Madam Speaker, I congratulate my colleague, the member for Pickering—Ajax—Uxbridge for putting this bill forward. This individual has repeatedly put forth private members' bills and motions to this House that are constructive, which have advanced the debate and are for the benefit of the public at large. I take my hat off to him for once again putting forth a welcome bill. It deals with a very serious situation which he articulated so well in his speech.
Death is never welcome, but never more so when it happens in a senseless form and takes away an innocent person. My colleague mentioned it has been a massive problem in his province in particular, but also in the rest of the country. Many people have been killed or maimed when somebody fleeing from the police has caused a crash.
To put the cold hard statistics on the table, between 1991 and 1997, there were 39 people killed, six of whom were innocent people, and 198 people were injured. I can say as an emergency room physician that people get injured very badly in high speed accidents. Many of those people to this day still suffer. They are scarred by the trauma that has been inflicted upon them because of the high speed chases.
Let us put some names to the statistics. In February 1999, Sarah Bowman, 20, of Brampton was hit by a man fleeing from police on Queen Street and died of massive internal injuries. On November 15, 1998 Mr. John Gibbons, 47, of Oshawa, a father of four, died after his car was broadsided by a pick-up truck being chased by the police. On June 18, 1993, Patricia Cavanaugh, 23, of Markham died when a stolen mini-van being chased ran a light and crashed into her car. It would take me all day to go through this list, but I am not going to. The point has been made.
This situation needs to be rectified. The current penalties for committing such an offence are inadequate. I have worked in jail both as a correctional officer and as a physician. I can say that many of the people who commit traffic offences such as fleeing from police and drunk driving scoff at what they have done. There are people with offence lists as long as their arms for repeatedly committing offences for drunk driving and other traffic offences such as fleeing from police. They laugh because the penalties are not there.
Some may criticize this bill for dealing with punitive actions. Some may argue that punitive actions do not work, but I can say that if the penalty fit the crime, those people would not be wilfully and negligently jeopardizing the lives of innocent people.
There currently are penalties in the Criminal Code. A person who is sentenced to dangerous driving and is convicted is punishable by either imprisonment for a period not exceeding five years or a summary conviction. Summary convictions are nothing. If a person causes injury, the penalty for imprisonment is for a term not exceeding 10 years. If the act causes death, the penalty for imprisonment is a term not exceeding 14 years.
Certainly those are significant penalties. What the public may not understand is that when people are sentenced, they do not serve the actual time.
There is no truth in sentencing. In point of fact someone who is sentenced for committing an act, outside of first degree murder, serves only one-sixth of the sentence before they are eligible for parole. What kind of penalty is it for somebody to be sentenced to six years for killing someone and serves only one year for that offence? What kind of message does that send? If somebody takes a life, they need to pay with a commensurate penalty. And they need to pay that price in our jails.
Bill C-440 provides for good penalties. If someone is not injured, the maximum penalty is extended to two years but if someone is hurt, it is a maximum of 10 years. These are conservative and should run consecutively, not concurrently.
A concurrent sentence is one which runs in conjunction with another. The person receives no extra penalty. Absolutely none. Nothing. There is no penalty. Criminals know that. Furthermore criminals also recognize that in the commission of multiple offences the penalties are plea bargained away. What kind of message is that?
We do not want to lock everybody up but there are certain offences that show a wilful negligence for the health and welfare of the Canadian public. The minister needs to put herself in the shoes of those family members who are bereaved by the loss of a loved one. The minister has to look at this from both sides. That is all we ask.
Support comes from many quarters, from the public, from the solicitor general of Ontario and from the police. The police are asking for help. It is not their fault. The police are doing their duty yet in the commission of their duty their hands are often tied. The justice system is not supporting the police in this country today. It is causing an erosion of the morale of our police officers whom we rely upon and trust to keep us safe. We have to give them the same consideration they give us.
The penalties in Bill C-440 are needed. We would like increased penalties for drunk driving. We also want truth in sentencing. If a person is sentenced to two years, they should serve two years. If a person is sentenced to 10 years they should serve 10 years. If sentenced to life, the person should not get out after 15 years but after 25 years. This is why our party has been fighting for the removal of the so-called faint hope clause, section 745.
We want to make sure that the police have our support. This includes financial support. We have been seeing for a very long time that the RCMP and police forces are not getting the support to do their job.
The RCMP training facility has been closed. How can we close down the training facility for the RCMP? It is ridiculous. How can we have police officers trying to do their jobs if they are not given the hours to prosecute the people they are arresting? People are being arrested but then they are released. They cannot be prosecuted because the police forces do not have the manpower, the time nor the resources to do so.
Governments have repeatedly made our legal system so complicated. The conviction process and the process of doing police work are convoluted, complex and inefficient. It takes a police officer many hours to do a job that would have taken much less time years ago. It presently takes two to three times the time to formulate and process a conviction. It is estimated that it takes six hours of office work for a police officer to process a simple drunk driving conviction.
How can police officers do their work with the complexity the government and other governments have engineered? If the Minister of Justice wants to do something along with supporting Bill C-440 she needs to work with her provincial counterparts to simplify the system now.
Again, I compliment my colleague, the member for Pickering—Ajax—Uxbridge for taking a leadership role with this bill. It is a bill for personal safety. It is a bill for the public good. It is a bill that hopefully will end the carnage on our streets.
If it is acceptable, I seek unanimous consent to pass Bill C-440 at this point in time.