moved that Bill C-242, an act to amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act, the Criminal Code and the Young Offenders Act (improvement to public safety), be read the second time and referred to a committee.
Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to have this private member's bill reach the floor of the House of Commons. As members know it is not an item of Private Members' Business which will be voted on. We all know and believe, because we have to, that our Private Members' Business arrangements sometimes shine a light, point the way and give direction in the field of statutory and policy reform. If it does not happen here it is not going to happen anywhere.
My bill-perhaps I should not call it my bill because a lot of people, events and persons contributed to the bill-reflects six or seven years of experience in this House as a member of Parliament, regionally and nationally and more particularly the seven years I spent on the House of Commons justice committee. Some of the things in the bill actually evolve directly from that experience on the justice committee.
To be sure there continues to be flaws in Canada's criminal justice system. We all recognize that. The challenge is to find solutions and make corrections.
I am not one of those who would say that the whole system is in disrepute. I have a great deal of respect for the Canadian criminal justice system, notwithstanding some of the flaws that it has. Let us be honest, there is not a criminal justice system in the world which will not over time develop flaws and show need for change.
In the past year and half the government that I sit with proudly has made a number of changes in the criminal justice area. I will mention the Young Offenders Act, the Corrections and Conditional Release Act, the new sentencing act, amendments to the Criminal Code to deal with DNA testing and other areas and last but not least the institution of a new national crime prevention council.
The council recognizes that we have a long way to go, maybe forever. The business of reducing the potential for crime will go on forever. The business of addressing society's needs in a way that will reduce the propensity of our citizens to resort to crime will always be there and will go on.
Last night, by coincidence I guess, I had the opportunity of watching on one of our Canadian networks an interview with the French and Mahaffy families following the conviction of the accused Paul Bernardo for the murder and other crimes in relation to their daughters. Thanks to television and to those families, we were able to enter into the homes of these two Canadian families. I could not help but sense that the families were hoping for a reconciliation with Canadians to meet the challenges in their personal lives. I cannot imagine that had anything to do with why they agreed to do the interview.
I want to thank them for doing the interview and I hope that Canadians have been made aware of several things. It shows how vulnerable we all are in terms of public safety. We share our vulnerability to a psychopath or any criminal intimately with every one of our fellow citizens.
Last night's interview permitted Canadians to understand how important this area of law and policy is to all of us. I hope those families will forgive me for even attempting to suggest what they wanted to convey. I believe one area where we still have some reform ahead of us is the criminal justice area. I hope they would agree.
There are still reforms that we must address. The bill before us today is a short list. It is not comprehensive. It contains six areas of reform. I am going to walk through it now. I believe it is fair to say that not every element of the six areas will have universal support. That is rarely the case when one tries to make a change in the criminal justice system. However, I would like to think that there
is a sizeable consensus that this list is just part of the reforms still out there for us to accomplish.
The first item is the denial of statutory release for serious, repeat offenders. A serious repeat offender in this case is a person who while on any form of early release, has been convicted of an offence for which that person has been sentenced to five years or more. The subsequent second offence which would result in the denial of early release is certainly a serious offence. It would have drawn a sentence of five years or more.
I am not being particularly aggressive in this. In April 1993 the standing committee on justice reported through its 14th report and recommended that the sentence for the subsequent offence be set at two years. It is the same recommendation of denial of parole and early release but the threshold was two years. In my bill I have selected five years.
I hope I will not be accused by anyone of wimping out. The Liberal Party of Canada in May and August of the same year adopted the report of the justice committee as part of its criminal justice policy package. The House of Commons justice committee unanimously endorsed the provision and referred it to the House. The Liberal Party of Canada adopted the entire justice committee report. At the moment that recommended reform has not yet been adopted.
One of the most glaring examples of why reform is necessary is the case of the conviction of Albert Foulston in Edmonton for the murder of a police officer in 1990. This person has had 48 separate convictions so it is fair to call him a convict. This convict was in prison serving a sentence of approximately 10 years. I do not know whether anybody really knew exactly how the 10 years was composed because the sentencing mathematics contained in the Criminal Code and in the CCRA are very complex. In any event, he was released.
On several occasions while he was on early release he committed other offences. I will not go through the list. It is part of the public record elsewhere. While on early release for the umpteenth time he participated in the killing of an Edmonton police officer for which he was fairly promptly sentenced to 20 years.
The sentence calculation resulted in his total sentence looking like 30 years because it was consecutive. However, because of the way we calculate sentences, he was eligible for parole one year and five months after he was convicted of the murder. With his life sentence he was eligible for parole one year and five months after he was convicted of murder. That is absurd. The absurdity has been recorded in public journals.
