Mr. Speaker, the hon. member from the Reform Party has made a proposal concerning the safety of the Canadian public.
We as the legislative body of this great nation must take a lead role in ensuring that our citizens live in safe communities. That responsibility extends even with greater seriousness to those who are simultaneously most vulnerable and most vital, those who carry our future in their hands, our children.
Let me take a moment to tell of some of the things we in Parliament have done to date to try to give both immediate and long term protection to our citizens from people who have shown little regard for the welfare of others.
In Canada's early history, clemency was unconditional and only granted through the royal prerogative. In 1899 Parliament passed the ticket of leave act which established conditional release and a system of supervised freedom. The Governor General could grant conditional release to anyone as a method to bridge the gap between the controls and restraints of institutional life and the freedoms and responsibilities of community life, as one historian has noted. The Department of Justice provided supervision and eventually established the remission branch in 1913.
In 1938 the Archambault commission recommended that rehabilitation become the purpose of incarceration. The Fauteux report recommended the creation of the National Parole Board which came into existence with the passage of the Parole Act in 1959.
It is important to note that in 1969, 31 years after the Archambault report, the Ouimet report reaffirmed that rehabilitation was the major purpose of conditional release. More recent developments suggest that the protection of the public is the primary goal of conditional release.
In 1978 Parliament amended the Penitentiary Act to permit offenders to earn time off for good behaviour. Good conduct in a penitentiary, it was hoped, was some indication that an offender had changed the type of behaviour that led to incarceration in the first place. In 1978 this period of remission when offenders were in the community was called mandatory supervision.
By 1981, the Law Reform Commission expressed concern about the small group of offenders who constituted an imminent danger to public safety but had to be released under the provisions of that law.
In 1982 the National Parole Board began suspending the release of a small number of offenders who it believed presented a danger to public safety.
The Supreme Court of Canada struck down this practice in 1983, saying that the board could only suspend in reaction to an offender's behaviour on release, not in anticipation of problematic behaviour.
In 1986 Bill C-67 amended the Parole Act to permit the National Parole Board, after a referral from Correctional Service Canada, to detain in custody until the end of their sentence those offenders it deemed likely to commit an offence causing serious harm before the expiration of their sentence. The legislation introduced a schedule of offences which were considered to have caused serious harm and required CSC to review the cases of all offenders convicted of one of these scheduled offences to determine whether they should be referred to the board for a detention hearing.
On November 1, 1992 the Corrections and Conditional Release Act replaced both the Parole Act and the Penitentiary Act. This new act, known as the CCRA, eliminated the previous system of earned remission and provided that statutory release take effect at the two-thirds point of the sentence for offenders who had not been granted parole earlier. In addition, it included and amended the provisions for detention that had been added to the Parole Act through Bill C-67.
The CCRA expanded the schedule of offences to include a greater number of specific sexual offences. As well, the CCRA calls for notifying victims upon their request of when detention and other hearings are to take place and permits them to observe such hearings.
Other measures in the CCRA include requiring an annual review of offenders ordered to either remain in prison or to reside in community facilities and one chance provision for statutory release which means that certain offenders felt to represent a certain level of risk but probably manageable in a residential facility are given this one chance to prove themselves.
Any breach of condition or increase in risk requires that they return to prison until the end of the sentence with no further opportunities to complete the sentence in the community.
These steps have all been designed to give immediate, short term protection to society by removing dangerous offenders from the streets and, more important, to give long term protection by effecting change in the behaviour of offenders so that they will never commit another crime. The bottom line, however, remains the same. We must do more to protect our children.
We said in the red book that we share Canadians' concerns that more must be done to better protect society from repeat sex offenders. These measures are part of ongoing reforms to improve our handling and management of these offenders in federal correctional systems, especially those who victimize our children.
We are all outraged by crimes perpetrated against our children. We are angry and we demand measures that will protect them.
At present, the CCRA permits the National Parole Board to detain sex offenders and certain other high risk offenders until the end of their sentence if they cause serious harm and if they are likely to commit an offence causing death or serious harm if released.
What about when the victim is a child, a person who cannot articulate the problem or even realize that there is a problem until many years later? We now know that when the victim is a child, the serious harm caused by a particular offence may not become evident for a number of years.
In addition, the victim may be too young to communicate adequately the trauma inflicted by the offence. We must protect and support our vulnerable children. It has been difficult for the National Parole Board and CSC to determine that a child was seriously harmed using the legal meaning of the term serious harm.
Without this determination, the National Parole Board could not legally detain the offender until the end of the sentence. The Solicitor General has already introduced amendments that make it easier for the National Parole Board to keep sex offenders who victimize children in a penitentiary until the end of their sentence.
This amendment removes the requirement to establish serious harm as a criterion for detention in these cases. This gives the board the authority to detain a sex offender if a further sex offence against a child is likely. I would like to add that the government has proposed to expand the list of offences for which an offender could be referred for detention until the end of the sentence.
This list includes criminal harassment, commonly known as stalking, conspiracy to commit serious drug offences and serious drinking and driving and criminal negligence offences which result in bodily harm or death.
These behaviours also put our citizens at risk, including our children. We all have a responsibility to protect our most vulnerable citizens, our children, from predators like paedophiles.
The National Parole Board must now detain offenders who it feels may cause death or serious harm before the end of their sentence. With the proposed amendments, if the victims are children, the board will not have to determine serious harm. It is assumed. This means that whenever the board finds that an offender might reoffend against a child, it must detain that offender.
The hon. member from the Reform Party oversteps the bounds of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. No administrative tribunal such as the National Parole Board would be granted such broad powers of post-sentence detention without due process nor would the courts countenance this.
No government would put into place a system it knows would be struck down by the courts, a system that is presently being proposed by the hon. member from the Reform Party who is promoting this private members' bill.
This government is certainly committed to strengthening Canada's criminal justice system to protect the public and most especially our children from dangerous offenders. Our government has acted in an increasing number of ways to bring about public safety, whether it be revisions to the Young Offenders' Act, whether it be much tougher action against criminals who utilize guns during the commission of a criminal offence and other progressive change which will greater ensure the protection of all our citizens.