Mr. Speaker, the very first words I said in the House after the last election when most of us were rookies here in the House, were to the member for Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, who has been in the House longer than virtually anybody here today. I spoke at that time about the culture of the government at that time which led to the laissez-faire attitude we have had for the last 30 years or so with criminals.
Some members will recall that October 7, 1972 was a pivotal day for jurisprudence because on that date the then solicitor general stood in the House and said that from that day forward the primary raison d'etre of the criminal justice system would be the rehabilitation of prisoners.
He said this and this became the raison d'être because the recidivism rate was so high. He thought that if the road we have been going down all these years has not worked, then perhaps we should try something different, so let us make our raison d'être, rather than the protection of society, rather than a punishment of wrongdoing, rehabilitation. There is nothing wrong with that ideal. It is a noble ideal.
In any event, I had some words to say about that. I attributed some words to the hon. member for Notre-Dame-de-Grâce who was sitting opposite. I noticed the look in his eyes. I knew I had misjudged the situation.
At the first opportunity I apologized to the member opposite because I was wrong. I have over the last couple of years engendered a good deal of respect for the member for Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, the member who introduced the so-called faint hope clause to the House. I know he did so because his heart is in the right place. The problem is that in my respectful opinion sometimes we need to use a soft heart and a hard head. Sometimes it is absolutely essential that people in our society know that there is a line beyond which it is not appropriate to cross.
I mention this because it is important to know to put the introduction of this law into the context of the time. Laws need to be adjusted to suit the temper of the time. In the context of the time we as a nation and most of the western world were experiencing a flower of magnanimity to one another, one to another. In the context of the time we got rid of capital punishment.
How can a civilized society be more civilized by perpetrating a barbaric act of murder, killing someone else, in order to justify its existence? I am now a proponent of capital punishment and I would not be if life meant life. The quid pro quo for our country to get rid of capital punishment was a 25 year sentence for first degree murder. It was a life sentence, minimum 25 years. That was the quid pro quo. That was what the government of the day used to sell the notion of getting rid of capital punishment.
That brings us to 25 years or so after the fact. As the member for Notre-Dame-de-Grâce said yesterday, it is merely a faint hope clause. Very few people take advantage of it. Fifty people have taken advantage of it, 50 of 175 or so people eligible to take advantage of it. That is one-third. Two-thirds of the people who have applied for it have been successful
The point is not how many are successful and how many apply. The point is that when someone takes the life of another person and it is deemed to be a first degree offence, premeditated murder, the sanction that our country has prescribed and the sanction that the social contract we as citizens of our country have prescribed is a life sentence, not 15 years. Whether a person in that first 15 years of incarceration has seen the error of their ways is not the question.
The point is that we made a bargain. We were not going to take a murderer's live, even a first degree murderer's life, as a society. What we were going to do is to put them away so they cannot harm anybody ever again in the future.
That was a social contract. We are abrogating that social contract when we slide in the so-called faint hope clause. That brings us to the duplicity of this argument today, which is this.
By taking the bill of the member for York South-Weston, which would abolish section 745 from the table and insert a lame duck replacement, it has put the Reform Party and others on the Liberal benches who would have voted in favour of that bill in the position
that they cannot find themselves in. It is wrong to vote for this half measure while at the same time it allows Liberals on the other side to vote in favour of the measure that they would not have been able to vote in favour of because they do not want to change it.
Altogether, the removal of the member from York South-Weston's private member's bill, which would abolish section 745, which should say life means life, and inserting this other bill which really does not accomplish anything is window dressing. It is fluff. It begs the question why is it okay to kill one person while it is not okay to kill two persons. It does not make any sense, none whatsoever.
My angst of this bill is two-fold. First, we have abrogated our responsibility, the deal we made when we said life means life in place of capital punishment. At the same time, we have taken a private member's bill which dealt squarely and honestly with the issue off the table and inserted in its place a half measure which is nothing less than duplicitous and not worthy of this House.