Someone from across the way wants to know my e-mail address.
What I'm saying is that we have an opportunity in this meeting, and the meetings we're supposed to have next Tuesday and Thursday, to allow Canadians to hear each and every discussion about clauses in this bill on which there are strong opinions. If the government had confidence in its position, it would be quite happy to allow this debate to take place in the fashion that was set up, in terms of our regular meetings that we've been elected to attend. The process of Parliament provides for standing committees such as this one on justice and human rights so that what I say can be heard. If I quote some expert, it can be weighed by people. Some could say that it makes a lot of sense and ask why the government is not accepting that.
Is that what it's afraid of, that somebody will say something sensible and make some logical, persuasive argument, and it'll be seen to be ignoring it? Ignoring what's said on the other side and not even making counter arguments—that happens sometimes. But if there are counter arguments, I'd like to hear them. I'm open to persuasion, too. I think government members should be open to persuasion as well. Canadians have a right for that process to take place in the open and in the manner in which it's expected to be brought forward.
We have these 100 clauses and 50 or 60 amendments to go through—I haven't seen all the numbers here. They'll take some time to consider. Many of them are similar. We're not going to have 55 debates if there are that many amendments that are similar. But there's a process here that we hope and expect parliamentarians to follow.
What we're hearing from the other side, through this approach, is no debate unless it's going to be all in one day, with no opportunity for due consideration. Are you asking Canadians to shut down their lives and spend the rest of the day watching TV? I'm assuming we'd be broadcast all day. I don't know; maybe only certain blocks are available. This committee is now being broadcast until 10:45. I don't know what happens after that. They may be broadcasting some other committee.
Is that the idea? That we're going shut down public access to this committee's hearing by keeping this going until midnight? Is that another way of limiting the public's knowledge of what goes on in their Parliament that they elected in May, expecting to have their voices heard? And not just the voices of the majority of seats with a minority of voters, not just those voices. We don't have an elected dictatorship in Canada; we have a constitutional democracy, a parliamentary democracy, where all the voices of those elected are entitled to be heard and where all are entitled to participate in the process. Instead, what this government wants to do is ignore that and say, “Just because we're elected we can do exactly what we want.”
Well, that's not the Canadian notion of democracy that we believe in, that our party believes in. We believe that members of Parliament are here to work together to make things better and to have a genuine argument about how best to do that. We are here to have a genuine argument and not just to hear, “We're here, here's how we're going to do it, we want this legislation passed, and we want it passed today.” That's what we're hearing: “Not only do we want this legislation passed, we want it passed today, this day, today, between now and 11:59 tonight.” They're saying that before November 17 is out, “We want this legislation out of this committee because we think this legislation is right and we're not prepared to hear anybody talk about it after midnight tonight, that's it, done deal, we're done, we're out of here.”
“We've had an opportunity for this to be out there in the public”, they're saying, “and we're not prepared to consider it for another day.” That's what we're being told here: “We're bringing down the hammer.” It comes under nice little euphemisms like “time allocation”. They say, “We just want to organize the schedule so that the time is allocated and used properly.” Well, that's a euphemism for shoving it down the throats of Canadians, stifling consideration and debate, and stifling the public's ability to even understand the details of something.
This is complicated. I'm not saying it's simple; it's complicated. But if you have an opportunity.... This is the problem. People say, well, we had witnesses come, brought by the government. They were very sincere witnesses and I'm glad we had to hear from them, but they said things like, “We support some aspects of this bill.” They didn't say, “We support every single piece of it.”
Also, frankly, I don't expect someone who comes forward as a victim of crime, whose child has been murdered, to come here and do a legal analysis of a 100-page piece of legislation. That's not their job. They come here to say, “I'm a victim of crime and I'm concerned that we don't take crime seriously enough in Canada and I support stronger sentences.” That's a legitimate matter that our committee has to consider.
But when they say they support “some aspects” of this legislation, that's not a carte blanche; that's not a statement saying that they've had victims who want this legislation passed. Well, we understand what that means; it doesn't mean that someone who comes forward with a point of view, who is concerned about victims' rights and has legitimate complaints about the remedies for victims, the support for victims, and who says the treatment of victims in the criminal process is inadequate...we understand that, and there need to be improvements made in that.
This bill doesn't make those improvements, frankly. This only deals with one aspect of it, which is, in some cases, the tougher sentences and access to parole hearings. I think we support a lot of that.
But because a witness has said they support some aspects of the bill, that doesn't mean they're saying “pass this today”. It doesn't mean they're saying not to consider the other aspects that you have expert witnesses on. It doesn't mean they're saying not to consider the aspect of someone saying in the case of Quebec that their 30 years of experience and work in the youth criminal justice field teaches them the following as to what works and what doesn't, or not to consider the aspect of what they know in their experience that is going to make our streets safer, reduce crime, and prevent young people who may run afoul of the law in their early years from becoming criminals. It doesn't mean they're saying not to consider the aspect of someone saying, “Here's the benefit of our knowledge, our experience, and our jurisdiction, and we want to offer that to you.”
The people who came here as victims didn't say, “We don't want you to consider that.” They didn't say, “We don't want you to look at the details of this legislation. We don't want you to consider what really works to prevent crime.” They didn't say that at all. I didn't hear one of them say that.
They came here in all sincerity with a great deal of personal angst and emotion to tell us they believed some improvements needed to be made in the criminal justice system. They like the idea of being more engaged in the parole process and of having greater knowledge of where offenders are in the system and when they are getting out and where they're going to be and all of that, and of participating in parole hearings and not being abused by some--which has happened in some cases where people scheduled parole hearings and then cancelled them, and that sort of thing. We listened to all of that. And their feelings and views will be reflected in the discussion that will take place on that particular aspect of the bill.
