Thank you so much for inviting me to speak today.
In addition to being an assistant professor who writes about the bail system in Canada, I'm also a criminal defence lawyer. I worked as duty counsel in the criminal courts in downtown Toronto for a number of years.
If restrictive bail measures, pretrial custody, prisons and policing were capable of ameliorating crime, we would live in a crime-free society. The reality is that all of these things create criminality rather than alleviate it.
We have 40 years of data, reports and jurisprudence indicating that Black and indigenous people in this country disproportionately bear the brunt of harsh and punitive criminal laws, including bail laws. Making bail laws more restrictive will work to further entrench systemic racism in the bail system and will cause more harm and further exacerbate the pretrial mass incarceration crisis that we are currently experiencing in Canada.
Pretrial custody itself causes harm and violence. In fact, it is so dangerous that it is literally a matter of life or death. Since 2010, 280 people have died in pretrial custody. Imagine what our bail laws might look like if each and every time one of those people died, Parliament convened a committee to discuss bail reform.
There were 711 deaths that involved police use of force between 2000 and 2022, which is more than 30 deaths per year on average. We have to ask ourselves why this committee is considering bail reform now. Whose lives matter and what are our priorities?
The approximate cost of keeping people in provincial and territorial jails is $259 per day, per inmate. That's approximately $94,000 per year, while the amount provided to an Ontario disability support program recipient is just over $1,000 per month or approximately $13,000 per year. Again, what are our priorities and whose lives matter? Victims of crime should be outraged that we invest so heavily in prisons and restrictive bail laws that do nothing to alleviate crime or violence, but rather cause it.
Restrictive bail laws will equal more prisons and more investment in prisons and policing. Indigenous, Black and racialized people, people with mental health issues and people who live with substance abuse issues will be disproportionately impacted by any such changes to the bail laws.
We know this, as my colleague Professor Jones has already explained it to this committee. In fact, the way he was treated when he did so was emblematic of the way the bail system itself operates. It treats indigenous and Black people as presumptively suspect, untrustworthy and not credible.
I implore you to base any decision you might make on the wealth of reports, data and jurisprudence we have that indicate that restrictive bail laws cause harm. The Manitoba justice inquiry, the Commission on Systemic Racism in the Ontario Criminal Justice System, the CCLA report, John Howard Society reports, the Ouimet report, the Wyant report and the “Broken Bail” report, which were conducted by experts in their fields and based on research, all indicate that restrictive bail causes harm.
We have swaths of evidence about racism in the criminal legal system, including the bail system. Black, racialized and indigenous people are subjected to racial profiling, are overcharged and are more likely than their white counterparts to be denied bail and be subjected to onerous conditions of release. Any bail reform that aims to make bail laws more restrictive will further entrench the existing racism. We know this.
There are changes to the bail system that could be made that will alleviate violence, as Mr. Bytensky indicated. Investing in affordable and adequate housing, investing in health care, investing in the creation of livable wages, increasing social benefits—investments in social infrastructure will make us safer.
Of the people who are currently in prison on remand, 70.5% have not been convicted of any crime. In law, they are entitled to the presumption of innocence. In many ways, I find it an affront to the constitutionally enshrined right to the presumption of innocence that this parliamentary committee is considering bail reform in response to a horrible tragedy but one where there has been no trial, no conviction and no understanding of the circumstances that led to the tragic death of Constable Pierzchala.
The fact that we're here today speaks volumes about the problems that plague the bail system.
Thank you. I will end there.