Madam Speaker, I am delighted to take part in the debate today. I would like to commend the hon. member for Crowfoot on his comments. I did not know until he spoke just now that he was formerly a member of a law enforcement agency. I would like to say that in my years as a practitioner of law, both as a defence counsel and as a prosecutor, I worked extensively with members of various police departments; municipal police in Halifax and Dartmouth and the RCMP, and I have great respect and admiration for them in what is a very tough job. I know that the hon. member has obviously worked in that area and knows what a tough job it is.
I want to make perfectly clear that I am not specifically referring to the member for Crowfoot here, I am referring to the resolution itself but when we debate these matters we tend to forget the basis on which our law is built and the fact that the system which we live under and the system that governs us is, at best, faulty. But it appears to be in the evolution of both politics and law enforcement the best thing we have come up with thus far.
I look at the words of the resolution: "That this House condemn the government for its inaction with regard to the reform of the criminal justice system, in particular its allowance of the rights of criminals to supersede those of the victim".
I guess I have to say that the resolution is almost charming in its naivety. I am not going to get into the question that the government has been in power a scant four months and that there are many things that have to be done within the legislative calendar to ensure that the government runs as it should and that the government fulfils its promises, which it has done to date and will continue to do. I want to talk about the phrase "the allowance of the rights of criminals to supersede those of the victim". As always I like to declare my prejudices early in any debate.
As those on this side of the House know, I represent the city of Halifax in the province of Nova Scotia. There is a name that will ring down the annals of criminal justice in Nova Scotia for many years to come, and that is the name of Donald Marshall Jr. I do not know whether my hon. colleagues on the other side of the House are aware of the Marshall case-they certainly should be-but I can tell them that for a period in the province of Nova Scotia, finishing in 1989-90, this case was a preoccupation of a great percentage of the legal profession, both prosecutors, defence counsel, the judiciary. There was a special royal commission to look into what had happened.
Donald Marshall was a young man who served 11 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. Some terrible things were uncovered in the Marshall inquiry in the way criminal justice worked, or conversely did not work, in the province of Nova Scotia.
We have talked a lot in the House lately about questions of racism and bigotry. There is no question that one of the reasons Donald Marshall served 11 years for a crime he did not commit was racism. One of the reasons was bigotry. There were police officers who suborned perjury, there were dreadful miscarriages of justice, a complete lack of accommodation for cultural and lifestyle differences in the fact that even the ability to communicate on the part of the accused was ignored and so on. Evidence was suppressed. It is a black mark on the escutcheon of the province of Nova Scotia.
The Marshall inquiry report is 26 volumes. I know I have a copy in my office and I have read major parts of it, but in the life of a member of Parliament it would be hard to read the entire thing. But it is something that most practitioners of criminal law in Nova Scotia have availed themselves of and have read.
Over and over again what rings through your mind when you read the reports of the Marshall inquiry, when you read the reports of what happened to Junior Marshall, the words "innocent until proven guilty", "the rule of law", "due process" come back again and again.
I want to make another thing perfectly clear. In my years in the courts and practising law, particularly in my years as an advocate for women's rights and for the protection of women who are abused and battered and of children who are abused and
battered, I probably spent more time enraged at the lack of protection that our system has for victims of crime than anything else.
This country is littered, as unfortunately are other countries of the west, with the detritus of violence against women and children. Nonetheless we have to look to the whole picture to solve the problem and not merely zero in on one side and what I think, with the greatest of respect to the framers of this motion, what is ostensibly an inadequate response.
We have talked here about lowering the age of young offenders and with the greatest respect I do not think that is the answer. I can tell you as someone who has thought long and hard about this, someone who has served on committees dealing with criminal legislation in this House over the past five years, the situation that I think we must all remember is those two little boys in England who murdered the baby. This a situation that must come to the fore when we are talking about this very thing today.
I was discussing this in the lobby just a minute ago with one of the minister's staff. On the one hand we both agreed that we are horrified at the actions of those two boys, 10 years old when they killed the baby, to even go back and think of the testimony that came forward at that trial of that two-year old who kept getting up when he was hit again and again.
I am equally horrified that two 10-year old boys are found by the courts in English justice to be bad seeds, if you will. I think it very strange and very unlikely, too much of a coincidence, that two innately evil creatures would end up living next door to each other. There has to be more to it than that.
I use that example to illustrate the fact that merely increasing sentences, merely incarcerating for longer periods of time, merely going at the punishment angle is not going to give us the answer.
What we have to do is look at the causes. There are a variety of causes. I know that my colleague from Crowfoot and my colleague from Calgary who is also a former police officer would agree that other things come into the formation of criminal activity, that poverty is a part of it, that lack of education is a part of it, that poor nutrition is a part of it, that lack of education is a part of it, that the cycle of violence within the home is a part of it and on and on and on.
Criminals are made. They are very rarely born.
The whole question of how we deal with victims and how we deal with criminals should not be connected in this death battle if you will that is one before the other. The rights of victims must be respected. They must be listened to. There must be services for victims unquestionably.
The fact that we have not addressed this as a nation and as a society is, I agree entirely with the mover of the motion, something that we have to deal with and we have to deal with soon.
It is not an either-or situation. It is not going to improve the lot of the families for example of the McDonald's victims in Sydney River, Cape Breton, if you extend the sentences for the murderers, now convicted. Revenge is not what the framers of the criminal law should deal in. What we deal with in legislating the criminal law has to be deterrence and protection of society. Those are the reasons that we legislate in criminal law.
If we look at it as redress, how do we redress the families of the McDonald's victims? How do we redress those families? We cannot restore the lives of the victims. We cannot restore shattered families in the emotional sense. No money could possibly come along to fill that terrible void at the loss of young people. No money can do anything to restore the fact that the McNeil girl has major and serious brain damage and that however long she lives, she will never be the bright articulate young woman she was when she went to work in that McDonald's restaurant last May. Nothing can change that. It should not be connected.
Yes, we prove the crime and we have the appropriate response to the crime and we deal with the victims, but we are dealing in a separate theatre. We are dealing in a separate area.
When we talk about the rights of victims vis-à-vis the rights of criminals, I go back again to the Donald Marshall case. To hon. members across the way who I feel think that we on this side are somehow lax on the criminal law, I say to each one of them to remember the adage that those of us who suffered through law school will all remember, that it is a truism in legal education that it is better for a thousand guilty to go free than for one innocent to be convicted.
I wonder whether those on the other side would agree with that or not. I see that my friend from Calgary does not agree. It is an interesting point that that phrase has hung around for a very long time. I wonder if each of those members on the other side would look at that question and if it was not objective, if it were subjective-in other words, if you were the innocent victim-does that phrase become more valid? If it were your child who was the innocent victim, does that phrase become more valid? If it was your neighbour's child-all politics is local, all issues are local-think of it within the context of your own group, your own circle, and whether that makes it more relevant.
It has been talked about here today that we should lower the age of young offenders. I do not have children. I borrow my friend's because I can give them back. I know that most of you on the other side are parents and you do have children and you
know that children get into difficulties. They make mistakes. Is the answer to deal harshly?