Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure for me to rise in the House today to speak on Bill C-215, an act to amend section 227 of the Criminal Code. This bill has the objective of replacing section 227 in order to deal with a person who commits a culpable homicide or the offence of causing the death of another person regardless of the time at which the death occurs. Right now the code says that for a person to be found guilty, the death must have occurred within a year.
People in Quebec would remember the case of a taxi driver who was beaten to death by police officers. The taxi driver was in a vegetative coma for many months and finally died more than a year after the incident took place. The police officers could not be charged with the culpable homicide because of the time that had elapsed between the time of the commission of the crime and the resulting death.
We all understand that the amendment proposed by my colleague would cover such very sad cases, but does this House want to completely open section 227 of the Criminal Code? Do we really want to not have any time limit imposed? This House should not say yes to these questions before it reflects on the consequences of such an amendment.
By having no time limit it would become much more difficult to establish the link between the cause and the effect of the death. If a crime occurs today but the death of the victim occurs five years later, how can our police and prosecutors really establish that it was the last event that caused the death and not something else? It could become a technical battle in court, a battle between lawyers needless to say. Furthermore it is impossible in Canadian law to prosecute the same person twice for the same act. It would be impossible to charge someone with aggravated assault only to later change the charge to culpable homicide.
With section 227 written as proposed in Bill C-215, how long would a crown prosecutor be forced to wait before pressing charges? If there is no time limit, the jobs of the crown and the police are made much more difficult.
There is a further example of consequences to this amendment to section 227. What about cases where victims are comatose and the family decides to pull the plug on the life support machine? Would that be considered death following the last event? These are all only small but important examples of the consequences to our criminal justice system of the amendments proposed by my colleague.
The Progressive Conservative Party believes that the Criminal Code should be revised, but we also believe that it should not be changed piece by piece. It has been many years since there was a complete revision of the Criminal Code as a whole, and maybe it is time to start thinking of doing it. Maybe this House through its standing committee on justice could begin such a revision.
It is our belief that Bill C-215 has touched on a good point and that the principle behind the amendment is a good one. But it is also our belief that while section 227 should be broadened, it should not be left wide open. We believe there should be a revision of the time limit between the moment an act has been committed and the time a death has occurred. We also believe there should be a reasonable cut off time in that limit.
For those reasons and the ones previously mentioned we cannot support Bill C-215.