Mr. Speaker, I congratulate my colleague from Prince George-Bulkley Valley for doing such a fine job in elucidating this very important issue that affects Canadians from coast to coast. I think he raised a very important point which the government tends to forget. Canadians today are more afraid in their homes than they have ever been in the last 20 years. Sometimes the facts do not support it, but in many cases the facts do support that. I will get to that later in my speech.
It is a pleasure to speak to Bill C-53, an act to amend the Prisons and Reformatories Act. The purpose of the bill is to change the temporary absence program, creating additional types of temporary absences, and to lengthen the time temporary absences are available.
Let us stand back and look at what this actually means. If a crime is committed and a conviction obtained at public expense, and sometimes it can be a threat to the men and women in our police forces, the felon is released on a temporary absence program. The felon does not pay a penalty for actually committing the crime. That is a very important thing to realize. It means that if a felon commits a crime and is convicted, the felon is then released back into society.
Let me give an example. A friend of mine checks on people out on temporary absence programs. He went to Vancouver to check up at the home of a convicted cocaine seller who lives in an opulent home in Vancouver. This person is smiling away, going full and continues to sell cocaine through his back door. He is living in a home worth millions of dollars and is laughing at the police officers who come to his door. That is an example of a temporary absence program. That is not what the taxpayer wants to hear. That is not justice. That is not the way the criminal justice system should work, but in this instance that is the way it is working. The government wants to make this even more lenient.
Let us look at the overall crime situation in Canada with statistics from the National Crime Prevention Council. In 1994, contrary to what the government says, the crime rate was 8 per cent higher than a decade ago, and this is probably under-reported.
A substantial number of crimes are never reported to the police for a number of reasons. The statistics are truly appalling. It is notable that 90 per cent of sexual assaults and 68 per cent of non-sexual assaults are not reported. These are violent crimes that are not reported to the police. The victims go unheard. They do not get restitution. The criminals continue to go on their merry way with no penalty.
About 80 per cent of crimes are committed by only 20 per cent of the population. For future reference, it is exceedingly important for us to identify who those 20 per cent are. I know the government will not disagree with that.
We got some laughs from the other side when I mentioned that Canadians were more scared today than they were before. According to the statistics of the National Crime Prevention Council, not mine, not the Reform Party's, one in four Canadians feel unsafe walking in their neighbourhoods at night. Only 10 per cent of males reported feeling unsafe, but 42 per cent, nearly half the female population, felt unsafe walking in their neighbourhoods.
That is not the society that Canadians want. That is not the society of which we should be proud, and it is something that we, the legislators of this country, must change. It must be an embarrassment to every person in this House to face up to that statistic.
It means that half the wives of the men in this House are afraid to walk in their own neighbourhoods. It means that half of the female children of the people in this House are afraid to walk in their neighbourhoods. That is totally unacceptable and must change.
I saw the Minister of Justice on a CBC television program saying that violent crime is not as bad as we think. Let us look at an independent statistic on that matter. According to police statistics, the rate of violent crime in Canada has increased fourfold in the past three decades. That is 400 per cent in the last three decades. Bear in mind that those statistics are under-reported, as I said earlier. The vast majority of violent crimes never come to the attention of the police.
Youth crime is worse. Criminal Code offences by youth have increased by 16 per cent since 1986 and violent crime among youth has escalated dramatically. We have heard this time and time again from my colleagues and the government has repeatedly ignored them. But it ignores youth crime at its peril.
The public has repeatedly said to the government and to us that it wants this fixed and fixed now. Canadians no longer want to be fearful of walking in their own backyards, something we as Canadians should never have to do.
Since 1962, when penalties started to be reduced for committing crimes, when governments got soft on crime, rates began to increase. What the government said to the public was that if you are victimized you will not see restitution; you are not going to see retribution.
What it said to the police is that no matter what hard work they put into it they will not be able to put criminals behind bars. What is happening now is many of them are standing back and asking why they should do it any more. It is a sad thing.
What it tells the public, who feel they are not being protected by the justice department, is that they now have to take matters into their own hands and vigilante justice may be their only recourse. That is not something we would like to see in Canada. If we start having vigilante justice we progress along that slippery slope toward anarchy.
The real reason for Bill C-53 is that jails are too crowded. The government wants to decrease the pressure on the jails, which we completely understand. However, in doing so, it wants to put more and more people on these temporary absence programs.
We are not opposed to temporary absence programs, but it must be done with forethought and within a certain framework. The most important overriding concern in this framework has to be the protection of the public and of innocent people above all else. That is the role of justice first and foremost. It has other roles certainly, but the government has forgotten that. The roots of this began in the early 1980s when the solicitor general of the day, a Liberal, said that from now on the justice department's primary role would be not the protection of society but serving the criminal. It is going to be the rehabilitation of the criminal, not the protection of society.
That is a significant departure. What we want to do here is get the justice department back to having as its primary focus the
protection of innocent civilians. It is not to say that the rehabilitation of the criminal is not important. If we ignore that we ignore it at our peril. However, there are intelligent and effective ways of doing that. I will get back to that a little later because the experience in the United States has been very fruitful and cost effective.
