Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for that very challenging question. I could go through a lot of decisions but I guess the most recent one I can think of is a murder that occurred in Washington state.
The victims were in Washington state. The crime was committed there. Canada really did not have any interest in this crime other than we do not like to see innocent people murdered. However the people who were murdered were not Canadian citizens, they were American citizens. Through good fortune, the people who committed the crime ended up in Canadian territory. With the Singh decision and so on, they had full rights to use our system or to basically exhaust it. They made it to the Supreme Court of Canada and the supreme court did something very astonishing.
As a lawyer, I respect the American process. It believes in reasonable doubt. One is innocent until proven guilty. One is entitled to a defence counsel. Long before that was ever an entitlement in Canada, the public purse provided one with defence counsel. The supreme court of the United States has a long history of appointing defence counsel to represent people who have limited means and so on and some major decisions have worked through the system. One is entitled to a trial before one's peers, a jury and so on. It is a system much criticized in the rest of the world as favouring the accused too much.
The Supreme Court of Canada decides that American judgment as to what it should do with criminals in America is not good enough, that Canadians know better, especially the Supreme Court of Canada, and that Americans have no right to decide the penalties if they are not in line with our penalty system.
Capital punishment is totally alien to our value system. The American supreme court never asked the people of Washington state or the other 280 million people in the United States whether they thought capital punishment was warranted in this situation. It knew better and decided to impose its decision on the Americans as if they were in some banana republic or in some dictatorship in Africa or in the Middle East or something like that. The Supreme Court of Canada has been doing that internally.
There have been many other cases. There was a case seven or eight years ago. It was actually from my province. A person, whose name I forget, killed 14 or 15 children in California and ended up on our soil. It was a decision very much like this. He worked his way through the system. Fortunately, the Supreme Court of Canada still had some people who had some good judgement. A four to three decision ruled that this guy should go back to California. The plane was running at the airport in Prince Albert. American authorities were waiting at the Prince Albert institution. They rushed him out of there, put him on the plane and flew him out of the country before some immigration lawyer could start another application.
My understanding is that this fellow is still working his way through the system in the United States. The Americans are not finished with him. However, I think in many ways the government would have preferred that this individual stay in Canada where we are much more compassionate and caring in regard to these sorts of individuals than a lot of other people.
They know better and we have a Supreme Court of Canada that definitely knows a lot better than the average Joe in Canada. Those people have a lot more wisdom. They have been on the 28th storey in Toronto, looking out the window through a lot of smog for a lot of time and that gives them a lot clearer picture of the landscape of the country and what should be done.
There are a lot of examples of this sort of thing. To me it gets right to the whole question of the justice system in the country. It is defective.