Madam Speaker, I would like to thank the member for St. John's West for his remarks.
This is, despite anything suggested to the contrary, an important piece of legislation. It is not a trivial matter. The hon. member has accused us of killing time and that this debate is irrelevant. I suppose if that were the case, I might congratulate the hon. member for joining in the spirit of the thing.
I found the connection between the subject under discussion, amendments to the Corrections and Conditional Release Act and the state of the east coast fishery, incredibly creative. It was a line I had not heard before, but I want to commend him for his creativity.
It is important to return to the essence of the matter, which is the whole question of crime and punishment in this country and how we deal with it. It can be said that the prison system is a reflection of society's failures. It is what happens to people when we do not get it right, when we fail to make and create high functioning citizens.
I have some experience with the prison system because in the 1970s, as a young professor of history at Dalhousie, I used to spend time visiting young students who were inmates in Springhill Penitentiary. I have some personal knowledge of the complexities of issues surrounding crime and punishment. The impression I took away was that these were very complex issues.
We are examining why it is that people do dreadful things to each other, and why is it that we fail as human beings and have to be punished? The question for us as we contemplate amendments to the act is, how do we test our own civilization and how do we protect our own civilization? How do we get the balance right, as the member for Burlington suggested?
How do we treat people in our society who fail, people who are vulnerable, while we protect other people's rights? How do we measure our civilization in terms of protecting their rights when they have often taken away the rights of others? These are the difficult questions which surround the way in which we treat people when we send them to prison and then decide when to let them out, and when it is that we can trust them to be integrated back into society.
It is interesting that the amendments which we are discussing were actually recommendations made by the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights. In our system, justice and human rights go hand in hand. Everybody's human rights must be protected, even the rights of people we do not like very much and who have done bad things.
That is why we have provisions in this bill regarding the accelerated parole review process. We are trying to get the balance right again. We are trying to ensure that people who are capable of rehabilitation will be rehabilitated. We are trying to ensure that we protect society from those who will reoffend.
These are very difficult judgment calls. What determines the outcome of that is often a consequence of what we do for people while they are in prison, whether we can actually help them prepare for a life beyond prison. Many people in prison do not have much education. They have been denied the breaks that the rest of us have had.
Another important component in this set of amendments is the requirement for Correctional Service Canada to review all offenders who are entitled to statutory release for possible referral to detention or the imposition of special conditions. Once again we are balancing off the rights of prisoners with the rights of all of us to be safe in our communities. A very tough call and one which requires tremendous attention.
I know from my experience with the prisoners of Springhill when the importance of temporary absences was a major issue. How does one reintegrate people into society from what is an incredibly protected environment? There is something quite strange about prison. People actually go in to some unreal place, which is not at all like the world we live in. In fact, they lose whatever skills they had in society and so, upon release, they have to get used to society bit by bit.
I can remember, as a young professor of history, in the college where I was teaching, young prisoners coming with their parole officers to get used to the idea of being reintegrated with people of both sexes, of all ages and of all backgrounds.
What we do with temporary absences is incredibly important. We must ensure we know what the rules are. We must clarify the decision-making authority and we must be more purposeful about why we have temporary absences. We must socialize these people. They will be joining us in a better state or a worse state, but they will eventually get out of prison, except if they are there for life.
In this difficult task of balancing everybody's rights, we must hear from the victims. It is really important that we take into account their rights to be present at a Parole Board hearing to say why it is that this person should not get out or what it is that this person has done to them and their family. That is part of natural justice and must be brought to bear.
It is also important to recognize, as my colleague pointed out, that there are, among the prison population, older people, people who have fallen ill and who will not in the normal course of events survive to come out of prison. As human beings we must respond to those illnesses and difficulties. We must let them out to die in some kind of dignity, recognizing that they may have denied that dignity to somebody else. That is a tough call for all of us as human beings.