The framework must be, as I said before, the protection of the public. This cannot apply to violent criminals and must certainly not apply to any criminal who is going to continue doing what got them into jail in the first place. It cannot apply either to non-violent criminals who demonstrate no remorse. A non-violent criminal in this situation is going to commit criminal acts again.
It is also in the public interest to understand the situation that is taking place right now in our criminal justice system. When a person is convicted of a crime, automatically one-third of the sentence gets knocked off and often times that person will only serve one-third of the total sentence. Therefore, two-thirds of a person's sentence is knocked off for good behaviour. A criminal is automatically deemed to have good behaviour and have one-third of his or her sentence knocked off by the system. That is very disingenuous to the victim who believes that if a person who is sentenced to 15 years that person will spend 15 years in jail.
Perhaps the most glaring example of this is section 745 of the Criminal Code which states that if a person commits first degree murder by killing a police office he or she can get out in 15 years. There is a list longer than my arm of individuals who have committed first degree murder and have been let out shortly after their 15th year of prison. We want to see that revised because first degree murder means first degree murder and it means the person spends 25 years in prison. It does not sent a clear message to those who commit this most heinous of crimes that they should be getting out after 15 years. If they do the crime they must pay the time.
I would also like to give some examples of the absurdity that is taking place in our criminal justice system.
I was at a correctional facility treating some patients not so long ago. The first patient I saw had a large laceration in his arm. I said to him while I was sewing him up: "How did you get this?" He said: "Doctor, I got this because I was making a knife". This man, while incarcerated in jail, was making a knife. He was not the only one making knives because making knives was part of their program in that medium security jail, one of our newest I might add.
This same jail, which cost $175,000 per cell to build and which has a beautiful foyer with vaulted ceilings, has cameras. In the area where the inmates are housed they have their cells and then they have a communal area where they eat, play cards and talk. The guards are in the middle of this without any protection. Furthermore, the charter of rights prevents a camera from being on that communal area because it is an infringement of their privacy, the same individuals who are making knives in jail.
I am sure the taxpayer would be very interested to know that they are paying $60,000 to $80,000 a year to house individuals in jails where they are making knives. That is not justice, for crying out loud.
In the jail previous to this one, the inmates decided to set the jail on fire. There were soiled clothes and water everywhere. The inmates were locked up. Who was cleaning this mess up, but the guards, not the inmates. That is the situation that we have.
The guards are afraid for their own safety and they are afraid of actually doing a number of duties that they have to do for fear of retribution from the inmates. That is the situation in many of the correctional facilities across the country. That speaks well of our criminal justice system, but it speaks of what this government and previous governments have done to completely turn our criminal justice system on its head. Justice must protect society at all costs. It is not doing that at all.
Last, I would like to let the government understand that there will be some superb suggestions coming from my colleague from Calgary Northeast and my colleague from Wild Rose on a number of areas on how to revamp our justice system and prevent crime.
We in the Reform Party have often been accused of being hang'em high. We are not hang'em high. We want effective solutions to address crime, the appropriate punishment, appropriate protection of the public and appropriate, effective methods of rehabilitating criminals.
We do not want the situation we have today, which has proven not to work but cost effective solutions that will work. I will give some examples. These are not examples that my colleagues will mention because they will announce this in the very near future. These are a few from my personal experience.
We have to separate the psychiatric patients from the non-psychiatric patients in our criminal justice system. One of the silent tragedies that is occurring is the closing of psychiatric hospitals.
There has been a mindset of taking these psych patients and putting them in the community. For some, that is acceptable. For many, unfortunately, it is not. They are not given a choice. The choice is not there for them.
All we need to do is walk along the streets, even in Ottawa, and see the number of burnt out schizophrenics walking the streets.
Many other psych patients are not medicated and walking the streets, often falling afoul of the law and often suffering.
It does a disservice not only to these people who are ill but it does a disservice to the public too, who have to suffer from the unfortunately criminal activity that these people engage in while they are perhaps psychotic. That has to be done. These people have to get the appropriate treatment, otherwise they will never get better.
To address the recidivism rate, we have to pull out that 20 per cent of the prison population which repeatedly continues to show an abhorrent respect for Canadian society. We must pull them out and deal with them in a much firmer and very different way than the 80 per cent who do not repeatedly run afoul of the law.
While in jail skills training should be obligatory for individuals so that when they come out they can gain employment and become integrated back into society. One of the problems with individuals once they get out of a correctional facility is there are not many support programs for them and there is not a lot for them to do. They have a great deal of difficulty integrating back into society because they do not have the skills necessary to deal with that. This must be dealt with.
Also, alcohol and other substance abuse problems have to be dealt with while incarcerated in jail. That should be obligatory. If an individual is not prepared to deal with it, they should be dealt with differently too. There is no point in putting them back on the street as a cocaine addict if it contributed to the reason why they ran afoul of the law.
Last, it is wise for us to look at the experience in the inner cities of the United States. Columbia University did an excellent job of taking children at the age of four and five in school, bringing the parents into the schools and teaching the children not only their ABCs but also about self-respect, respect for others, appropriate conflict resolution, drugs, alcohol and so on. They learned that. The parents also learned these skills if they had never learned themselves. The outcome was a much lower rate of teen pregnancy, violence and drop-outs.
I thank the House for its time and consideration. I sincerely hope the government pays attention to these suggestions and the suggestions of my hon. colleagues.