Thank you, Chair.
Thank you, Minister, for being here with your officials.
I have two quick things I want to get on the record before I get to my question.
The first is that I appreciate your use of the word “pardon”, and I wish that your appreciation of the word had led to actually putting it back to “pardon” in the law, as opposed to “record suspension”, which is something we discussed when the committee did that study. But we are in the eleventh hour of this Parliament, so unfortunately I'm not going to hold my breath for that.
The other thing is about the John Howard Society. You quoted Catherine Latimer's testimony from the study we did on the pardon issue. I want to say that on this particular issue.... You're obviously familiar with my colleague Murray Rankin's bill, which favours expungement. The John Howard Society did say, in a Twitter exchange on the said bill when it was being debated, “Agreed. Time to expunge criminal records for cannabis possession-not criminal: end punishment.”
I didn't want to mis-characterize what the John Howard Society thought on this particular issue, given that we're kind of mixing the study this committee did on record suspension with this issue.
I want to go back.... The whole debate between your position in Bill C-93 and what our party is calling for in expungement is couched in the notion of historical injustice. There's no actual precedent for that. There's no legal obligation. This seem to just be something that the government has used rhetorically. When I asked the Prime Minister about it in the House after legalization occurred, I raised, among other things, that in Regina indigenous people were almost nine times more likely to be arrested for cannabis possession. In Halifax, black people were five times more likely to be arrested for cannabis possession. In Toronto, black people with no other criminal convictions were three times more likely to be arrested for cannabis possession.
Just before I get to my question and hear your answer, Minister, I want to quote Kent Roach, who of course you know very well, who says, “The history of miscarriages of justices in this country should not be equated with laws that would now violate the Charter. The Charter is the minimum not the maximum in terms of our sense of justice.”
Are you saying, unlike what Mr. Roach is saying, that your government doesn't believe that that horrendous overrepresentation of indigenous and black Canadians, among others, of course, from minorities, is not an injustice?