Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise today to speak to this very important bill. At the outset I remind the House that I will be sharing the time with my hon. colleague from Wild Rose.
The Reform caucus supports the bill 100 per cent, without any question, without any equivocation whatsoever. We are solidly behind both the intent and the desire of the government in the bill.
The Minister of Justice in his comments spoke for quite some time and quite well about the notions of specific intent and general intent. He lost me after about five minutes with the various intents going back and forth. I guarantee that he lost the vast majority of Canadians when the whole issue of intent, specific versus common intent, was raised. That highlights the problem I would like to address in my comments today.
It took 15 minutes for the justice minister to use the words most associated with what should be common law in our country, that is common sense. Without the foundation or without the basis of common sense in law it does not really matter what happens because we lose everybody else.
The basic test our laws must meet is the standard of common sense. Before I get into addressing that I point out that a week before the Minister of Justice introduced the bill I introduced Bill C-303, largely based on Senator Gigantes' bill introduced from the Senate.
My bill is on dangerous intoxication which addresses the issue from the perspective already covered by the Minister of Justice. When the bill was drawn in the lottery I went before the committee of the House of Commons which was to make the decision on whether or not it would become a votable bill. My advice and my suggestion to the committee was that anything which could possibly impair the development of or hinder in any way the application of Bill C-72 should be withdrawn. The decision should be made by people in the Department of Justice who are far more qualified than I am to make such decisions.
As parliamentarians we do not want anything to confuse the issue. Our caucus is solidly behind the Minister of Justice when he says that intoxication is no defence and no reason to slide out from under personal responsibility for the results of one's actions.
The bill rests in kind of a limbo waiting to see what happens. If it is necessary or if there is a problem, there are other ways to address the issue which may not be as efficient or as good as the bill. The reason we have come to this point is that in the first place the Supreme Court of Canada misread the intent and where it is relative to the Canadian population at large.
We do not really have a problem with the common law statutes that existed prior to the Daviault decision. In my view we have a problem with the Supreme Court expanding the envelope of its jurisdiction.
The Supreme Court does not have the responsibility to make laws. The Supreme Court has the responsibility to interpret laws. If this were a single instance where the Supreme Court were seen to lose touch with reality, we could say that perhaps it had a bad day or perhaps it was having tea or sherry in a club and thought: "What can we do? How many angels will dance on the head of a pin? Why don't we get the Minister of Justice to dance around a bit to see how he responds to this bone headed decision?"
If it were in isolation we might be able to say that but the reality is that it is not in isolation. This is a consistent pattern the Supreme Court has laid down over the last few years.
About 10 years ago late Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Bora Laskin, said: "The Supreme Court is a quiet court in an unquiet land". How things have changed as a direct result of the charter of rights and freedoms. The charter of rights and freedoms essentially says that individual rights in society are paramount. The Supreme Court is kind of between a rock and a hard place, which is why many of its decisions that seem to defy reality are split decisions.
If the Supreme Court does not defend the notion of due process-and by due process I mean dotting the i 's, crossing the t 's and making sure everything is done absolutely correctly-decisions would be overturned based on the charter of rights and freedoms or other considerations.
Meanwhile Parliament and the vast majority of Canadians are concerned with crime control and common sense. We have the Supreme Court on the one hand and the population and by and large parliaments assembled all across the land on the other hand. Somewhere in the middle, I suppose, is justice.
Recently the Supreme Court brought down a decision in which a woman arrested for impaired driving before she blew the breathalyser was allowed to go to the washroom. When she was in the washroom the woman alleged that she consumed more alcohol and that when she blew over the limit it was as a result of having alcohol subsequent to her arrest. Therefore they could not prove that she was driving impaired. The Supreme Court, in a move that defies logic, in a move that defies the last 30 years of trying to get drunks off the road, chose to say that the woman was innocent.
Recently the Supreme Court decided that someone arrested for impaired driving has x amount of time to find a lawyer of choice. If one is nailed for impaired driving, one is nailed for impaired driving. The benefit of the doubt rests with the potential victim: the innocent bystander who gets hit by a drunk. We are trying to stamp out drunk driving. We are not trying to figure out what is legal.
What about ordinary Canadians when laws come down from Parliament that are written for lawyers and not for ordinary people? They should not need law degrees to figure out what is right or wrong.
The Supreme Court may review debate in the House when the time comes to review the law again because it wants to get the judgment of the people. We in the House represent the people of Canada who are upset and disgusted with a Supreme Court that comes out with decisions such as it has recently. I want the Supreme Court to be cognizant of the debate. I want the Supreme Court to hear me speaking about it in the House of Commons, saying that average Canadians have gone beyond the point of being filled with contempt for it. People are just dismissing it.
