Thank you very much, Angelo.
These are perhaps the greatest challenges facing government. I think one of the things the pandemic has revealed to us, along with some very difficult situations that we have faced in Canada and right across North America as well, is the existence of significant systemic and structural disparity in the outcomes for indigenous people, poor people and racialized people in our criminal justice system.
It's one of the reasons that in the throne speech, we made it very clear that we will introduce legislation and make investments. Both of them are very important in taking action to address the systemic inequities in all phases of the criminal justice system.
I think it's important to recognize.... People often focus on one element of it, but what we have seen is that there are structural and systemic issues within the broader criminal justice system, from diversion to sentencing, rehabilitation to records, that are having an outcome for Canadians who are indigenous or from racialized communities.
Let me just give you some examples of the things that I believe are necessary for us to reform. You mentioned criminal records. We know that when people apply for a pardon for their criminal record, almost 75% of them have never spent a day in jail, but they have that criminal record. Although they may have received a conditional sentence and not been sentenced to any period of incarceration, 30 and 40 years later, that criminal record is having an impact on the quality of their life and their ability to succeed as Canadians. We are looking at ways in which we will make “record suspension”, as it's now called, or “pardons” as it's more commonly referred to, more accessible. Part of that is the impediment of cost.
Another issue for a lot of people is the bureaucratic thing of having to make application, significant background checks. For many people, I think it is fair to say that the pardon regime, or record suspension regime, that has been in place in Canada has made it inaccessible, particularly to people in lower-income margins, racialized communities and indigenous people. We are looking at significant reform to make those pardons more accessible. There are a number of very important ways, I think, that we can do that.
We are also looking at issues of sentencing. I think it's an undeniable fact that in our prison system, there is a very significant and unacceptable—disproportionate—number of indigenous men and women and racialized people, particularly young black men. It's grossly out of proportion. I believe there are issues within the criminal justice system that we need to look at systemically. We're dealing with things like training and reform for all of the justice participants, to make sure that there's anti-racism training and that they understand the influence that bias can have on them.
There are some systemic and structural changes that we need to make as well. We will do all of those things.