Justice Committee on March 29th, 2010

[Alexandra Mendes, Liberal, Brossard—La Prairie, QC]

It is provincial jurisdiction at that level.

Mr. Rice, you mentioned all the challenges you face, both in disclosure and in proper notice procedures, and that does touch the justice department. How do you propose we address that, very specifically?

[Greg Rice]

We have a policy division with PPSC and the justice department that could probably comment better on that.

With regard to notice provisions and disclosure issues, I simply put that out there, and I'm hoping that there may be ways to streamline or potentially force the issue of notice that this committee can look at. As I said, it's now governed by case law. Sometimes case law is followed; often it is not. These cases can spiral out of control. In some instances, it's surprising how they can take on a life of their own.

On disclosure, I'm trying to relate my experiences with it. I don't have any specific recommendations. My point is that despite our best efforts, as it presently stands in our case law and with the police's best efforts, disclosure problems continue to plague us and continue on for years.

I don't really have any suggestions. I wish I did. I don't know that there is a magic bullet, but I'm hopeful that this committee can certainly consider that. I would defer to them on that aspect.

[Alexandra Mendes, Liberal, Brossard—La Prairie, QC]

Do I have more time?

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Brian Murphy]

You have a minute and a half.

[Alexandra Mendes, Liberal, Brossard—La Prairie, QC]

Thank you.

To any one of you who would like to answer the question, do you think mandatory sentencing or a hardening, if you wish, of the sentencing process would in any way prevent, dissuade, or help address this matter of organized crime?

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Brian Murphy]

Mr. Cenaiko.

[Harvey Cenaiko]

I apologize. I can't answer that question. As an independent agency of government, free of political will--

[Alexandra Mendes, Liberal, Brossard—La Prairie, QC]

It's not a political question.

[Harvey Cenaiko]

--we're here to respond to and work with the government on the legislation that we have imposed upon us. I can't answer that. Maybe one of the other panel members can.

[Alexandra Mendes, Liberal, Brossard—La Prairie, QC]

Nobody wants to answer that...?

Okay.

Thank you.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Brian Murphy]

Ms. Guay, you have seven minutes.

[Monique Guay, Bloc, Rivière-du-Nord, QC]

I invite you to use your earphones, because I will be speaking in French.

I have taken some notes. I see you do a lot of prevention work among youth. I also see you have a pretty good success rate. You said that 79.3% of youth stated that they would get out of the gang if they had a true second chance in life. I was surprised by that number. That is a lot. This means that a lot of work has been done and it must continue in order to allow these young people to reintegrate into society, so they can have a better life.

In the past, there were major criminal gangs like the Hells Angels and the Rock Machine. Now we are experiencing another phenomenon, namely, street gangs. In Toronto, we heard a great deal about ethnic gangs, for instance, Asian gangs, black gangs, and so on. Now you are telling us about aboriginal gangs. Do aboriginal groups really have the resources they need to help young people and work on prevention? Perhaps you could talk about this, Mr. Louis.

Mr. Rice, you talked about electronic surveillance. That made me chuckle, because young people today all have BlackBerries and iPods; they use Facebook and Twitter, and they all have codes. It is very difficult to try to decode their systems. It could take years to do so. It made me chuckle a little when you talked about electronic surveillance, because they are very familiar with how you work. Small-time, young street dealers are not the ones who are dangerous, but rather the big bosses are. They will often use young people who have never committed a crime, who have never taken drugs in their life and who are out to make a fast buck. So the big bosses make them sell drugs on the street. I wonder what your thoughts are on this.

Mr. Louis, perhaps you could go first.

[Roy Louis]

Thank you for that

I think the issue we always face in the first nations community is the fact that very little or no funding comes for program development for many first nation communities across the country. It's always an issue, because first nations have different priorities across Canada. Some are struggling because of dysfunction in their families or they struggle because of poverty, lack of education, and a lack of resources. All of those issues are tied into this issue of where we're at today.

If proper research is done on issues that would help our first nation communities, I would totally support that. I think that's being looked at. Mr. Foss is working with the Assembly of First Nations to work on some of those initiatives.

So yes, it is a big issue. Funding is always an issue.

[Monique Guay, Bloc, Rivière-du-Nord, QC]

What do you think, Ms. Fox?

[Jan Fox]

It was my colleague, Hugo, who mentioned the 79%, but thank you for letting me speak to it. For me, when you ask about resources, I think what we need to do as a government agency is work very hard to keep those partnerships, because we realize that by the time they come to federal custody they have been through a lot of other systems that perhaps have failed them.

Whether it was the school system or provincial corrections, by the time they get to us, we know that we need a lot of other people to help us work through it, and I really support what Hugo has said in relation to the importance of working together to help them to disaffiliate. The partnership in which he is going to be working closely with the AFN is a really significant and important one. I think it's groundbreaking, and I think that it takes not only money but a lot of corporate will, so I'm proud of our organization.

I'm proud that we're working together to move towards that. Sometimes we may focus too much on the day-to-day work of purely supervising people, following all the rules and regulations, and not reaching out to get the help we need to do that, so for me that has been an exciting partnership.

[Monique Guay, Bloc, Rivière-du-Nord, QC]

Mr. Foss.

[Dr. Hugo Foss]

I wish I had more to say at this point in terms of what we want to do, but we're at the very beginning stages. I've had one meeting with the Assembly of First Nations. We're going to continue to work on the project.

