Justice Committee on March 29th, 2010

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Fast]

It is. Thank you.

We'll move on to Mr. Murphy for another question, this time for five minutes.

[Brian Murphy, Liberal, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

Thank you.

For guns, drugs, money, or sex--human trafficking sex--we're hearing increasingly that money, for organized crime anyway, is what sort of greases the wheel, and the other things are areas of enablement. We've talked a bit about drugs. We've talked a very little bit about guns.

The Criminal Code has been amended for many years in regard to dealing with specific violent crime. I don't want to turn this into a meeting on sentencing. For mandatory minimums, we can have that debate in Ottawa. It just goes around and around, you know, like everything in Ottawa.

But in terms of actually getting the guns out of the system, the guns that criminal organizations and gangs use, what can we do? Don't talk about sentencing, because we've dealt with that, and I don't think it's working. There's a big border. I think you said that there are 37 border sites here in western Canada. Where are the guns coming from? How can we get them out of the system to some degree?

Anybody can answer.

[Chief Rick Hanson]

Well, the one thing I would disagree with you on is that I'd love to see where sentencing is even applied. I think they're not looking at gun possession seriously. When someone carrying a handgun is picked up in downtown Calgary in the entertainment district, I don't think it should matter what he's doing with it. I don't think it should matter that he hasn't shot anybody yet. The mere possession of that gun should result in a significant sentence, because at the end of the day, the intention is to kill somebody.

That's not happening. It's a joke. The sentences around possession or use of a firearm in the commission of an offence are absolutely pathetic, especially with the time they're in jail. I'd love to see a regimen in place that actually sends these guys to jail. Let's get off the—

[Brian Murphy, Liberal, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

You're talking to an east coast Liberal, so I don't think that's a problem.

In terms of getting the guns out, I didn't mean to minimize that--

[Chief Rick Hanson]

It's search and seizure.

[Brian Murphy, Liberal, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

--but we talk about sentencing a lot. We need to do more. I agree with that. But on the supply of guns...?

[Chief Rick Hanson]

It's search and seizure. The ability of our officers to conduct search and seizure is severely limited.

I think there has to be a distinction between violating somebody's home and doing a traffic stop late at night when you have certain grounds. Maybe those grounds are insufficient to justify a search warrant, but certainly they're sufficient grounds to believe that this is a dangerous person--because you have information--and to subsequently search that vehicle and remove the firearms before they're used in the commission of an offence, without having to justify the criteria that have been established by the courts through the interpretation of the charter.

If you're serious about getting guns off the street, then untie our hands and let us do what we're paid to do out there. We'll do it for you. In the meantime, with the gun registry, we pretend we're doing more. We're just kidding ourselves. There are guns flooding into this country in numbers that we have not seen, ever, and I've been in policing for 35 years.

[Brian Murphy, Liberal, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

Is there any time left?

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Fast]

You have two minutes left.

[Brian Murphy, Liberal, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

I'm really interested in this gun thing. Does anybody else want to speak? The border people may be implicated in this.

[Mike Skappak]

Yes.

[Brian Murphy, Liberal, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

Guns are flooding into the country. You're CBSA. What do you say to that?

[Mike Skappak]

Yes, absolutely. Port of entry gun seizures are up right across the board. A lot of our challenge is between ports, which is the jurisdiction of the RCMP. We put people into the IBET units to curb some of this issue; however, the guns continue to flood in.

The main thing here is that it's about intelligence sharing, about getting information from the convictions and seizures made inland back to us so that we can track the weapons back and use our international partners to possibly identify where the guns are coming from. Getting that is huge and sometimes that's limited.

Other than that, the huge challenge is the issue of it being between the ports. There are miles and miles of border that surround this country. There are 37 ports of entry in the prairies. Down east, there are more ports that closely attached to each other and there's not as much distance between them.

[Brian Murphy, Liberal, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

Briefly, then, in 20 seconds, are the guns coming in primarily through known border points—ports or airports or whatever—and then being concealed, or are they coming in across our undefended, porous border, where there are no posts? Do we know this?

[Mike Skappak]

It's both.

[Brian Murphy, Liberal, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

Is there no proportion to it—mostly this or mostly that?

[Mike Skappak]

No, there isn't, really, unless my counterpart from the RCMP knows anything different.

[Insp Clemens Imgrund]

No. Beyond that, there's not much I can say other than to mention the fact that in the areas where they're coming across, the porous areas of the ports, I think there's an unknown element to it. It's hard to speak exactly to what extent it is happening, but certainly there's no question that it's happening, by both means.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Fast]

Thank you.

Monsieur Ménard, you have five minutes.

[Serge Ménard, Bloc, Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, QC]

In the case of these people who have been arrested over 100 times, this must not involve very serious charges, since they have been released so many times. I doubt a judge would release someone convicted of murder before 20 years, or even individuals convicted for bank robberies, armed robbery, and so on.

Do you really know of cases where people have arrested over 100 times? Are these not, as I have seen at times, unfortunate souls, people of very limited intelligence who commit petty crimes, like shoplifting and petty larceny, simply so they have a roof over their heads in the winter? Do you really know of cases of dangerous criminals who escape justice 99 or 100 times?

[Chief Michael Boyd]

The people I was referring to were arrested for a variety of offences: break and enter, certainly; theft of auto, or stealing cars; and theft from auto. Sometimes, though not in all cases, there were robbery arrests, violent crime. A lot of that, in comparison to murder, sounds like minor crime, but if you get enough of it, it can really affect an entire city. In my experience, that's the effect of not dealing appropriately with crime.

I'm not referring to some people who may be out of work, who may be homeless and on the streets, and who may be committing some crimes as a form of existence. I'm talking about people who are committing crimes on a habitual basis; if they go to jail for a little bit of time, it's just the cost of doing business.

[Serge Ménard, Bloc, Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, QC]

In your presentation, you spoke a great deal about mandatory measures. You talked about them a lot in relation to people who are released on bail.

Am I to understand that these mandatory measures have to do with release conditions, and not mandatory sentences?

[Chief Michael Boyd]

For those people who are out on bail, who are before the courts facing charges, there are limited conditions written into the Criminal Code, which I think need to be modernized. That was my point. We need to look at where the world is now in 2010 rather than where we were in the late seventies or early eighties.

I think there are some conditions that.... We may put curfews on individuals. There may be people who are out breaking and entering into homes in the daytime, but whose curfew is to be inside a location--ideally, a given residence--from nine o'clock at night to eight o'clock in the morning. So it's not limiting or controlling their behaviour.

I believe that the conditions that need to be expanded and specified in the Criminal Code need to be more consistent with today's world. For example, with some street gang individuals, I know of an incident where, in order to restrict their ability to operate, the request was to prohibit them from carrying cellphones, because when they carry cellphones, that's how they do their business. It was, I believe, a responsible condition to prohibit them from carrying cellphones, but these conditions need to be expanded. They need to be commensurate with controlling the behaviour of individuals if they are out of custody on strict conditions. I think we need to revisit that.

[Serge Ménard, Bloc, Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, QC]

In any case, the end of those sections always include the mention “any other condition prescribed”.

Basically, do you want to be able to force them to wear a device, like an electronic monitor, to follow their movements? Is that what you would like to see? Secondly, you did not want to—

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Fast]

Monsieur Ménard, your time is up.

We'll move on to Mr. Norlock for five minutes.