I think they're entitled to watch these hearings and to see to what extent members of this committee were listening to their concerns. They're also entitled to recognize that this committee is considering other aspects of the bill, other matters about which there may be disagreements among members of this committee but which in the view of some will lead to a safer community for them, a safer feeling in their home and less worry about the proliferation of criminal activity.
You know, people need to help. Part of this process is helping people to understand that there is no black and white. There's a mantra going about that the government wants to be tough on crime and the opposition doesn't, that somehow or other there's only one group of people who want safe communities and who want less crime and that the opposition, what, wants more crime? Does anybody actually believe that? Yet that's what we hear. If you take it at face value, that's what we hear.
The exact opposite is true. As Mr. Cotler just said, it's the constitutional responsibility of the Government of Canada to engage in policies and practices that make our streets safer. There can be honest disagreements about that. There can be honest disagreements about that without one side being vilified as coddling criminals or advocating for criminals. But that's what we hear.
The Canadian public deserves to hear this debate, deserves to hear clause-by-clause consideration, deserves to hear the arguments as to why some of the provisions of this bill, which impose particular types of punishments or sentences, treat young offenders in a particular way. The public deserves to hear why there are arguments that say this is going to lead to more criminality; this is going to lead to more dangerous people; this is going to lead to less rehabilitation; this is going to lead to less safety.
They deserve to hear that the money that's going to be spent on corrections and on incarcerating people in this manner could have been spent on preventing more crime and on saving the lives and futures of young people, for example, who might otherwise end up incarcerated for long periods of time, or who might fall victim to circumstances due to conditions in prison, or to mental health problems, or to the whole gamut of conditions that led to the loss of life for Ashley Smith, for example, who went to jail at age 14 for throwing crab apples at a postal worker and never got out. She died at 19 in prison. She never got out.
Is that a regime that we think doesn't need improvement? Is that a regime that we think is a model? And should we incarcerate more young people? We're hearing reports all the time about the number of people in prison, whether young people or others, whose major problem is a mental illness. That's their problem. That's why they're in prison. That's why they can't cope with society. That's why they run afoul of the law. And they don't have adequate treatment either inside or outside of prison or a correctional institution. These are some of the problems that underlie the issues we're talking about here.
We need a more health-based response to the mentally ill in place of incarceration. It's one thing to say that someone is fit to stand trial, but it's quite another thing to say that they're mentally whole, that they don't have mental health problems that ought to be dealt with that aren't being dealt with. We have a long way to go to make our communities safer, on the one hand, but also to make it safer for people who are mentally ill, by giving them the right treatment options and the right services and the right response to their needs, whether they start off as young people with mental illness or are people in later stages of life. These are all of the things that we actually need to deal with if we're going to properly consider this legislation and we're going to have a proper debate.
We're going to have an opportunity for the public to see that this debate is meaningful, that it's not just some process where the one side wants justice and the other side wants injustice or something different. There is a legitimate debate about how best to achieve a safer community. How do we do it? Do we do it by locking up more people? Well, that's one way. One of the answers you hear from members of the government is that at least those particular individuals won't be able to commit a crime outside if they're inside. Well, that's true. How long are they going to be inside? When they get out, are they going to be more or less likely to reoffend?
What have we seen in the experience of other countries, in other jurisdictions? Our neighbour to the south, who we look up to in some respects, has a dismal record of enhancing safety by locking people up. That's not what happened in the United States. It's been said many times that if locking people up led to a safer society, the United States would be the most crime-free and safest society in the world. In fact, the murder rate in the United States is through the roof. Even the most right wing of Republicans and states in the United States who believed in this philosophy for a long time are now seeing that it doesn't work. All they've done is managed to impoverish their treasuries to the point where in a number of states--and I saw a list of them the other day--there's more spent on incarceration in prisons than there is on education. Imagine, you have a state in the United States that spends more on locking people up than it does on educating its children and young people.
They're saying to themselves, what are we doing here? This is not working. This is not leading to safer communities. This is leading to bleeding the treasury, to preventing us from carrying out our responsibility to look after our citizens, and it's not giving them a chance to learn enough and to get enough education to participate in society. Instead, we're waiting for them to commit crimes so we can lock them up. Then we're spending all our money keeping them in prison.
That's the extreme. I'm not saying we're leaping immediately to that particular point of view. Let's be reasonable and honest here. It's time we had that debate, after what we've seen in the United States, in states like Texas and others. They say they have to change this approach and look at rehabilitation, for example, when it comes to drug offenders and not incarceration as a principal means of dealing with this.
We've got a situation where the United States of America, in many of its states, is looking at going the other way. We're talking here about replicating that failure, by going in a direction that many believe is wrong and that we believe is wrong. Rather than replicate the failure of that policy in the United States at a great, enormous, and unknown public expense, we might instead learn from that country's experience.
That's the purpose of these discussions here today and next Tuesday and Thursday. They are supposed to be open, regularly scheduled discussions that the public can participate in—by viewing, by sending e-mails if they wish, and by responding to what people are saying—and play a role in a participatory democracy that we talk about from time to time. That's why we have regular meetings; that's why we don't jam everything into one day.
We should be here this morning.... By now, we probably would have been halfway through this legislation. But no, no, the government wants to change the channel: “Let's change the channel here. Let's not talk about this legislation. Let's talk about how we ram legislation through and say, 'Well, we're only going to allow this to be considered for one day', and anything that has to be said, or could be said, about the 200 clauses in the bill”—I think there are 200.