Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to speak to Bill C-55.
We heard a lot about dangerous offenders and some offences that should be included in the dangerous offender category. I will try to explain to the government the need to categorize and identify why certain offences should be under the dangerous offender category.
Why is the public looking more and more to articulating why certain offences should be categorized and why there is a lack of trust the judiciary will actually call a spade a spade and give out a sentence in proportion to the crime committed? In doing so I will
try to explain why the judiciary is out of sync with society and why victims today have lost confidence.
For instance, during the sentencing of a man who broke into his estranged wife's home while on probation, Judge Louis Matheson said that: "I don't know whether it is your own fault or you happen to have a very sensitive mate who is easily rattled". Twelve days later the man's girlfriend was shot to death and he was charged with her murder. I raise this story to try to show why the system of justice is out of sync with victims and those who may become victims and their expectations.
During the sentencing of a man for sexual assault, Judge Louis Matheson said that if the victims had been women instead of girls he would have thrown it out of court. Can we imagine the logic behind that statement?
Frederick Metcalfe of Oshawa was given a two-year less a day prison term followed by three years of probation for grabbing a three-year old boy and kicking him in the stomach in the house Metcalfe shared with the boy's mother, his girlfriend. The blows ruptured the boy's liver and pancreas. He also suffered permanent brain damage that crippled him physically and mentally. He cannot walk or talk and has lost vision in one eye.
Although Metcalfe was charged with aggravated assault, Justice Sam Murphy was not convinced the brain damage the boy suffered that night resulted from the attack. After one doctor testified the boy could have suffered a brain aneurysm, Judge Murphy convicted Metcalfe of a lesser charge of assault causing bodily harm. He was given two years less a day for a savage attack on a child who is now crippled for life.
These decisions in our courts are happening all the time. People are sick and tired of them. People are apprehensive that there will be real justice applied in a courtroom today.
Some wonder why we are demanding in Bill C-55 that certain types of offences be included in the dangerous offender category. The reason is that we cannot any longer trust the decisions of those who should be making them.
Not too long ago in 1989, to show how consistent things are because I can give some very recent situations, Douglas Schwartz raped and maimed a 7-year old girl very close to my riding. He raped her so savagely that her vagina had to be surgically reconstructed. As a result of an appeal in 1991, not so very long ago, Judge Allan McEachern reduced Schwartz's prison sentence for that attack from nine to five years because he said there was no evidence that Schwartz was either sexually deviant or a risk to the community. These are facts I am talking about here.
He concluded that Schwartz's thinking was impaired by drink when he assaulted the child. The magnitude of the chief justice's error of judgment became apparent when Douglas Schwartz was found guilty in the Supreme Court of British Columbia of sexually assaulting a woman six months after his early release from jail. That is what we are talking about, yet the House wonders why we are asking for these kinds of offences to be included in dangerous offender status.
They are not made up stories. They are errors in judgment. They are loopholes in the laws of the country. They are problems that can be resolved in the House of Commons, but they are not being resolved.
The folks over there can say that Reformers are some kind of group of extremists.