Evidence of meeting #37 for Public Safety and National Security in the 41st Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was restitution.
A recording is available from Parliament.
President, International Organization for Victim Assistance
I forget exactly how the Criminal Code and the Youth Criminal Justice Act are worded. Is it required? It's easy for them not to order it.
President, International Organization for Victim Assistance
I don't have in front of me the actual wording. But we also don't know how often it is not ordered. We don't collect those sorts of statistics.
Liberal
Francis Scarpaleggia Liberal Lac-Saint-Louis, QC
That's interesting.
If you were in a position to order that two things be done to resolve the problem of insufficient restitution—say you were the Minister of Justice for a day, or whatever—what two things would you say we have to do right away?
President, International Organization for Victim Assistance
I would say that you need to modify the Criminal Code along the lines of the best jurisdiction in the United States, which is probably the Justice for All Act.
The second thing, which I'll limit to the federal role, is to change the RCMP Act to make sure that every victim who reports to the RCMP in Canada is given the basic information according to the standard set not by me but by the International Association of Chiefs of Police, of which most of police leaders in Canada are members.
President, International Organization for Victim Assistance
I'm going to give you a third thing.
I would bring the provinces together. I would tell them that these are joint areas and that you, federally, are going to do your job in the Criminal Code and the Youth Criminal Justice Act and are going to change the RCMP Act but that the most important way for victims to get restitution is for the provinces to start doing things differently. One of those would be to bring the criminal and civil jurisdictions together, as they did for family issues about ten years ago.
Liberal
Francis Scarpaleggia Liberal Lac-Saint-Louis, QC
You say that Alberta does a victimization survey every year.
President, International Organization for Victim Assistance
It may be every two years, but it is done regularly
Liberal
Francis Scarpaleggia Liberal Lac-Saint-Louis, QC
It's often. And the federal government does it every....
President, International Organization for Victim Assistance
It is every five years.
Liberal
Francis Scarpaleggia Liberal Lac-Saint-Louis, QC
It is done every five years. What about other countries?
President, International Organization for Victim Assistance
It is done every year.
President, International Organization for Victim Assistance
And they're much more sophisticated than ours.
President, International Organization for Victim Assistance
The national crime victimization survey in the U.S. started in 1972, so you have a very long period. The British crime survey started being done every year in the late 1980s. The British release their crime survey and their police data together. This avoids a huge amount of confusion among the media. Our media are not doing their homework well on this issue.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kevin Sorenson
We have another minute. It actually goes back to the NDP.
Maybe we'll just leave it at that.
We want to thank you, Dr. Waller, for appearing today. Certainly, as I mentioned before, your expertise is very much appreciated. Your testimony has been listened to, and we look forward to going back over some of the things you've done. I've written down a couple of points to look up, or have my researcher look up. One is the Justice for All Act in the States. A second would be potential changes to the RCMP Act, which you believe might work towards the enhancement of victims' rights.
Thank you for your work. You might want to put in a little plug here for your book. I don't know if it's available at all good bookstores around Canada. I know that in my little drugstore, in my small town, I haven't seen it, but maybe there is a way we can find it.
Thank you for coming.
We'll suspend for a moment and prepare for our next witness.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kevin Sorenson
On our second panel this afternoon, we are hearing testimony, hopefully, from Stephen Fineberg, the vice-president of the Canadian Prison Law Association. Mr. Fineberg has been held up momentarily. We're hoping that he will arrive soon.
I'll give you a little bit of information on Mr. Fineberg. He's from the Canadian Prison Law Association, an organization of lawyers who work on behalf of prisoners and who seek to protect and promote the constitutional rights, interests, and privileges of prisoners by advocating on their behalf.
As well we have, no stranger to our committee, Ms. Pate. Kim Pate is the executive director of the Elizabeth Fry Society of Canada. She has taken time out to come before our committee on a number of issues dealing with prisoners and prisons and prisoners' rights and many different issues.
We welcome you back. If it is all right, we will begin with your testimony, and hopefully Mr. Fineberg will make his way through security and will get here.
Welcome.
Kim Pate Executive Director, Elizabeth Fry Society of Canada
Great.
Thank you very much, and thank you for inviting us to appear.
I guess I don't need to introduce our organization, because we have been here before. In case there are any new people, our organization works with those who are marginalized, victimized, criminalized, and institutionalized, particular imprisoned women and girls.
