Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to address Bill C-45, which is a bill we oppose.
We oppose it on a number of counts. Primarily we oppose it because it sends a clear message to the Canadian public and to criminals. It says to the Canadian public that their lives are not worth more than 15 years in prison. It sends a clear message to the criminals that if they kill somebody in cold blood, in a premeditated fashion, they may be asked to serve 25 years but then after 15 years the sentence will be revisited and likely repealed.
It is not unusual for this to happen. Across my desk came a huge list of individuals who had committed first degree murder and who had been released after spending 15 years plus a small amount of time in jail.
Who are these people? These are people who have committed first degree murder for killing police officers. Many have killed police officers but all have killed individuals in cold blood. It is very difficult to actually get a conviction of first degree murder because premeditation has to be proved. This is not a person who comes along and kills during a crime of passion. These crimes have been planned and done in the most indiscriminate fashion imaginable.
This bill is opposed not only by the Reform Party but by the police associations that the Liberal Party profess to support. It is opposed by the vast majority of Canadians. They want to know that their lives is worth more than somebody spending 15 years in jail. If somebody is going to be convicted of first degree murder he or she is going to pay the penalty.
The Reform Party has been accused of being without sympathy but that is simply not true. Reformers believe that sympathy and consideration must be for victims and for criminals. However, a line has to be drawn somewhere and where a person has committed first degree murder that person has to pay the full price. Society demands it, Canadians demand it, police associations demand it and the people in this party demand it.
The fact that Bill C-45 does not actually address section 745 in a meaningful way goes back to the early 1980s when the attorney general of that time said: "We are going to change our focus in the justice department. Instead of focusing on the protection of society we are going to focus on rehabilitation of the criminal". The primary role of the justice department, contrary to what the public believes, is not the protection of innocent civilians, it is the rehabilitation of criminals.
The facts show that this government and previous governments have failed to do both. They have failed to protect society and they have failed to rehabilitate criminals. For example, everybody in this House realizes, particularly in youth crime, violent crime has increased dramatically with no decrease in sight. Those are the facts and there is no use denying it.
When we look at other aspects of crime it is true that adult violent crime has decreased somewhat, but crime in general in many areas is on the rise. Governments have not put into place any effective measures of preventing that and there are ways of doing that.
I spoke with the Minister of Justice before we left in June and I said that we can look at the United States and see some very important work that it is doing in urban centres to prevent criminal activity. In order to address future criminal activity and conduct disorders which go into youth crime and then often develops into adult crime, it has to be prevented. The way to prevent it is to address the children when they are very young, at four and five years of age.
Unfortunately what we are seeing here are individuals, particularly in youth correctional facilities, who do not have the pillars of a normal psyche. Those pillars are developed very early on in the first five to seven years of life and that is where we can have the greatest effect.
In the United States children are being brought into the schools and not only are they teaching them their ABCs, they are also teaching them self-respect, self-confidence, respect for others, appropriate conflict resolution, about drugs, alcohol and sex; a lot of the problems that teenagers are fighting and grappling with today.
They also brought in the parents. They are usually single parents, and interestingly enough these parents do not have the appropriate capabilities to be parents. What they have found is a twofold benefit. First is the obvious benefit to the children. Also, they
found that these parents started to develop the pose of a normal psyche which did not develop early on. They started to learn about self-respect, self-confidence, self-reliance, personal responsibility, drugs, alcohol, conflict resolution. The result was fewer conduct disorders, less teen crime, a lower dropout rate. It was extremely beneficial and it did not cost the system more money.
I ask the justice minister to take a leadership role in bringing together all the ministers of education from across this country to have a meeting in Ottawa to address this problem that would not cost more money but would have a dramatic impact on decreasing the number of youth crimes and therefore adult crime in the future. It is a win-win situation.
The government has also failed to protect civilians, and Bill C-45 addresses that. Bill C-45 does not protect citizens. It only says to criminals that if you kill somebody, you are not going to pay the price, and that is unacceptable.
To show how absurd this can get, I spent some time in jails both as a physician and as a guard. I will give two examples. There was a child in the juvenile correctional facility I was working at who had murdered somebody in cold blood with a bow and arrow to rob him. Someone else saw him commit this act. He and another murdered that person too.
This person is a psychopath. At taxpayer expense his lawyer brought in a psychologist from the lower mainland to teach this person remorse. And so this child was trying to practise remorse. What a tragedy. They tried this to ensure that the child, who showed psychopathic tendencies, would get a lesser sentence than what should have been coming to him. It would not only give him a lesser sentence but give people less of an opportunity within the system to address his problems. That does a disservice not only to the public but to the individual being convicted.
In another case, I had to go up to the jail once to commit somebody because their term was up. The person was a violent offender with a rap sheet as long as your arm. This person was going to be released the next day and the only way to get him back in the system was to commit him on psychiatric grounds.
This person had chosen to show on umpteen occasions a wilful ignorance of respect for human beings and it had been demonstrated that this individual was a grave threat to innocent civilians. Yet, the system would have allowed this person to be released. The people in the system said those were the laws.
We are here to change those laws and we are here to ensure that people who are going to be a danger to society are prevented from doing so not only for society's sake, which is most important, but for the individual who would commit these offences.
We may not be able to address all the problems in the justice system, but we have seen over the last three years that the government is willing to only tinker around the edges of the criminal justice system instead of addressing the fundamental problems that exist within it. It does so at its peril but also sadly at the peril of the public that demands respect and deserves protection from individuals who would prey on it.