Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure today to stand in support of the motion to hoist the bill. Fortunately from my point of view I will speak from a different perspective of why the bill should be hoisted than the member who introduced it.
It is a piece of legislation that I have to oppose for two main reasons. The first is that it totally ignores the wishes of the majority of the Canadian people. The second is that it tramples on the will of this Parliament whose members voted in favour of a private member's bill which would have repealed section 745 of the Criminal Code, and not just tinker with it as the justice minister is doing with Bill C-45.
Regarding my first point, I wish to emphasize the terrible impact on the families of murder victims when their loved one's killer is eligible for parole after only a 15-year sentence. When this legislation was introduced in June, Debbie Mahaffy whose daughter Leslie was one of Paul Bernardo's victims, made a passionate plea to the justice committee to simply repeal section 745. She said how disappointed she was with the half measure proposed by the justice minister.
Sharon Rosenfeldt, the mother of a Clifford Olson victim spoke on behalf of the national group Victims of Violence saying: "I have fought for 15 years for the rights of victims and I think we are all in this together". Unfortunately, not the case according to this government.
Another mother, Darlene Boyd, whose daughter Laurie was raped and murdered south of Calgary, spearheaded a 35,000-name Calgary Sun petition to repeal section 745.
These people are not speaking just for themselves. It has been proven with the names on the petitions and the groups that they represent. They speak for many of the families that have suffered the murders. They suffer for life, not for 15 years.
From personal experience, this bothers me a great deal. Outside the House we have a plaque. That plaque is in memory and honour of officers who gave their lives in service to their communities.
My cousin was married to one of the officers whose name is on the plaque. His name was Lenard Shakespeare. He was an officer in Toronto who in the line of duty happened to stumble upon an attempted bank robbery.
Lenard was the kind of officer who did not believe someone had to use firearms in order to rectify a situation. When this was taking place, he happened to spot a taxicab in front of the bank that was in
the process of being robbed. He thought it was his duty to warn the people in the cab that they were in danger.
When Lenard walked up to the cab and put his head in the cab to warn the people that they had to move, the man in the back seat shot him. He not only shot him then, but he stepped out of the cab and pumped five more bullets into Lenard as he laid there without his gun drawn.
Lenard's wife happened to be at our place. I was there when the officers knocked on the door. Members have not been through hell until they have to sit with the wife or the children of the victim of a premeditated murder.
We try to honour these people through different organizations, through plaques on the Hill. However, we have a government that says we must look after the predator in these cases. The man who shot Lenard is now out in Vancouver as a businessman. Is this fair?
For any member on the other side of the House who would like to know the name of my cousin, I am quite willing to give it. She lives in Atikokan, Ontario. They can phone her family members and see what they think about this joke on society that members call 745.
Premeditated murder was an automatic hanging or execution at one time. The government of the day decided it had some hope for these murderers and would only make it 25 years. It was sold to the public as 25 years without parole. That sounded not too bad. It gave everybody a chance to get over the healing, if they could, and get on with their lives.
Now we look at 15 years. I hear that 15 years is hard on these people. From death to 15 years. We heard the outcry that this might be too much, so we passed section 745. Five years down the road, mark my words, if we have a Liberal or a Conservative government we will be looking at 10 years for premeditated murder.
The government likes to throw out fancy numbers. It forgets to tell the people what the population is in the country, what the unemployment rate is and what the actual crime statistics are. It does not bother to bring forward those statistics. According to Statistics Canada violent crime increased 782 per cent from 1971 to 1994. Argue that one. From 1986 to 1994 violent crime by youth increased 124 per cent. Many of those crimes were murders.
We have a system which I hope people understand. Our courts are so overworked that we have a bargaining system. We have a bargaining system in which the charge will be reduced for a guilty plea. If we want to know why the statistics are starting to show on the other end, it is because we have lawyers and judges who are agreeing to bargain. They are not representing the people; they are representing themselves and their own self-interests, the same as the government.
I wish everyone involved in this debate would go back to their constituents to get their opinions.