Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to speak to Bill C-251. It has been ongoing in the House for some time and, I must say, with a fair bit of acrimony. I am not sure if the debate has gotten into the rights or wrongs of the bill. It seems to be more that it did not come from one particular source or that it was not sanctioned by the cabinet, for instance, and therefore it is not going to go.
This particular bill deals with a pretty basic issue in the country, which is whether or not multiple murderers and rapists are getting the right amount of prison time for their crimes. I, too, have a private member's bill in the House on consecutive versus concurrent sentences, but it does not deal murderers and rapists. It deals with individuals who are already in prison and who unlawfully go at large. At a facility in my community there have been 23 unlawfully at large prisoners in the last six months. That is only one facility out of the seven in the area.
What happens is that they go and commit a crime or whatever and get a concurrent sentence. In other words, there is no extra time. A guy goes into prison thinking he can escape on a dump truck or something else in order to get out. Once he is out he robs a bank. He just goes back to prison and the courts say that he was a bad boy and that he should not do it again. He receives the same amount of time.
At the moment, I am not going to deal with that particular issue, even though I think it is important, because this particular issue on Bill C-251 is much more important. This is about people who commit severe crimes, multiple crimes, multiple murders and rapes.
This frequently happens in my community in the lower mainland of British Columbia. Victims enter the courtroom thinking that the individual will get life and they will never see him again. What happens most of the time is that the faint hope clause, section 745 of the Criminal Code, will take light and give opportunity for an individual to get out of prison after 15 years.
The terrible tragedy of all that is that those parents, families and victims from way back when the original crime was committed think the person is away for life and they can put the terrible tragedy in their past history and get on with life. However, after 15 years the person can apply under the faint hope clause and the battle starts all over again.
I am already in a situation with Colin Thatcher who is about to apply for a section 745 hearing. All of the victims will once again have to relive the tragedy of 15 years ago. His wife was bludgeoned to death 20 times and shot in the back of the head. They will have to relive this all over again. They are asking whether the punishment fits the crime. In this case we have serious rape offences and multiple murders. Very few people today are satisfied with the fact that an individual gets life because life does not mean life in Canada.
Way back, when the Liberal government did away with the death penalty, it said that it would bring in life as a penalty. Little unknown to most of us, the Liberals said that life is 25 years but it could be reduced by 10 years by applying under the faint hope clause to get an early release. We did not know much about that because by the time it started it was 1992, some 16 years later.
We have seen some terrible situations of individuals who were originally up for life, and where families thought they were in prison for life, but who were in fact out on the street 16 and 17 years later.
What we have to deal with is whether Bill C-251 is an appropriate bill. I sincerely believe it is. The second issue is how we get it through the House of Commons. We know that cabinet, by and large, is not in favour of this, but this is not a cabinet bill. It is not a piece of government legislation. It comes from an individual, an individual with the support of a majority of the members in the House.
Just because it is not government legislation, it does not come from cabinet and it does not have the support of those in cabinet does not mean the bill should not be carried. It means that maybe the individual who brought the bill forward to the House is a lot closer to the grassroots of the country than the cabinet may like to think. This is one of the difficulties with private members' bills in the House. Cabinet thinks private members' legislation interferes with an agenda.
I have had considerable experience with private members' legislation being a member of a subcommittee that looks at it. This legislation is a lot closer to the grassroots of the country than much of the legislation put forward and tabled by cabinet.
It can be said that overnight success usually takes about 10 years in the House of Commons. We have been at this long enough to recognize that this issue is not going to go away. It is time for those of us who really believe in this to stand up and be accounted for and not to stay home because we were told to stay home by government members or a whip. It is time to stand up and be counted.
It is interesting that in the bill, as the member who sponsored it has said, judges have complete discretion as to whether to use it or not. That in and of itself should be enough to waylay the fears or concerns of anybody on the other side that here we go down the slope of always issuing consecutive sentences.
I wish it could be said that judges in the country issue the maximums. However, in my experience judges are often implementing and imposing sentences that are minimums, not maximums. We see it all the time under the Young Offenders Act and when they deal with drugs, they give minimum not maximum sentences.
What is important here, although it says “using complete judicial discretion”, the next stage for me would be to try to convince some of these judges to use some of that discretion rather than the minimum sentences that they give.
If an individual is sentenced to two consecutive sentences, to a maximum of 50 years, is that so bad? I am not going to repeat the names of those who should have it, but I am going to say that any individual in the country perpetrating multiple murders should serve an appropriate amount time for that crime. When we get into two, three and four multiple murders, we should not be saying that one 25 year sentence is adequate. It is not for the victims of the crime.
In view of the bill, which is significant to the House of Commons and to Canadians, I move:
That the question be now put.