Madam Speaker, I believe the bill before us this evening, Bill C-329, is an attempt on the part of the mover of the bill to shift responsibility with regard to enforcement of provisions that are imposed upon people who have been accused or have been charged and are either out on bail conditions, recognizance or, if convicted, on parole.
We have an existing system for how this works. I think we have to look at the law from that perspective and recognize, I suppose, historically, if I can start from that vantage point, that for more than 400 years, arguably as far back as the Magna Carta, society has looked very closely at how we treat individuals within our society and when we require our enforcement officers, whether they be police or other agents, to have the judicial authority to apprehend someone or to actually conduct search and seizures of property.
We have a lengthy history of doing this and it is a constant balance. I believe what is being attempted here is to shift that balance somewhat. The provisions of the bill, as it stands now, would be to implement in the Criminal Code additional authority for our regular police officers to charge, apprehend and arrest without warrant individuals who had breached the terms of their conditions of release on parole.
The argument that we hear being made to support the purpose of this bill and its passing into law is that police officers need this authority. I think we have to stand back, look at that and say that there is other legislation, specifically the Corrections and Conditional Release Act, that already empowers agents in those agencies to enforce the provisions of that act.
The argument we hear against that is that it is just not working very well. My answer to that is an amendment, not to the Criminal Code to shift authority, but an amendment to the Corrections and Conditional Release Act. I think there may be some merit to considering that.
We have certainly seen a number of cases in the country where individuals, either charged or convicted of crimes, who obviously were not benefiting from the restrictions they were supposed to be functioning under and in fact were abusive of those conditions or terms of release and were ignoring them or breaching them on a regular basis. I therefore believe there are strong arguments for tightening this up but the tightening up should occur under that legislation rather than the Criminal Code.
When we go back to look at our long history of determining people's rights to security of the person, that is, from unreasonable arrest, we put quite clear restrictions on when police officers and enforcement officers under the Criminal Code can apprehend without an arrest warrant. What I believe we would be doing under this bill is interfering with the role that we have imposed on agents, whether they be parole officers or agents at the provincial level who enforce these conditions, and leaving to them, which is what I believe we should do, the authority to enforce. If it is not working that well, then we should amend that act and provide them with additional authority.
My final point is on the existing provisions within the Criminal Code. We have heard a bit of it this evening about the need to add this additional authority to our police officers for them to be able to prevent crimes from being committed by individuals who are out under bail conditions, recognizance or on parole. Subsection 495(2)(d)(iii) of the Criminal Code has a specific provision that allows police officers to arrest without warrant when it would “prevent the continuation or repetition of the offence or the commission of another offence”.
If police officers have reasonable grounds to believe that an offence is being committed or will continue to be committed, under the existing Criminal Code, they can arrest without a warrant. With regard to prevention, the code already has those provisions in it. This to some degree would be duplicitous. More important, and I come back to the essential point, this enforcement to deal with people who abuse their bail or parole conditions should be left under the Corrections and Conditional Release Act and to the officers and agents who are responsible thereunder.