Mr. Speaker, it has been said many times today that one of the flaws in this bill is primarily the fact that there is no retroactivity. The list will come out on the national sex offender registry and it will be completely empty and being completely empty, it will also necessarily be completely useless.
Just in case, as time goes forward, this thing actually does a tiny bit of good, and I do emphasize the word tiny, at some future point someone is going to commit one of these heinous acts and that person's name will be put into the book. However, because the government wants to keep not only all the people who have already committed offences of this nature out of the book but also wants to provide an opportunity for people who commit these offences in the future to be kept out of the book, it put in a provision which says that if this does more harm to the poor person who sexually molested a young child than public good, then that person's name does not have to go in the book either.
Let us consider for a minute why on earth the Liberal government would do this type of thing. There are two reasons.
One I almost hate to use because it gives the government the credit of being clever in a very sinister sort of way. The first reason is that we have to consider the people who make up the primary front line of the Liberal government starting with the Prime Minister and working down through the cabinet to junior cabinet ministers. The vast majority of them have listed “lawyer” as their former occupation. They are lawyers. They have that background and training. They have that strange kind of mindset. I do not necessarily wish to attack other lawyers. At least they have had the dignity to continue to do what it is they do and not come in here and combine it with politics. It seems that combination brings out some really twisted ideas.
The other reason is a more Machiavellian look into the psyche of the Liberal mind. This is the kind of psyche that produced the non-position the Prime Minister has taken on Iraq. The Minister of National Defence cannot even decide if we are there or not there, if we are there but are invisible, if we are visible but it is not because we are really there because we are not. That is the kind of mind spin that comes out of this.
The Machiavellian approach goes like this. The Liberals say, “We know the Canadian Alliance received a great deal of support when it came out with this push for a national sex offender registry. We know that the public is demanding this. What we want to do is come out with something that makes the public think we have actually done something. We want to take the pressure off, so we will do just the tiniest bit. No one who has already committed an offence will be in there, so we will not lose any support from the pedophiles, child rapists and molesters who have already committed an offence. After all, we went to a great deal of trouble to make sure they were able to vote while they are still in jail. The last thing we would want is to do something that would offend them”.
“We finally got this new cache of votes, so we certainly do not want to do anything that offends convicted people by telling them, just when they are able to start voting for a member of Parliament, that we are going to put their names in a sex registry. They might be offended by that and gee, we do not want to do that. Let us make sure that those who have already committed offences do not go in the book. We are going to put some other people in jail in the future and we want their votes too, so let us make sure they have the opportunity of not getting their names into the book either. We will leave that little loophole for them and make sure they understand where it came from. It came from us Liberals, so they will want to vote for us when they get to cast their vote in a federal jail”.
The other is an even more Machiavellian part of the same thing. That is where the Liberals actually want to come out with this and then have all the people who pushed and worked so hard to have this brought in and who put pressure on the government say, “See? We were not so bad not having brought it in because now we have brought it in and it really is not doing any good. A big fuss has been created over nothing. People were kind of looking down their noses at the Liberal Party because we would not bring this in. Now that we have brought it in, nothing has really changed. Everyone was wrong and we were right and therefore, people had better start thinking better about the Liberal Party because we know what we are doing when we do not bring in these laws that others want. They are not going to work”.
Certainly the laws are not going to work the way the government brings them forward.
I do not know how much time I have, but I can assure members that this is something on which I could talk at length. It is something which resonates strongly in my riding. It has been asked already here by a couple of my colleagues how this resonates in different ridings.
I represent a western riding, as do most of my colleagues. I have to assume that people in eastern ridings feel as strongly about this as we do in the west, that they are just as appalled at a government that brings in legislation for which people have been calling, then emasculates it in such a way that it has no real impact or effect.
I have heard people talking about judicial activism. That is where people are complaining about decisions made by the judges in this country. In this particular case, we are going to get into a situation where the government will say that if it starts putting people's names retroactively in the book, the judges may not like it. The judges may decide that it is not constitutionally fair, that we have not been reasonable to those terrible criminals and we have to uphold their rights. They would challenge the government.
I talked to a judge some time ago about the concept of judicial activism. He said to me, “I am not going to stand here and say that there is not a judge anywhere who makes a bad decision. We are human. We are like every other group. But before you start coming down on judges, start writing better legislation. When Parliament writes sloppy legislation, judges have no alternative but to consider the ramifications of what is written. Fix the legislation. Write better legislation. After doing that, if you still feel you have a problem, that is when you need to start looking at the judges”.
Let me give an example of this. I have a private member's bill on conditional sentencing right which tries to fix what the government itself admitted was a problem but would not do anything about. Conditional sentencing is something brought in by the Liberal government which says that judges can consider if jailing a person is not necessarily in the public good. If there is nothing to be gained from it, the judge may, at his or her discretion, decide to sentence a person to serve time in the public, not to have to go to jail, to serve no jail time whatsoever.
After the Liberals brought this in, not surprisingly we found that some people who committed violent offences, in some cases very violent rapes, were being let go with a conditional sentence. People who heard this were absolutely outraged, as well they might be. They wrote to the government. Certainly they wrote to us asking for our help and we raised it in the House of Commons.
The Minister of Justice said in defence that it was never his intention that it should apply to violent offenders. We said, “Then it is an easy fix. All you have to do is bring in a simple amendment that says it does not apply to violent offenders. We can pass it in the House in a day and we can take that loophole out”.
I believe that the minister said that in 1995. It is 2003 and it has still not been brought forward. I have now put it in a private member's bill. Hopefully with the new system we have managed to bring in, I may get to bring that bill before the House one day and hopefully the government will recognize the wisdom of passing it. That is just one example.
Another one which is a little different situation is statutory release. Statutory release is where someone, and in this case we are talking about child molesters, pedophiles, and people who commit sex offences, in some cases very serious ones, serve two-thirds of their sentences. They gave no cooperation inside prison. They did not take any kind of courses that would help them deal with whatever makes their minds so twisted to do those type of things. Maybe they have had some offences inside the prison, they have had problems with other prisoners, they have been disruptive. They have served two-thirds of their sentence and they automatically get out. It is not even subject to review by the parole board.
These are the kinds of things we want to change but the government says no, it cannot do that, that it is the prisoner's right. In fact, the Liberal government believes that prisoners retain every right and privilege of law-abiding citizens, except obviously the ability to keep them incarcerated. I fundamentally disagree with that.
If people want to hear more about this and particularly about statutory release, they should feel free to look at my website. There is a great deal of information on it. If the Liberals would like to raise questions, I would love to hear what they have to say about this.