One is moved to say that the system is obviously in some disarray. I will leave that as an example of why the existing provision must be changed.
My bill says that if a person is on early release and is convicted of a crime and sentenced to two years or more that person loses the right to early release.
I accept that there must be at the end of the consecutive sentences a period when the offender will be integrated. That has to be in the statutory release portion because I do not want that guy being released at the end of 30 years and sitting on the Bay Street bus the next day beside my kids. I want a period of integration.
The bill would close a loophole which allows offenders to avoid serving time for new offences if those new offences occur while they are on early release or even while they are in prison. If a person is sentenced to seven years for a particularly bad crime and during the fifth year that person gets out, beats somebody up and steals his money, that would normally draw a sentence of a couple of years. The way the law is currently written it requires that person to start the two years back at the beginning of the seven year sentence.
I am not going to take time to read that section of the Criminal Code. It is a public statute and anybody can read it. They can read the Corrections and Conditional Release Act and the appropriate section of the Criminal Code.
Basically the second offence is what I had call a freebie. There is no sanction. You can steal a car, steal a purse, commit an assault, and provided of course that the sentence for the second offence does not exceed the length of the sentence you were first on, you do not have to serve any additional time. This needs to be corrected.
We tried in the House in the last Parliament, I know we tried in this one, and we are getting closer. We have made amendments, but officials seem to be reluctant to alter the system too much, because every time you change a sentence calculation it costs money, and they do not have the money in their budgets. They are very cautious about making changes to the way we sentence people and keep people in our correctional institutions. I accept that.
In any event, I am still on the case and many of our colleagues in this House are still on the case and we are slowly getting to those reforms.
The third area is the lowering of the age of criminal responsibility from age 12, where it is now, to age 10. That has been misinterpreted in a lot of quarters. People ask how you can throw the Criminal Code at a little 11-year-old. That is not the objective, any more than it is the objective to throw the book at the 13-year-old or the 14-year old. What we have done in this country is arrange for intervention into the life of a young offender when they are under 18 years of age. What this does is allow the appropriate intervention for a 10-year-old or 11-year-old. At present there is no intervention.
I remember in the last Parliament, the day before I introduced a similar provision in private members' business was the day of that unfortunate killing in Great Britain where the two 11-year-old boys were involved. If that had happened here in Canada there would have been no intervention. In some provinces there would have been a social worker, but no Young Offenders Act. The social worker procedures vary from province to province. This would allow intervention at an early age, the same way we intervene for all young offenders.
The fourth area is a provision that deals with the community scourge of crack houses. Municipalities are crying out for some way to deal with this. I suggest the solution is to redefine what we call a disorderly house or a bawdy house in the Criminal Code and allow the same procedures that communities use to deal with bawdy houses and disorderly houses, where there are procedures to deal with what we call found-ins and procedures to deal with landlords. There is nothing else out there. It is a simple amendment, and many communities I know would want to take advantage of it to deal with crack houses.
Fifth is stiffer bail provisions for two categories of cases, where you have people out on bail or on peace bonds committing other offences. This proposal deals with being on bail or on a peace bond and committing an offence on the peace bond or committing another driving offence while on bail for a driving offence. There are very serious implications for the public to have a drunk out driving again when he or she is on bail on a driving offence. To reverse the onus in the bail does not mean they do not get bail; it means that it is up to them to show the judge why they should be released. The onus or the burden of proof changes in terms of entitlement to bail.
Last is a matter that has been discussed publicly. It would allow victims of sexual assault to have the blood of the accused tested only under a judge's order and in such a way that the evidence of the blood test would not be used against them in the trial. This provides something for the victim to make sure that he or she has not been infected with many of the sexually transmitted diseases that are out now. There are half a dozen of them. Some of them are lethal. We have to have some compassion for victims where you make a prima facie case in front of a judge and the judge says there will be a blood test. In this way the victim can be assured, as best we can using the medical testing we have, that he or she has not been infected with one of these STDs.
Those are the six parts. I have had a lot of help preparing this, first from my constituents, who have given me a lot of latitude here in Parliament to deal with a lot of issues. I hope the bill reflects their concerns. I received a lot of help from Canadians. I will mention some of the people with whom I have had contact over the last few years: Margot Blackburn, who has gone public, Priscilla de Villiers, who has gone public, Mrs. Mahaffy, the Rosenfeldts, and others. These people have all been direct or indirect victims who want to see change. I have also spoken to public interest groups, Victims of Violence, CAVEAT, the Canadian Centre for Victims of Crime, financed by the Canadian Police Association.
I am grateful to my colleagues in this House for their continuing support. Sooner or later, I hope these initiatives will bear fruit.