Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to speak to Bill C-46 and to acknowledge that the bill is intended to strengthen the protection of privacy and equality rights of complainants and prosecutions for a variety of sexual offences. I think the government is headed in the right direction on this. Since I am the author of the national victims' bill of rights and it has come up here, I want to address a few very specific instances with regard to that and maybe to set the Liberal member for Broadview-Greenwood straight on exactly what the problem is on the victims' bill of rights.
From my perspective and the perspective of people right across the country, victims' rights are not legislation amendments. They are not tinkering with the details of gun law. They are not minor changes necessarily to the Young Offenders Act. They are not amendments to the Conditional Release Act so to speak. They are specific rights that people are looking for as a result of the criminal justice system, as it used to be called, becoming a legal industry.
I can give all kinds of examples. I had been to numerous parole board hearings, numerous sentencing cases and on and on it goes. I was there in Vancouver when the insult of insults to the victims of a mass killer had the right to a hearing under section 745-I am talking about Olson-and where he actually debated with the judge the terms and conditions of the whole sentence. It was quite appalling.
Let me give an idea of what is problem with victims' rights. These rights are almost considered a privilege by the government. They are the kind of things where the government suggests perhaps it will give you a little right, it will throw in an amendment to this particular criminal justice act, the Criminal Code, and it will kind of tell you it is working on your behalf. That is not what these folks are looking for.
They are looking for a standard right across the country that applies so they know very specific things. They know that from the moment they become a victim, they will be told what are their rights, just like a criminal is today. That is all they ask. That is not too much to ask. That should be very quickly resolved by the government. It could have been three years ago and it could have been last year on April 29 when the justice minister said he agreed with it. It could have been last fall or this winter. I understand I will be addressing this issue tomorrow. He knows as well as I do that it is too late. The government is going to call an election and it will do nothing about this.
When the hon. member suggests that the Minister of Justice has amended more justice legislation than anyone ever has before, that may be so, but again he has missed the point of what we are looking for here. I will give an example. The government brought in Bill C-41 on conditional sentences. I happened to attend an appeal hearing of a conditional sentence a few weeks ago and the arguments I heard from defence lawyers were really quite appalling. It happens that conditional sentencing exists nowhere else in the world. It was brought in by this justice minister. That is the argument I heard in court by defence lawyers and by the crown. I presume it is true.
Conditional sentence virtually means that the criminal will let off this crime on condition that it does not happen again. That is as simple as it comes.
In my community, Darren Ursel met a young lady who was a single mom of two. He met her in a restaurant, talked her into
going to have a coke with him. He went behind the restaurant, locked the car door, pushed the front seat where she was sitting back and ripped her clothes off. He could not get an erection so he took his racquetball handle to her, front and back, and tore her open. For 90 minutes she suffered in this car, then managed to escape. He did not let her go.
When in court in front of Judge Harry Boyle, who made the decision, he said he was tender at times. It was his first conviction and he was darn sorry for what he did. That is what he told the judge. He got a conditional sentence, thanks to this justice minister. That means he does no time. I believe it is the first time in my life I witnessed something as terrible as that, an individual not getting any time in prison. He had a conditional sentence.
"Do not do it again. If you do, they might do something about it". He was out the next day. In fact, that creep was in the court room during the appeal smiling.
Those are the kinds of amendments that are brought into the House. I heard defence lawyers at that appeal tell the crown that the Liberals were motivated for this kind of conditional sentence because there are too darn many people in our jails and they are trying to keep them out.
At the same time, I heard many women across the country say: "Do you mean they are back into raping women, sodomizing them, and there is no jail time?" What that will do, quite frankly, is take us back 20 years and put women in the closet again in these kinds of cases. They will not go through what happened in this case with that offender, Darren Ursel, and have nothing happen to the offender and expose their whole private lives.
That is why that whole issue was in the closet for years in the first place. There has to be punishment befitting the crime in this country.
When I hear Liberals say that they care about victims' rights, I would like to ask where in conditional sentencing they give two hoots about it, given Darren Ursel's case. By the way, I have a petition of 13,000 names coming in here this week saying that this is very wrong. I agree that it is wrong.
Do not tell me that we have a justice minister who has brought in a whole bunch of legislation, therefore you care about victims. I do not see that one iota in conditional sentences. Neither does the young lady whom I have had the pleasure of talking to a number of times. Neither will the next woman or young girl who has met the same fate.
That is what is wrong with trying to relate victims' rights with amendments to justice. Members can go right back to Bill C-45, which takes the automatic right of a victim impact statement away in a hearing for serious offenders to get early release after 15 years. That is wrong too.
We fought too many years to have people express themselves, to have the right to express themselves. Even today when I am listening to sentencing hearings and so on, I hear victim impact statements that are expunged. Certain sentences are taken out because in the defence's opinion, it may harm the character of the client. In fact this happened in one case when his good client bludgeoned to death a young lady from my riding by hitting her 26 times. He did not want all of the expressions of the victim to come out in the sentencing. He had already been proven guilty.
Therefore we must look at what it is that people are asking for. They are not asking for a whole bunch more amendments to criminal justice legislation. Although that may be another request they have, it is certainly not the impetus behind a victims' bill of rights.
I am quite appalled at defence attorneys, specifically at some of the comments they make about victims and victims' rights. I have a few quotes to illustrate this. If you really think this is where the country is going, then you should vote Liberal. But if you do not, you have to consider other options.
Listen to these quotes about victims: "There is no such thing as a victim. It's just a state of mind". That comes from a defence attorney. "Victims want someone else to fix their petty problems". That comes from a defence attorney.
"Victim impact statements are just a venting of the spleen and don't serve justice and should be outlawed". That comes from a defence attorney. Are we getting the message? We have long past the time when we dealt with something called criminal justice. We are now into a legal industry. Let me go on.
"Victims' rights groups have outlived their usefulness. What these groups are doing is pushing criminal justice policy toward punitive measures rather than rehabilitative measures". This comes from a criminologist and it is wrong, patently wrong. I have not yet met a victim I have worked with who was looking for punitive measures. They were all looking for justice.
The folks in Ontario, where a major battle is brewing over the politics of this country, should be listening to what is right and to what needs to be changed. The government does not give two hoots about victims' rights. "Victims should not have the formal right to make submissions before a judge since this will result in an arbitrary justice system". That is patently wrong and comes from another criminologist. I could give all kinds of quotes but I think my message is getting through.
Victims are no longer just interested in sweet amendments to the criminal justice legislation, the Criminal Code as we call it today. They are interested in distinctly designated rights that pervade our
society from Newfoundland to British Columbia. Mr. Speaker, how much time do I have left?