moved that Bill C-416, an act to amend the Criminal Code and the Youth Criminal Justice Act (sentencing principles), be read the second time and referred to a committee.
Mr. Speaker, on July 15, 2000, Valentino Harper was found guilty of manslaughter. He broke into the apartment of George Monias and beat him severely. While Mr. Monias lay on the floor, Mr. Harper took a 43 pound television set and dropped it on Mr. Monias' head, killing him.
On December 21, 2001, near Russell, Manitoba, RCMP constable Dennis Strongquill was fired upon by Robert Sand when he attempted to pull over a truck driven by Sand's brother. The brothers proceeded to pursue the constable back to the detachment where they rammed his cruiser trapping him. Robert Sand then fired four shotgun blasts into the body of the police officer. Constable Strongquill did not survive the attack.
Besides the horrible nature of these two events, what do they have in common? In both cases the assailant is of aboriginal descent, as is the victim. In both cases the lawyer has argued for a more lenient sentence based on the criminal's race. In both cases the judge must take into consideration the race of the guilty offender when making a sentencing determination.
However that has not always been the case. Since the Liberals made amendments to the Criminal Code in 1996, Canadian justice is no longer blind. It now peeks out from under the blindfold and checks to see what race someone is. Like the American Express card, a status card now has its privileges.
However a status card is not supposed to be a “get out of jail free” card. My bill would delete nine words from the Criminal Code and from the Youth Criminal Justice Act that instruct judges to pay “particular attention to the circumstances of aboriginal offenders”. Why did the government introduce this specific provision?
We know that as a percentage of the population of our country, aboriginal offenders are disproportionately represented in our penal institutions. The Liberal government wanted to appear sensitive to that reality so, rather than confront the root causes of the crime at the preventative stage, it decided that it would appear to address the problem after the crime had been committed. This created the present predicament where the old adage “Do the crime, do the time”, has been amended and now says “Do the crime, do the time, unless you're Indian”. That is flawed for several reasons.
First, the amendment is based on the erroneous assumption that judges have been discriminating and victimizing aboriginal Canadians. Professors Philip Stenning and Julian Roberts, in the Saskatchewan Law Review , wrote:
Recent data do not sustain the view that judges systematically discriminate against aboriginal offenders at the sentencing stage. Clearly there is a problem with the disproportionate numbers of aboriginal people in prison but the available evidence overwhelmingly suggests that these individuals did not get there through discrimination at the sentencing stage.
Second, there is no mention in the 1996 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples' report that the sentencing process contributes in a significant fashion to the over-representation of aboriginals in correctional facilities. It makes the frank admission that the over-representation of aboriginals in the correctional system is attributable to the substantially higher crime rate in aboriginal communities and for aboriginals.
This is the reality that must be changed.
Third, combined with the fact that aboriginal offenders commit more offences against the person, which are generally considered far more serious crimes, and that they have longer prior records, one would tend to believe that the median sentence would be longer for aboriginal offenders than for non-aboriginal offenders. That is not the case.
Carol La Prairie, who is a noted scholar and justice researcher, argued in a recent paper that data prior to the amendment revealed that at the federal level non-aboriginal offenders were being given longer sentences. I will quote from that report: “Aboriginal offenders are receiving significantly shorter sentences for attempted murder, assault causing injury and robbery”.
Therefore, discrimination against aboriginal offenders, according to the evidence, is not and has not been the problem.
By reducing sentences based on race, Canada's justice system disrespects the victims of those crimes. The majority of the victims of the crimes of aboriginal perpetrators are in fact aboriginal people themselves. According to the latest Statistics Canada figures, 35% of the aboriginal population in this country reported having been the victim of at least one crime. Aboriginal people are also more likely to be repeat victims. Aboriginal people experience violent crime at a rate that is nearly triple that for non-aboriginal people, and rates of spousal violence are also alarming. Approximately 25% of aboriginal women reported having been assaulted by a current or ex-spouse, compared to 8% for non-aboriginal women.
When we discount the sentences of aboriginal criminals, we discount justice for the victims of those crimes, an approach which uses racial generalizations to attempt to alter the rate of aboriginal incarceration, which introduces a new concept to our justice system: the concept of volume discounts for crime. More important, it places communal circumstances over individual responsibility. It is choosing criminals over victims.
On January 17, 2003, Clinton Derrick Byrd was found guilty of sexual assault. He had forced his wife to commit bestiality with a dog. He had been engaging in sex acts with his daughter, including sexual intercourse, for over 10 years. This behaviour commenced when she was not yet two years old. Why do the victims of this man's crimes, his wife and his own daughter, not deserve the full and equal protection of our justice system?
Constable Dennis Strongquill leaves behind six children. Why should their father's murderer receive leniency because he is an aboriginal man? Dennis Strongquill is an aboriginal. Dennis Strongquill's six children are aboriginal. Surely they deserve the equal protection of our justice system.
There is no other jurisdiction in the world that has followed our example, none that includes race as a factor in sentencing. By adding a racial distinction in the sentencing provisions of Canada's Criminal Code, the government has implied that aboriginal Canadians, by virtue of their ethnicity, are more likely to commit crimes. This stigmatization is intolerable. It offends all Canadians. Let me quote from an editorial in The Globe and Mail : “We do not endorse the Balkanization of the justice system with distinct sentencing rules based in any way on skin colour or ethnicity”.
But that is what has happened. The government has Balkanized our justice system and in so doing it has unfairly stigmatized aboriginal people. People who listen to these arguments are not convinced.