Madam Speaker, I am pleased to speak on Motion No. 1 related to Bill C-37, amendments to the Judges Act. The motion put forward by the Bloc member is that Bill C-37 be amended by deleting clause 5.
Clause 5 has to do with pay increases for judges. The way the pay increase would work is it is an increase of 4.1% retroactive from April 1, 1997 to March 31, 1998, and an additional 4.1% from April 1, 1998 to March 31, 1999. At that time the salaries will be reviewed by a newly created body called the judicial compensation and benefits commission. What this amounts to is that judges will get about an 8.3% increase over two years. It is important to note that the average salary for judges at the moment is approximately $140,000 a year.
A few minutes ago in the debate the member for Windsor—St. Clair said that by talking about these judges and the outrageous decisions that they have been making we are undermining the prestige of the judges and the courts. I say to the hon. member that it is not us undermining the prestige of the judges and the courts, it is the judges who make the ridiculous decisions that appear out there. Many of my colleagues on this side of the House have given the most outrageous examples of decisions that have been made by judges over the last while. I will be giving a few from my own area as part of speaking to Motion No. 1. If these judges were more representative of their community and our community values we would not be faced with these problems.
In connection with the comments made by the member for Windsor—St. Clair, a poll last July showed that more than 50% of those polled have little faith in judges. Surely that is a very good message to all of us that there is something wrong if more than half the population feels that judges are not doing the right thing. It is time to address a major problem.
In the North Vancouver area a number of my close friends are members of the RCMP. In North Vancouver the RCMP looks after our policing. Some members have told me about their frustration with judges and how difficult it is as a police officer to get some sort of charge against somebody and then get it to stick. There are so many technical flaws or problems in the way of laying a charge in the first place and then to be successful in court to get somebody convicted. Then to get them put in jail is a tremendously difficult thing to do.
It is very frustrating for police officers who know they are faced with this problem every day. Police officers are working hard to keep our streets safe and to get these offenders dealt with. Yet starting constables have had their wages frozen for five years and the starting salary for a third year constable is in the range of $50,500 to about $52,400. That is $90,000 less than the judges who are making judgments on the sorts of criminals these police officers are bringing forward.
As many of my colleagues have mentioned earlier, most Canadians now are starting to think about the justice system not as a justice system but as a legal system, a wonderful place for the judges to share experiences with one another and to talk about the technicalities and how they can find flaws in the things that parliament has passed as our laws. The will of parliament should be ultimate in these decisions.
In the Lynn Valley area, like many other areas of the country, we have a fair bit of youth crime. Of my constituents, like those across Canada, well over 90% would like to see significant changes to the Young Offenders Act and they would like to see some judges being a lot more particular about the sentencing of youth offenders. For example, in May there was a court date for some young offenders in my riding who allegedly had committed a devastating crime in the Lynn Valley area in March.
What they are alleged to have done is that in the middle of night they attacked a person in the street, beat him so severely that plastic surgery was required and practically trashed a person's house and their almost brand new car. They were identified and arrested. But of course nobody could give out their names. It was extremely frustrating to the father of the victim who wants to take civil action against these people but was unable to get names until recently when they appeared in court. There is a general feeling in the community that these people should be named, especially once they are convicted.
There was a court date set for May. Only a few of these defendants actually showed up in court. What did the judge do? He said “you should tell your friends they really should appear”. He set a new court date and put the case off for another few months.
This is absolutely ridiculous and outrageous. Surely the judge should have issued arrest warrants immediately for those people who did not turn up. Instead, it was almost a flippant comment for him to make.
This is the sort of comment that brings judges into disrepute. Maybe they have been numbed by hearing so many cases that they just do not take anything seriously any more. They are at this point where we have to start imposing minimum sentences for these judges to use. Otherwise they are just not going to do anything.
There was another case in the Vancouver area recently where a prisoner in the Kent institution escaped from the institution in a cardboard box. He asked for a stand for his television set. He knew there were not any stands for television sets, so he then made the suggestion that a cardboard box would be fine.
The prison authorities found him a nice big cardboard box which he put under his TV set. While the cardboard box was there over a period of a few months, he reinforced it with bits of plywood and stuff that he got from the prison workshop. He knew a friend of his was going to be released at a certain date. On the night before he climbed into this box and his prisoner friend took it to his cell. It was put in storage overnight as personal effects of the prisoner who would be leaving the next morning.
At no time did the prison authorities ever check the box to see what was in there. The following morning it was loaded into the trunk of a car and left with the prisoner who was being released.
This prisoner who was in the cardboard box was then released from the trunk and he was out at large. He was recaptured within a short time. But he had already escaped numerous times from correctional facilities.
The ridiculous part was when he came to court for this crime, what did the judge do? He sentenced him all right to a number of years in prison but he made it concurrent with the sentence he was already serving. So there is no additional time. It is free time. Escaping from prison means nothing. They get it free. Try it again, please.
We have to congratulate the prisoner for his creativity in escaping in the cardboard box but there is absolutely no accountability for that and the judge undermines the confidence of the public by making ridiculous decisions like that.
There is a member on the government side who has been trying to get a private member's bill into this place which would get rid of these concurrent sentences and make people serve time for these types of crimes.
This prisoner had been into bank robberies and had been jailed for those a number of times and he has all these concurrent sentences. They get time for the first crime but not for subsequent withdrawals so it does not really matter what they do.
What we are really pointing out here is that if judges will have their pay increased from the already very generous level of $140,000 per year on average, it is about time they were a little more accountable. One of the things that the official opposition has proposed is that judges should be selected through a more democratic process.
If we cannot get to the point where the constituents actually elect the judges themselves to truly reflect community values, let us at least have some sort of public process where parliamentarians or MLAs at the provincial level can at least grill and question, get to the bottom and background of people who are to be appointed as judges. I think that is a reasonable approach. It is a step we should be taking and before any of us agree to pass a bill like Bill C-37 with these very generous pay increases we should be insisting on accountability for judges.