If the Supreme Court continually comes out with decisions better suited for a faculty club, with no basis of reality, obviously the laws will not connect with people. It is like a municipal police force installing a new sign which says 60 kilometres an when everything is designed for 100 kilometres an hour. People will ignore the law, get tickets and feel resentful.
When the Supreme Court makes decisions that do not make sense it brings discredit and disrepute not only to the Supreme Court but to Parliament as well. That includes all members who were elected to represent the people.
It is the righteousness of law, the essence of law that ordinary people instinctively understand is right, which imparts moral authority to law. If a law does not enjoy moral authority, if it does not enjoy the goodwill of the people, if ordinary people cannot look at it and say that it makes sense and they will obey it, what good is it?
In the absence of a foundation of common sense, laws will be ridiculed and with them the people who write the laws and the people who interpret the laws. That is the bottom line. We do not want to bring discredit to the whole notion of jurisprudence and the law in the way we work as citizens and in the way we relate to one another. Laws keep us civilized and we must respect them.
This brings to mind what we can do about it. We have a charter of rights and freedoms, which in my view would be greatly improved if it were the charter of rights, freedoms and responsibilities. We are not likely to lose the charter of rights and freedoms because people feel that it gives great protection.
Perhaps it is not all bad, but it has changed the way the country works. It has changed our relationship as legislators to the process of making and interpreting laws. As parliamentarians we have to start looking at a new way or another way of confirming people appointed to the bench.
When a person is appointed to the bench historically the procedure has been that the decision will have a host of considerations: where the person lives in the country, what language the person speaks, whether the person has standing in the community, whether the person has standing in the legal community, and whether the person has standing within the community of the political party that makes the appointment.
That might have been okay. By and large Canadians can be very secure in the knowledge that over the years we have had and do have a court that has the most profound respect of people from coast to coast. We have to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bath water.
There has been and is a continuing concern about the wisdom of decisions coming out of courts all across the land and not just the Supreme Court, decisions interpreted by some as decisions to promote or to enhance a particular lifestyle or a particular point of view. There seems to be tremendous inconsistency in the interpretation and the application of law from coast to coast and from court to court.
Perhaps it would not be a bad idea to consider after a person has been appointed to the bench, not just the federal benches but all benches, holding some sort of ratification process. I do not think it would be advisable to have members of the bench or of the Supreme Court in particular fearing for their jobs or being recalled.
I concur the positions should be until retirement because we need consistency and long range thought. We want to make changes slowly, not arbitrarily. We want to ensure that institutions of the country such as the Supreme Court do not reflect a bias that is here today and gone tomorrow. We need it to apply long range thought to decisions.
When the Prime Minister, in consultation with the Minister of Justice, makes a decision to appoint someone to the bench, it would not be a bad idea if the appointment were further ratified, not turned over or dismissed, by a committee of the House, probably the justice committee.
The terms of reference would have to be well defined. I do not think Canadians want or would put up with the confirmation hearings of our friends to the south that we see reported and that become partisan attacks. It would be an extremely important idea at the time of appointment that judges to all courts, particularly the Supreme Court, be very clearly told and understand that their job is to interpret laws and that our job is to write
them. Their job is to push the envelope to ensure that what we do is done correctly and that the checks and balances work.
A confirmation of some description would have far more value not to the judge who has been appointed but to those who are making the appointment to know that if they are making an appointment of someone who does not bear the scrutiny of a carefully crafted confirmation hearing they probably should not be there in the first place.
It would be a check and balance to those of us who are elected and make these appointments to make sure the appointments will stand the test of time, the test of open debate and the test of a little sunshine coming in so people understand these laws and the people who interpret them belong to the people of Canada. Our laws do not belong to the court. They do not belong to the Queen. We live together in society in a social contract because we have confidence and faith in our laws.
When someone commits a crime in all of our courts it is always the Queen, Regina versus the defendant. Perhaps we should expand that and say it is the Queen representing Canada at large and the person affected, the family affected versus the defendant. It is not an abstract third party deal if one has lost a friend or a mother, a father, a brother, children or a spouse either through criminal activity like murder or through violence or second degree offences such as impaired driving where there was no necessary intent.
We have to realize we are not talking about abstract ideas. We are talking about real honest to God people impacted on positively and negatively by the results of our actions, by the results of actions of others.
I put these suggestions on the table. These are the things Canadians from coast to coast want. Whether in British Columbia, the maritimes, Ontario, Alberta, in the north or in the south, whether Canadians are French speaking, English speaking, male, female, black, white, have been here for 10 generations or 10 days, we want security of the person. We want to feel secure when we leave our homes. We want to know that if we have been hurt or injured by someone else, the law of the land is here to protect us, not to protect the guilty, not to protect the perpetrator. The due process should belong to the innocent victim.
Unless we start to put the rights of the victim ahead of the rights of the criminal we will never ensure that people in the social contract between independent citizens who have given of themselves to the state, given their duty and fidelity to the state, get a fair return in exchange.