Mr. Speaker, the debate this morning is essentially about violent crime, rapes and sex crimes against children, and the government's inaction on these issues.
Our obligation is to put in place laws that protect society. Unfortunately the current justice minister is having difficulty doing it. The government has failed but now with an election in the air it is at least trying to right a couple of wrongs.
This morning the government proposed two amendments to Bill C-17. Essentially the amendments correct deficiencies in Bill C-41. The first amendment proposed concerns conditional sentencing. It cautions judges to use conditional sentences only if public safety is not threatened. As pointed out earlier it seems we are legislating common sense. It is remarkable that such a motion would be put forward yet that is the case.
The second amendment concerns the provision of automatic victim impact statements, something that was denied earlier by the government.
The difficulty is the justice system has been too lenient on people who perpetrate violent crimes. Bill C-41 sprang to life in September 1986. The courts were encouraged to be relatively lenient on first time offenders and to attempt to keep them out of jail. I find this particularly amusing and curious, given the pace with which the government has put people guilty of fisheries offences in jail. It has put farmers guilty of shipping some grain south of the border and attempting to fight for their rights in jail and has kept them there. The government has in place some legislation that is attempting to keep people out of jail because the facilities are too crowded.
Originality it was intended that an offence would carry a penalty of less than two years if the offender was not a danger to the community. We seem to have forgotten that in our sentencing policies the notion of a deterrence to repeat a crime or to commit crimes should be part of the notion of sentencing. In other words, we are not simply sentencing someone for the commission of the crime but what we are trying to do is deter others from engaging in these sorts of activities.
When Bill C-41 was brought before the House it introduced a scheme of alternate measures to deal with this issue. Some of the alternatives to incarceration which were put in place included such things as performing a number of hours of community service or even receiving counselling. Somehow that would be sufficient to encourage people not to commit the crime.
The issue which should be addressed this morning is where we ended up with Bill C-41. I would like to read into the record some instances in which Bill C-41 has been used to keep people out of jail.
The first instance I would like to refer to took place in British Columbia. My colleague from the Okanagan referred to it. In that instance a man was convicted for abducting and sodomizing a single mother. The judge, however, was impressed with the man's behaviour while on bail. He suggested that it was exemplary and that psychological assessments indicated that the man was unlikely to reoffend.
Psychological assessments are just that. The assessments are a good guess. The fact is that the crime was heinous and deserving of a prison term. With this sort of crime, consideration should not have been given to letting the man walk the streets freely without serving some time and receiving psychological training.
In another instance, two Ontario off-duty police officers were convicted of forcing their way into a woman's home, threatening her with death and robbing her of a small amount of cash. Why men convicted of a cruel and violent crime will never spend a day in jail is beyond me, but it is easy when the justice minister creates that possibility. These two supposed defenders of society walked away without spending a day in jail.
This instance was referred to earlier as well. A Gatineau man was recently convicted for repeatedly forcing his young step sons to perform sexual acts on their hypnotized mother. Along with that, this gentleman also forced the boys to masturbate one another while he watched, and to masturbate him and perform oral sex on him, and yet somehow the judge thought that the man should not spend any time in jail. One of the victim's, a step son, said this: "He just keeps on trucking. He walks away, goes home and enjoys Christmas. It is unreal. But that is the justice system. We have done a lot of crying, gone through a lot of agony, all for nothing". All for nothing because our justice minister saw fit to put the plight of the criminal ahead of the victims.
The justice minister was warned about this. The hon. member for Crowfoot warned the justice minister that violent criminals might avoid proper punishment if he proceeded with Bill C-41. He ignored my colleague.
Two members of the justice committee at that time also warned the justice minister that these sorts of things could happen, and yet again he ignored two members of his own party. In fact, one member was eventually shown the door for trying to hold the government accountable on another matter.
Justice requires that violent offenders be punished. It also demands that victims and their concerns be addressed. We are going through this business on section 745 of the Criminal Code where the beast of B.C., as Clifford Olson likes to call himself, is going to have his opportunity to grill the families of his victims again, 15 years after those crimes were committed.
It is time that we in this House and members opposite in particular and the justice minister take pains to recognize that some of these violent criminals will never be rehabilitated and that the best we can do is protect society from them. It has been proven time and time again that people who offend children cannot be rehabilitated. Yet we put these people into jail with short sentences. They come back out on probation and so on and reoffend.
Those people cannot be rehabilitated. Our duty is to ensure that society is protected and we should be taking immediate action to see that it happens.