I want to take the opportunity very quickly to say that next week is National Elizabeth Fry Week, which is a week in which we try to draw attention to the number of women who are in prison. We end it on Mother's Day to draw attention to the number of those who are in prison and the impact that imprisonment has not just upon them but upon their children. As many of you are aware, in the case of 90% of the women who go to prison who have children, their children end up in the care of the state, compared with 10% in the case of men. So it's a very different situation for women, and it ends in our having to deal with the victimization of their children as well.
With no further ado, I'll get to Bill C-350.
I want to start by saying that in principle of course our organization supports compensation, restitution, child support, and ensuring that all individuals are held accountable and take responsibility for their financial and fiscal obligations.
I find it challenging, though, when looking at Bill C-350, to take into account that we're talking about situations in which people may receive compensation because of their victimization--essentially, situations in which victims are being compensated and then being required to use their compensation moneys to assist others.
I know that this situation already exists. For instance, we know that in the majority of cases of those who receive compensation, it is because there has been an acknowledgment by the corrections service, in the context of receiving it from corrections or the state, that they have been victimized, that their rights have been violated, and often that they've been abused. To have that resource treated as an income rather than the compensation it is and to have them recharacterized other than as the victims they are in those contexts, somehow still carrying on with a perpetration or adding to the punitive treatment they receive, is a concern for us.
We know that despite some of the testimony I was able to review, very few prisoners get lawyers to do this. There is not legal aid, and there are very few individuals who can afford to get counsel to assist them with this. Usually the cases in which there is a resolution of this sort and there is a compensation scheme are those in which there is a particularly egregious breach of human rights and charter provisions. It's usually a settlement negotiation, because the individuals don't tend to have counsel. When it is a settlement, one of the conditions is a non-disclosure clause. A challenge would be to go behind those non-disclosure clauses, whether with the corrections service—and obviously corrections would know, because they are imposing that non-disclosure clause....
I read with interest the testimony of Mr. Taller and his colleague from the Department of Justice. It would in fact breach a prisoner's privacy if they first required a non-disclosure provision and then breached it by notifying others or imposing....
Those are questions the committee would have to look at.
I already know, given that in some instances women will ask—and as you know, for the last 21 years now my focus has been on women, although prior to that I worked with men and young people.... In the last 20 years, and in my experience with men as well, often when those non-disclosure clauses are signed there is an expectation that they will have some assistance in what they can do with their money or how they can invest it. Sometimes I have been asked to consult on those. In my experience, any income that women have used has either gone to assist their children, for counselling, or some of them have used it to take courses to essentially allow them to participate in their own rehabilitation, because education is not covered. Education has not been covered in this country beyond grade 10, sometimes grade 12 and GED-equivalency, since 1992.
The other concern I have and that I haven't seen addressed—and it may be that I missed it, so I would encourage anybody, if there is information about this, to bring it to my attention—is that there are some prisoners who have had extensive experiences in residential schools and have recently received some residential school compensation because of the apology that was provided by the government and the scheme that has been set up by the government to compensate those individuals who experienced physical, psychological, and/or sexual abuse in the residential schools.
I know it's already an issue we've had to raise with legal aid. In some areas, legal aid has tried to force individuals who have residential school claims to pay for their own legal counsel when they're trying to get assistance with matters. Clearly that is not what the residential school settlements were supposed to be for.
Again, there were individuals who have been using them to assist their children, and to assist themselves in their own rehabilitation to take counselling to deal with the trauma. We would have concerns about those resources being then tapped into, to fund other resources with the state.
We do support the development of better victim services, overall. Our concern, however, is that it should not be funded in this way by victims themselves. That's a position I would suspect most everybody here has taken as well.
So really the question becomes at what point are you ceasing to recognize individuals who are being compensated because of their victimization as victims, and what is the label imposed upon them because they are serving a sentence, forever tainting every other facet of their lives? We would have concerns about that.
I'm happy to answer any questions.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kevin Sorenson
Thank you, Ms. Pate.
We'll move to the first round. Ms. Hoeppner and Mr. Leef are going to split.
Conservative
Candice Bergen Conservative Portage—Lisgar, MB
Thanks, Mr. Chair.
I'm going to take a moment to ask Ms. Pate a couple of questions, and then my colleague will take over.
Just so I'm clear, and I appreciate that you stated at the outset that you support this bill in principle, and you support restitution.
Whether they're offenders or non-offenders, I would assume you believe it's important for all Canadian citizens to pay debts or pay monetary obligations they have.