Mr. Speaker, in order to briefly discuss Bill C-224, presented by my colleague from Wild Rose, I propose a rather cursory, and somewhat simple, analysis. First, we shall analyze the difference between what should happen by the book and what happens in real life. Then, we shall attempt to address the problem in order to take some position on it, even though the bill is not votable at this time. There is, however, nothing to stop us from having an opinion.
First of all, the question of arrest without warrant. Although it is a rather cursory way of looking at a bill, that is more or less what it comes down to. This situation is of enormous concern to us.
Let us look at how things are done. A policeman arrives at the scene of the crime, and runs into an individual whom he suspects to be in breach of parole for instance. If there is some doubt in his mind, he can take the suspect to headquarters, question him and try to check out the situation.
If everything checks out OK, he releases him, but if something is wrong, he can charge him. However, real life seldom goes by the book. Let us imagine the most common and most critical situation, perhaps the one that led to this bill.
Same scenario. A police officer arrives on the scene of a crime, on a Friday night, and stops an individual. We know that parole officers who could inform the police work 9 to 5 weekdays and are off during the weekend. Very often, problems arise the night and police officers must wait till the next day. The thing is, on weekends, it means they must wait till Monday morning. The police officer stops an individual and, if he doubts his innocence, takes him to the police station.
Police officers already have the power to detain an individual for 24 hours without a warrant. They already can do that. Of course, if a crime-other than breaching the conditions of parole-is committed, the main crime takes precedence. A charge will be laid.
Let us imagine that the only crime is a breach of the conditions of parole, as is often the case. I know because I worked for some time in this field. Let us say that this individual is forbidden to be in such and such a place and is seen there by the police. This is the main issue. The only crime committed by this individual is to be in this place.
Since it is Friday or Saturday night, the probation officer cannot be reached. Even with the current 24-hour period, the police must release the individual since it is still not enough time to reach the probation officer who only returns to his office on Monday morning.
I understand that, in order to solve that problem, correctional services have developed an emergency response system allowing a police officer to get a probation officer to fax him warrant in short order, thus enabling him to arrest a parolee who has violated a probation order or a condition of parole.
A very specific and touchy situation was described. We realize that the issue has been somewhat simplified as regards what could go wrong. The computer-since everything is done by computer, fortunately-could break down, the communication system allowing us to check whether the individual is committing an offence could break down. In that case, the police officer would need a bill like this one. We agree on that point.
Let us say there is a vote and the bill is passed, then arrests without warrant will be allowed. The Bloc Quebecois does not agree with arrests without warrant for very obvious reasons; tomorrow we might ask for searches without warrant. I think that people who must enforce the law want to protect the public and ensure its security. I think they have enough tools right now not to need this one.
In my opinion, such a measure would open wide the door to taking certain liberties and maybe even lead to abuses much worse than those which might occur because this small detail is missing.
The House will recall the famous firearms bill that was introduced. I do not remember the specific clause, but the initial bill specified, in terms that were almost clear, that police officers could, if they thought there were firearms in someone's home, seize them without a warrant. In the end, even the minister and therefore the government amended this provision because they felt it went too far. It went too far because quality of life is included in individual rights. There are ways to do things and, for a start, police officers must learn to do them right, with the tools they are given, of course.
In my opinion, it is when these things happen on a weekend, returning to the example I gave at the start, that there is likely to be a major problem. Then it becomes a conflict between the parole officers' collective agreements and the government. Here, instead of creating legislation to deal with this problem, they are putting the cart before the horse, or however you might like to put it. Legislation ought not to be altered to compensate for shortcomings in collective agreements. Instead, the government should say: "One parole officer will be on weekend duty in such and such a region, because it has a higher incidence of weekend incidents". I have no problem with its passing legislation to that effect, but legislation ought not to be altered because of flawed collective agreements. Instead, the collective agreements must be brought in line with the legislation. That is more or less the logic of this.
Someone also mentioned overpopulation. As you are indicating that I have two minutes left, Mr. Speaker, I will not move on to the next topic, although I would dearly have loved to.
I will conclude simply on this point by repeating that we could not have given our approval, even if this bill had been voted on, because it would permit arrest without warrant thereby opening the door to searches without warrant, which would be totally unacceptable.
Finally, in our opinion, it is much more a problem of lack of availability of parole officers, and therefore a collective agreement problem, and a law does not adapt to a collective agreement, but rather the reverse.