion of people who are newcomers to Canada in my community. Third, we have one of the last places near the downtown where there is still a large amount of affordable, private rental stock. We also have in my community a fairly high degree of drug use.

I'm actually probably the only person who represents a ward in the City of Toronto that has people from all five income quintiles in it, from the very top to the very bottom. The thing that's quite remarkable about my community is that people from all five of those quintiles advocate for more affordable housing. They advocate for more investment in community resources like parks, swing sets, allotment gardens. They advocate for harm reduction programs. They advocate, essentially, for social inclusion of people who have addiction, and sometimes concurrent disorders with addiction, because they recognize that someone who is recently on the streets after having served a jail term is a much more difficult person to house, a much more difficult person to integrate into the community, a much more difficult person to provide supports to, than someone who is in a treatment program, than someone who may be using a harm reduction strategy to try to manage an addiction problem they have, than someone who is treated as a member of the community rather than whisked off under some arbitrary sentencing scheme to become a non-member of the community and then return back to Parkdale with their lives broken.

[Larry Bagnell, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

A majority of crimes are done under the influence of alcohol or drugs, or are to get the sources to buy these products. This question is for everyone. Basically, I've been arguing at this committee that we lack resources in prisons, that we lack rehabilitation resources, etc., and that's where we're failing. Obviously, prohibition is not working, and in fact non-prohibition doesn't work either, because alcohol is legal. We haven't solved the problem in either case. So what types of steps can we take? You mentioned a few, the swing sets, etc., but I just want to hear from everyone, a couple of the leading things.

[Ann Livingston]

I just want to quickly say, as a mother of young teens, that the difference between my children.... It is Vancouver, after all; someone is going to offer them marijuana. They're going to offer them marijuana at school, as they did when they were in junior high school. When they wanted to drink, they were able to come to me and ask me if I would buy them alcohol. I think you need to understand that alcohol is regulated and much more difficult for children to buy. Children buy drugs from other children, and it creates a problem, I find, in parenting. I would much rather have had the ability to have a discussion with my children before they used marijuana. I don't know if they've used other drugs.

I just want to make that comment, because Canada was much admired internationally for many years when alcohol.... In our province anyway, you had to go in and write what you wanted on a piece of paper; they didn't have advertising for liquor and you didn't wander the aisles and look for nice bottles. Liquor in British Columbia was very controlled. We had a very low consumption rate, as a result. I think that needs to be perhaps examined. There are two things that add tremendously to an increased amount of drug use or alcohol use: a completely free and open market where there is a lot of advertising; and prohibition, which seems to increase the availability because of the profit--and the drug cartels really want a lot of people to use a lot of drugs. It seems odd to us, but they have their ways of increasing drug use, the black market I mean. What is it? Regulate, control, discourage. That really does work.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Fast]

You can make one quick response, Deborah.

[Deborah Small]

I think some of the things that are solutions, Canada is already doing, such as having a safe injection site and experimenting with heroin maintenance, which has worked successfully in different parts of Europe. I think that is one way of reducing the black market demand for drugs.

I also think that the Dutch have shown us something about the value of separating the markets for soft drugs and hard drugs. They have much lower consumption of cannabis among young people, in spite of the coffee shops. And they've been able to reduce the level of young people moving into hard drugs because of the fact that they've made it easier to regulate access to cannabis.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Fast]

Thank you.

We'll go over to Monsieur Lemay. You have five minutes.

[Marc Lemay, Bloc, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

I don't have that many questions, as I agree with everything you have said. However, there is one issue that I would like to revisit.

Mr. Paradis, wouldn't you say that the problem is the getting out of prison, rather than the getting in?

[Jerome Paradis]

Definitely, yes.

[Marc Lemay, Bloc, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

Minimum sentences don't solve anything. The problem is that the men are released much too soon. In our lingo, we say that they don't do their time. I don't want to discriminate, but it's mostly men who do prison time. The minimum sentences that the bill would create won't solve a thing.

What do you think?

[Jerome Paradis]

I'll answer in English, if you don't mind?

[Marc Lemay, Bloc, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

Please, go ahead.

[Jerome Paradis]

I think the important point about the idea that this solves anything--that is, sending people to jail--is that it is manifestly not so. It does not work; that's true. But I think Mr. Bagnell's question about the problem and how we solve the problem.... What do we do to solve the problem? The fact is, we're trying to solve a problem that isn't, in the terms put by both of you, solvable. The fact is, human beings have been using psychoactive substances since the beginning of time, and they will continue to. Some will use them responsibly and others will not. It doesn't matter what the substance is.

The advent of the chemistry and other things over the last hundred years has certainly made this huge cornucopia, if you put it that way, of drugs available. By putting people in jail, you're simply inviting them to spend time in a hothouse where they can come out fully prepared to lead a much more efficient life of crime. And you only put them in there because they happened to have been caught up in this artificial net you've created.

That's my answer to that.

[Philippe Lucas]

Merci beaucoup.

If I could add to that, substance use is really a symptom of the problems we're trying to tackle here. The evidence is very clear that if you want to end half the substance use in Canada, we need to house the people who are currently homeless in Canada. That would cut, literally, substance use problems by half. This is a poverty problem, largely. As Madam Small so ably explained, our poorest and most visible minorities are the ones who are the targets of our current drug use. They're the ones who are living on our streets and who of course come into contact with the criminal justice system at a much higher rate than those of us who are in homes dealing with our addictions within the privacy of our own quarters, within the social support of our families, in many ways.

So obviously dealing with drug addiction through housing and poverty reduction is going to be the best thing we can do, not spending more money on a criminal justice approach.

I just want to differentiate between drug-related crime, which Mr. Bagnell mentioned, and prohibition-related crime. When we talk about shootings in Toronto, when we talk about shootings in Vancouver, these are not people on drugs shooting each other. These are people shooting each other for drug profits. Nothing to do with the actual substances themselves has caused this violence. This violence is caused by the profitability of these drugs. So obviously addressing the difference between drug-related crime, which is typically petty crime that feeds someone's substance abuse and dependence on substances, is very different from prohibition-related crime, which is the high violence we're seeing and the gun violence we're seeing in our major cities in Canada.