Public Safety Committee on Nov. 1st, 2018

[Jim Eglinski]

I agree.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Thank you, Mr. Eglinski.

I'm a little confused as to who's on the left and who's on the right now.

[Wayne Long, Liberal, Saint John—Rothesay, NB]

We're all in the same circle here.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Mr. Spengemann, you have five minutes.

[Sven Spengemann, Liberal, Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON]

Mr. Chair, thank you, and through you I would like to thank Mr. Long for being here and for his leadership on this issue. I think he inspired all of us by saying that he's a voice for those who don't have a voice.

I want to take you to the point you just finished with, and point out, Mr. Chair, first of all that what we have today is not perfect but a very good gender balance on this committee and use that opportunity to ask you to drill down a bit more into the gender impact of what you're proposing not just quantitatively but qualitatively. The obvious scenario that's been raised already is the young mother who has to carry costs like the cost of diapers, which are disproportionate. There must be other dimensions to this from a gender perspective.

[Wayne Long, Liberal, Saint John—Rothesay, NB]

The stat that I always go back to is, again, 70% of female offenders are mothers with children under the age of 18.

We do a lot of work in our riding with different organizations that deal with women specifically, Elizabeth Fry, Coverdale and others. Young women...women are more severely impacted by this. There's no question about it, because there are so many barriers I find—we all know this—for women trying to move ahead. There's that ball and chain, if you will, of $631 when they are trying to move forward.

Brenda Murphy of the Saint John Women's Empowerment Network holds classes, work sessions and what have you with women who are trying to better themselves, who are trying to move forward, single mothers on the system, and you can go around the table as to how many women have that record and can't afford to remove it.

Again, without naming names, some of them say to me, “Wayne, I can't afford $631. I can't afford it. I'm going day to day now with social assistance,” or the Canada child benefit, or what have you.

To me, it's compelling. There is a gender impact for sure.

[Sven Spengemann, Liberal, Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON]

If I can draw a parallel, maybe it's the same as being locked out of the housing market because one can't afford the first and last months' rent. It's the same order of magnitude just about, that $631.

[Wayne Long, Liberal, Saint John—Rothesay, NB]

It is. I go back again to why? I'm not suggesting it was mean-spirited, but you look back at what happened and how. What was the purpose of quadrupling the rates? You see the stats—

[Sven Spengemann, Liberal, Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON]

Mr. Long, let me jump in there and, first of all, say that I support you in the conceptual gap that you're trying to close, which is really a challenge to our correctional system. Our correctional system releases people who are supposed to be ready to enter society and then we're locking them out of the workforce for a time between, whatever, five to 10 years.

That is the challenge you are addressing, and I commend you for it.

I did want to ask you about one aspect. Oftentimes people, to be able to re-enter the workforce successfully, have to do some volunteer work. They may not get hired immediately for remuneration. Some of that volunteer work may involve work with vulnerable populations, and oftentimes police forces have additional checks on those folks who work with the homeless or children.

Do you see any room for tiering, through that lens, in terms of the offences that you're looking at for which record suspension could be sought?

[Wayne Long, Liberal, Saint John—Rothesay, NB]

Absolutely.

I can give you examples of women I know who have that record who would love to give their time back to maybe the shelter they stayed in or the YWCA that supported them or the food kitchen that supplied them with their lunches for years. Yes, there should be....

Again, I'm being very transparent. My hope is that the committee rips the sheets off the bed in this and really looks at it to ask what we can do, how we can make this palatable and how we make sure we balance the costs of this with the benefits.

I'm extremely hopeful that the committee's going to come up with some innovative ideas and some good points.

[Sven Spengemann, Liberal, Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON]

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Thank you, Mr. Spengemann.

Mr. Eglinski, you have another five minutes.

[Jim Eglinski]

Thank you.

You were correct on your first statement. It was $50, out of recognition that everyone in society benefits when people are able to reintegrate into society. That was the idea behind the whole program when it first started at $50 and then consequently went up.

How do we deal with the other aspect of the problem that you haven't spoken about at all? I don't think anybody here in this room, especially me, thinks we should not help the vulnerable. That absolutely must be done. Then we have problems, like they need a criminal record check. A criminal record check now becomes the responsibility of multiple agencies across Canada, and most of the agencies—City of Vancouver, City of Edmonton, City of Kamloops—will charge. They don't give those out for free because it takes time to get them. You need court documents.