For the skeptics in the crowd, I'll just say this with respect to the 79.3% out of 3,500 who said they would want a better life, a different life if they could. There often are skeptics when it comes to organized crime or street gangs, and the thought people often have is that they don't want to change and will never change. So arbitrarily cut that in half, if you will. Then we are still dealing with a significant number of people who are dissatisfied with the way in which they are living. That is the motivating factor for me: to tap into what is already their dissatisfaction and move it forward.

You may hear a lot about disaffiliation in your travels throughout the country, but it is important to remember that disaffiliation is not an event; it's a process. Just because somebody says he wants out doesn't mean that he has the resources, the fortitude, or the support to do that. I've been working with some individuals for six, seven, and eight years. We are at the point where they are no longer active in the gang, but they are still piecing their lives together because they come from very broken backgrounds.

[Monique Guay, Bloc, Rivière-du-Nord, QC]

I have one minute left.

I would simply like to say that you could look at Quebec as an example. In Quebec, we have street outreach workers who work with these youth. These people really work in the street. They are trained to seek out these young people, reintegrate them into society and help get them back on the right track. There are associations and working groups. There are important services aimed at supporting young people from an early age, while they are still adolescents and can be rehabilitated, and not treating them like criminals. Indeed, dealing with criminals is completely different than dealing with a young person who is just starting down that path.

Thank you.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Brian Murphy]

Thank you very much, Ms. Guay.

We continue with Mr. Comartin.

You have seven minutes.

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you all for being here.

Mr. Rice, I am going to start with you.

We were in Toronto last Thursday. Bill Trudell, who is with the Canadian Council of Criminal Defence Lawyers, was in front of us telling us about the symposium that had been carried on fairly recently, which was an outflow of the work that Michael Code did specifically on disclosure and other procedural problems in prosecuting mega cases.

We understand recommendations are coming out of that symposium, which I hope the committee will have before we write our report, but the major item on disclosure that they identified was the fact that it had to be dealt with under the present system in the course of the trial. You are going to be recommending that both the Criminal Code and the Canada Evidence Act be amended so that procedure as to what is necessary in disclosure would be determined in pretrial proceedings.

I'm not sure if you are aware of that. If you are, have you any comments?

[Greg Rice]

Thank you.

No, I wasn't aware of the symposium, but obviously when that comes out it will be front and centre with our office. I'm interested in seeing how this is going to work. In a way, some of these disclosure problems are often dealt with in what we call pretrial motions: Garofoli itself is a pretrial motion.

Usually what happens in a mega trial is that first there will be the defence application for disclosure, and that's usually dealt with. It may take several weeks or months to hash out, especially when there are a lot of vetting concerns where pieces of the disclosure have been blacked out or taken out to protect confidential informants or what have you. All that has to be defended. In fact, we tend to do that; we'll split that off from the actual trial at present, so--

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

I'm sorry, Mr. Rice. Is it the trial judge who's making those determinations or is it a different judge?

[Greg Rice]

In this province, we've actually had some charter issues split off, but generally speaking it is the trial judge who makes those determinations.

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

All right.

Ms. Fox, and perhaps Dr. Foss, for the programs you're describing today, can you give us a sense of when you identified the need to throw those extra resources at fighting gangs in the corrections system? When did it start? Then, as an adjunct to that--and as parliamentarians I guess we are always looking for this--is there any monitoring or criteria that will assess the success rat in terms of reducing recidivism or encouraging disaffiliation?

[Jan Fox]

Maybe I'll start with some of the specific ones. I talked about the more static interventions. I could ask Mr. Foss to talk a little bit more with respect to the program interventions.

I think you might be referring to my opening comments about the resources we've put toward security intelligence. We have had a security intelligence officer assigned to parole districts for just a few short months now, for about eight months. Before that, we had them assigned only to institutions, so we weren't sharing information, both with our partners inside the institution and with our partners at CSIS, in Canadian border security, and in policing agencies, on the level that we really needed to be.

In a very short time, in that short eight months, the results of putting resources there have been that we know exactly the numbers of those gang members, who they are, where they're residing, what the incompatibilities might be, and in particular any residual problems there might be. Already in those eight months, we've seen huge differences. In an even shorter period of time--I'd say four to six months--we've also had criminal community analysts who've been able to work to assess and analyze some of the situations involving the gangs.

The importance of this, though, is that it's really enabled us to establish even better credibility with our policing agencies and with prosecutors, with people who work in that side of the business. It's been really good from that perspective.

The other part I really want to highlight is the community correctional liaison officers we now have in all of the districts. They're actually serving police officers, who are, if you will, seconded on an intergovernmental exchange from one department to the other.

We began that almost two and a half years ago. We had an arrangement both with the Edmonton police and with the Calgary police. I note that both chiefs are going to speak to you later today. They may want to talk about that. We've had that for just over one year and now have that same agreement with the RCMP, so we've been able to reach out beyond the major urban cities to work with that.

We have a lot of data. To answer your question more specifically, we're researching that. We're evaluating that. It's important right now because that was done with Treasury Board funding that we received only for a very short period of time, so that's being evaluated to determine if it would continue.

If I'm allowed to say so, I would say that this has been a wonderful initiative. What has been important about our work with the police and with people who do interventions is the recognition on both sides of the fence of the importance of prevention programming and suppression--that we can't do one without the other. We need to recognize that there is a need to take a strict approach with some really difficult guys we work with--and I say “guys” because the vast majority are male--but we also need to recognize what Hugo has said and the importance of that program.

What I've learned through this and through the research we're conducting is the importance of a balanced approach. I hope that answers your question.