Just on the issue of transferring prisoners, I note the comments of the opposition in the House, saying how lenient the American system has become; that everyone now has done away with mandatory minimums in the United States and that it has become a virtual panacea to become a prisoner in the United States. This is always a surprise to me, given that every Canadian in an American prison wants to come home to a Canadian prison, and the reasons for that are very obvious.
It's unfortunate that the opposition continues to mislead Canadians about how the sentencing laws and the lack of parole, for example, in the United States, or the mandatories that they serve, the sentencing guidelines—all of those kinds of things.... We have a system that has been consistently focused on the interests of the criminal as opposed to those of the victims. What this law does in fact is create a number of criteria.
The first criterion is that of public safety: is the transfer of that individual from the United States back to Canada in the interest of public safety? As the minister, that is what I need to consider.
I have to say that the federal courts have given the Minister of Public Safety wide discretion in making that determination. A number of cases have been delivered by the Federal Court in the last while. In some, they have asked the minister to reconsider. I have reconsidered those, and ultimately the courts have upheld the decision I've made in those cases on a reconsideration.
What this in fact does is give legal definition to the types of criteria we have been applying. In terms of the rule of law, these criteria are very important both from an offender's point of view and from a decision maker's point of view. One of the things I like to stress is that if you want to cooperate with law enforcement officials, this will be a clearly recognized criterion that you can point to, saying “Look, I identified who the ring leaders in this drug crime are”, or who the ring leaders are in this child pornography crime, “and I have demonstrated my willingness to be rehabilitated.”
A Canadian incarcerated in a foreign prison shouldn't just be able to say “I demand to come back, and I'm not cooperating with law enforcement officials, and it's none of your business whether or not I'm considering being rehabilitated.”
This gives clear definition. It corresponds to the rule of law, which I think is very important.
