Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Honourable members of this committee, I had a statement prepared, but on Sunday I had a chance to listen to a prisoner that had been rehabilitated, and he was one of the worst of the worst. He had committed murder in prison. He's spent the majority of his life in prison. He had helped rehabilitate a prisoner who is now a member of the Saskatchewan legislature. It's kind of thrown me in a bit of a quandary about what I should be stating to you.
Do I believe that people should pay for their crimes? Most certainly, and I think the more serious the crime, the more serious the time should be, but I believe that we have to temper anything that we do with a certain amount of compassion, not only to the person who's committed the crime, but I think we have to realistically look a little more towards the victims of the crime as well.
When I talk about compassion, I don't believe in the death penalty. I'm against the death penalty because we're now finding out how many times in our justice system we have made mistakes. People have gone to prison for crimes they didn't commit. Can you imagine if somebody had been executed for a crime they didn't commit? So that is off the table as far as I'm concerned.
I believe that if you commit a heinous murder--and to me any murder is heinous--if you take a life deliberately, knowing what you were doing, I believe that you forfeit your freedom, not just for 25 years and not for 30 years. My feeling is, if you took a life, it's now time for you to forfeit yours in society.
I know that puts an economic burden on our system, but as a victim, having an 18-year-old daughter murdered, what would her life have been like? That young man is only going to be 49 when he sees the street again. There's still time to be productive, if he chooses to be productive. In my case, I don't think he will be, but that's a personal opinion.
If we are going to insist, though, that we release murderers after, say, 25 years, somewhere in the system there has to be a proper rehabilitation program, a rehabilitation program that prepares them for society when they come out. Far too often, people go into prison and are forgotten. They are simply left in there like caged animals.
Yes, they say there are education programs, but how many of them are really guided towards that education program? Better yet, how many of them are guided to the program put on by the guy that's teaching them, first of all, how to break into a house better, how to crack a safe better, how to stage a better bank holdup, how to get away with a murder?
So there are lots of education systems going on in our prisons, and those things we have to address as part of the justice world. It's not just the penalty, but what are we going to do to rehabilitate them once they're in there? There's where the compassion comes in for the criminal.
When I think of the young man who murdered my daughter, I looked into his eyes for hours while we went through the process, and I didn't see a spark of compassion for us or for anything that he'd done. He was just stone cold. I know that we're going to have those people in the system, and those people belong in the system and they need to be kept in the system.
Clifford Olson comes to mind, a prime example of a man whose own lawyer said, “If you let him out, within two hours he will recommit.” That's just one member that comes to mind. So we have to be very careful.
We need to have justice and compassion, but we need to keep an eye on these people. We have to know who is in danger of recommitting and who is not.
That's for the more serious crimes, but we have numerous lesser crimes that take place. A man walks into a bank with a gun. He holds up a bank and takes the bank's money. Nobody's injured. He probably gets anywhere from 10 to 15 years in prison. Somebody dressed as well as you gentlemen sits down and creates a little Ponzi scheme, takes millions of dollars from thousands and thousands of people, and we give him four years. Who committed the worst crime?
I'm not an expert, gentlemen. That's for you. My Bible says to pray for those who are in government and those who lead us, so I do. I hope that whatever your beliefs are, you'll look at this bill and realize that serious time has to be paid for serious crime, but by all means with compassion.
Thank you.