I can tell you that every time I've gone to the courthouse to get a copy of a document for someone, it costs money. The private individual has to pay because the province isn't going to give it away for free. They may need immigration records, which are going to cost you, and you may have to get fingerprinted to prove who you are. Again, almost every municipality I know in Canada that has a police contract, charges for the fingerprinting of people. I've argued that for many years because, if you're in minor hockey, all your coaches have to be fingerprinted and anybody related to the team has to be fingerprinted, and there's a cost.

We have a number of factors that come into play that you haven't brought up. I said earlier—and I wasn't trying to be sarcastic—that maybe the minor summary conviction offences should just disappear at five years, and everybody across there said no. But if you say no, then accept that you're going to have a cost for fingerprints. People are still going to have to get immigration records, and somebody's going to have to pay for it.

Someone is going to have to get court documents. Someone's going to have to go to multiple agencies to get the criminal record checks to help the people we want to help. They don't have the money to fill out the form anyway and spend the $600, so they're going to need assistance.

We need to be creative in our thought process. I wonder if you would comment on that, because there's a whole avenue beyond the $625.

[Wayne Long, Liberal, Saint John—Rothesay, NB]

It's a fair comment.

There are organizations, certainly in my riding, such as the John Howard Society, Elizabeth Fry, that are also there, that also have programs and apply for funding. It's not to say there couldn't be some hybrid, if you will, where the government eliminated, for the sake of argument, the $631, but other organizations, like John Howard and Elizabeth Fry, would also be there to help. It's not to say that couldn't happen also.

I would go back again and say to you that we can't be fixated always on the cost of doing something. What's this going to cost? There's a cost of not doing it. Sometimes I worry that good things don't get done just because of the cost. I would argue there's a cost of not doing things. My background is obviously not politics but sports and hockey. I can give you a hundred examples of things that you could always have argued. It would have cost too much to redo my dressing room, but there was a cost of not doing my dressing room, too.

I respect the fact that we need to be smart with our money. I respect the fact that costs should be looked at. I strongly argue here, and hopefully the committee can bring this out, that there's a cost of not doing it. I feel we have an obligation to those most vulnerable. This is a tax, to me, on our most vulnerable citizens.

I'm encouraged by the tone and from what I'm hearing. Obviously there are differences of opinion. There's always going to be differences of opinion. However, I really believe there's an opportunity for us to work together in a non-partisan way to do the right thing and to correct something that to me was wrongly done.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

I too am encouraged by the tone of the conversation.

Ms. Damoff would normally have five minutes. I just want to know the will of colleagues to see whether we can go past the one hour that's allotted. All we have is committee business. We don't have anything that's pushing us in terms of other witnesses.

Do you want to go past the 4:30 time and carry on this conversation?

[A voice]

[Inaudible—Editor]

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

I'm sure he'll shelve his commitments if necessary.

[Wayne Long, Liberal, Saint John—Rothesay, NB]

I can finish my introduction if you're going to give me some more time.

[Jim Eglinski]

Is my time up? I had one little poor question I wanted to ask.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

You're done.

Normally we would finish. I would give Ms. Damoff five minutes and Mr. Dubé three minutes. But I'm trying to find out whether the committee wants to go beyond that and carry on this conversation, which I agree with you has been fruitful, quite interesting and a welcome relief from the usual partisan nonsense.

Committee?

[Julie Dabrusin, Liberal, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

I would suggest the five and the three. That's going to be eight more minutes to close it out.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Are you fine with that? Okay.

Ms. Damoff.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

Thank you.

It's the first opportunity I've had to say I think sometimes there's a misunderstanding about what record suspensions, pardons, are. Those people have lived crime-free for the last five years. Just after five years to automatically say, “No, they're gone”, that wouldn't allow the opportunity to look and say, “Okay, but during that five years it started with shoplifting, and then it was something else.” Hence, the reason I did the....

[Jim Eglinski]

Well, yes.

Did you know that we have computers today? You can kick it right back in there if they get another offence. It's simply done.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

I do think there's a bit of a misunderstanding sometimes about what exactly record suspensions are. If someone has applied and they commit another crime, what happens with them, Wayne? I believe they're revoked. If you have a record suspension for shoplifting or for theft, whatever it might be, and then you commit another crime, it's going to be revoked. This is really looking at people who are going to live crime-free. Then if they don't, they're penalized.