Mr. Speaker, I am not sure where the member who just spoke gets her information about the west. Perhaps she might want to visit out there. I live out west and I do not in any way meet the description which she has given the House. I am a little bemused by that kind of simplistic labelling. Perhaps she will have an opportunity to see other parts of the country one day.
Today we are debating Bill C-45. It has been introduced in the House, examined by a committee and is now at third reading which means that if it passes third reading, it will become law very shortly. Therefore, I would like to give a bit of an analysis of this bill and whether it could be improved.
As the House is aware, the Reform Party introduced quite a number of motions to this bill, none of which were accepted by the government. Those motions in our view would have gone a long way toward achieving the stated aim of the bill which is to make our justice and corrections system more effective, particularly in protecting the public. As most members know, there have been 78 re-offences by people who were out on parole in the last year. These people have killed, terrorized and invaded the homes and lives of innocent people.
Canadians have been asking for many months that something concrete and decisive be done about this situation. Therefore, we looked anxiously at Bill C-45 to see whether that had in fact been the result of this bill. Unfortunately we find that it is not.
Bill C-45 is very technical. It has a lot of administrative details about the transfer of prisoners, the calculation of sentences and the figuring out of when people are eligible for parole and when they are not. However, there are some real flaws in the bill. It is interesting to note that the bill was floating around the Department of the Solicitor General in the last Parliament when the Tories were governing. It has now been introduced by the Liberals in a watered down version. It is not even as effective, as strong or as decisive as the original bill. We find that extremely unfortunate.
We feel a number of the provisions in this bill should have been and could have been made much stronger and given a lot more teeth. We wish the government had listened to those proposals. Unfortunately it did not.
For example, we talk about the detention of people who commit offences while on parole. When people are on parole, given a chance to go back out into society and be upright citizens, they have been told: "You do not have to serve the whole sentence you have been given. Now you can go back out into society". We do not have in the bill a requirement that when people abuse that privilege
they have to serve the rest of the sentence they should have served when they were out on parole and the entire sentence for the new offence. Again they are eligible for parole on the second offence they committed when they have already abused the privileges and the opportunity they were given as parolees. We really object to that.
When offenders have shown once that they have no respect for the privilege of parole, an early opportunity not to have to serve their full sentence, why should they be given the same consideration the next time out? How many times do they have to be sentenced and not have to serve their full sentences before we start sending the message that we really mean business about people who violate the rights of others?
That was not done in the bill. It should also have demanded full term detention for all dangerous offenders deemed capable of repeating their offences.
As justice critics we visited prisons over the last few weeks to familiarize ourselves with aspects of the justice system. One of the questions I like to ask when we talk with prison administrators, representatives of guards and prisoners is: "If there were one thing you could change about our justice system, what would it be?" Quite often the answer includes some demand or plea.
Officials and frontline workers in prisons know the offenders who are likely to reoffend. They know these people. They work with them every day. They know their attitudes. They know the way they think. They know the way they operate. They know how they respond to opportunities they have been given. They say: "When we know good and well that these people will reoffend, please let us keep them off the streets and out of our communities".
The bill was a golden opportunity for the government to allow that to happen. It did not do it and it did not support a Reform amendment that would have allowed it.
There are administrators and guards in our prisons who say: "Please do not make us put these people who are a danger to society back out on the streets". Our government says that it is all right and out they go. There has to be something wrong with our justice system. It is no wonder the people who work in the system are as frustrated as the citizens and the victims of repeat offenders.
Other people have mentioned the concern in society that sexual assault is not deemed in and of itself to be a danger or to cause harm to adults. Clause 129(3) of the bill states that the parole board may order an offender not to be released from imprisonment before the expiration of his term if the board is satisfied that the offender is likely, if released, to commit an offence causing serious harm to another person or a sexual offence involving a child before the expiration of what otherwise would have been the offender's sentence.
We are very unhappy with the distinction made in this clause between serious harm to another person and sexual offence involving a child. We would have thought that offenders who were deemed to be likely to commit a sexual offence against anybody should be made, at the very least, to serve their full term. Never mind going on, as we have suggested, and being incarcerated indefinitely if they are deemed to be likely to commit a sexual offence.
Sexual offences against children are the only crimes that would make a person serve his full term. We just wonder about that. The government makes very loud noises about caring and compassion, particularly for women, and then it says that a sexual offence against an adult woman may not be deemed to be causing serious harm. It has to be shown that a sexual offence against an adult woman involves serious harm.
Sexual offence against any female whether she is eight or eighty is by definition a serious harm to the individual. I am very surprised the government would make a distinction and say that sexual offences against children will keep somebody incarcerated and not be too concerned about sexual offences against any other woman of an older age. I object to that and I think all Canadians should object to that. I find it a very unacceptable distinction in the legislation.
Much is made by the government side about holding the parole board more accountable. All the bill does is allow the chairman of the parole board to call an inquiry when an offender released on parole by the board reoffends. Can we imagine a chairman of the board who let an offender out who reoffended being the best person to decide when the actions and the decisions made by the parole board should be investigated? Is that not a bit like asking the fox to guard the hen house?
If we have a parole board that has screwed up, that has let somebody out who has hurt other people, should the chairman of that body decide whether the particular decision should be investigated?
One of our amendments was to mandate an investigation of the parole board decision in any case where an offender was let out into the public on parole and reoffended. Here we have a situation where only the chairman of the parole board can mandate that kind of investigation.
When Liberal members applaud the bill as putting restrictions on the operations of the parole board, the public should be aware of how toothless those restrictions really are in that the power to hold the board accountable can only be exercised by the chairman of the board. Certainly that is not what the public has in mind when it talks about holding the parole board more accountable and having its foul-ups reviewed.
There was an opportunity in the bill to do a number of things that the public has been asking for. Yet we see that the bill has fallen far short. We in the Reform Party are in a real dilemma about the bill. The weak, almost ineffectual steps taken in the bill will not necessarily hurt anything. The government should have done much to help straighten out the system and get it more decisively and solidly on the side of making sure that our justice, corrections and parole systems really do the job for Canadians. The bill just does not do it.
What do we do? There is nothing here we could not support because there is really nothing in there at all, except a bunch of administrative add-ons that may or may not make very much difference. How can we support a bill that should have done something substantive for Canadians, for the criminal justice system and for the reforms that the Liberals are so fond of talking about, promising and saying are a piece of the action, when it just does not deliver?
On balance, when the government introduces a bill that should have done the job decisively, strongly and effectively and fails miserably, how can we support that? How can we say this is something worthy of support? We cannot do that.
For some of the reasons I have mentioned and some of the reasons my colleagues will be mentioning, we say to the government that the bill is not good enough for Canadians. It is not something the House should support. It is not something we can even in any way suggest does the job that should be done.
We ask the government to take back the bill and give us something that does the job. Then we will support it 100 per cent.