Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to engage in the debate on Bill C-9. It is my first intervention on a bill since the election. I want to acknowledge the support of my electors in Scarborough—Rouge River. I continue to be supported and have wind in my sails as a member because of the strong support of my electors, and I thank them for that.
The bill would make a change to the conditional sentencing provisions of the Criminal Code. Bills dealing with crime and sentencing around here have a noble heritage, going back a century. One of the early interveners said, “Boy, we have a problem with crime and our voters know it”. We have had a problem with crime since the beginning of time. We would not have enacted the Criminal Code over 100 years ago if we had not.
However, sentencing continues to be a modern issue and we continue to adjust our sentencing regime in Canada, as do other countries, to meet the needs of the changing demographics and population.
The bill would make a change to remove the availability of conditional sentencing for a group of crimes that are described very generically in the bill. In the end, I have difficulty with that generic description and therefore I am inclined to be negative on the bill. However, I will acknowledge that my colleagues in the previous Liberal government introduced a bill which would have altered conditional sentencing to remove its availability from a certain group of crimes.
The bill before the House now appears to do it with a much broader list of crimes and it is for that reason that I am cautious about giving support to it.
At issue here is whether we have a huge crime problem, in particular, with reference to crimes that are on the list where conditional sentencing is available. I do not have enough wisdom to know whether we do or we do not. If the bill goes to committee, the committee will review the bill with some of these issues in mind. If it does not, we will not have to deal with it.
As we begin on this, I have the perception that the government has spent a bit of time generating what I call the politics of fear by telling everyone we have a huge crime problem and that we are all in jeopardy because of that. The facts are that in a relative and a real sense, we do not. Are there crimes? Yes. Are they serious crimes? Yes. However, all of the trend lines in crime are down, with the odd yearly spike up or spike down. I will refer to some statistics later on in my remarks, statistics from Statistics Canada. They are there for everyone to see. They are on the web and they have been obtained and analyzed seven ways to Sunday, but the information is there for all to see. Therefore, I do not think we have a huge crime problem.
Do we have problems from community to community? Yes, we do. Sometimes the solutions involve enforcement. Sometimes it involves some community action, crime prevention. Sometimes it is just the result of a bad crew or a bad gang. There are solutions out there for each of these and communities eventually get to them with the essential help of government to liaise with community groups.
In my particular constituency, and I have a Toronto constituency, we had a very serious problem such as criminal gangs, murders, drug dealing and a lot of the bad stuff. The streets had a problem. I, and MPs from the region, knew it, so did the city, so did the province and the federal government.
Following concerted police action about three years ago, the result was the arrests of some 25 or so gang members. The crime rate dropped for 19 weeks following this police action. There was not a serious criminal incident in Scarborough for 19 weeks, and Scarborough has a population of about 600,000, bigger than most places in Canada.
The police have learned how to use that toolbox of procedures to deal with this type of crime. In this case they were creative, along with the prosecutors, and imposed very strict bail conditions. These individuals, having been arrested and charged, would ordinarily be back out on the street pending their trials. In Canada one does not go to jail until one is convicted. One is free until convicted and sent to jail.
Bail conditions were developed, which had police officers doing bed checks. They would go to the residence of the person on bail and check to ensure that he was at home at 7:30 p.m. or 8:30 p.m., whatever the bail restriction was. If he was not, that constituted another offence, another arrest and a further detention.
The point I am making is that the solution to that problem was not to double the sentence for the crime. It was not to remove conditional sentencing. It was simply to creatively use the toolbox of procedures that were in the Criminal Code. The police have successfully done that.
Only two weeks ago the police conducted a similar operation in the west end of Toronto, the largest bust, if I can use the term, or arrest of gang members in the history of Toronto and Ontario. They will use these same techniques. We are learning to deal with these localized problems of crime.
I want to come back to this politics of fear issue. I mentioned it in the justice committee recently. I urge members to avoid the politics of fear and to look at the real data. If we do not look at the facts, we will fail to make good public policy.
I recently noted the fact that people said we had a lot of child poverty, which is a huge challenge, and that the House promised in 1990 to address it. They say nothing has been done and we have not made any progress. The statistics that came out two months ago, and poverty has a whole lot to do with crime, showed that we had made huge progress in dealing with poverty in Canada. Yet I have not heard much about it and I am not too sure why.
Statistics Canada tells us that between 1996 and 2004 the number of poor families dropped from 1.3 million to 865,000. That is a huge drop. Yes, there are still poor families and there is a challenge.
The other one was the proportion of families living below the poverty line. The first one was the number of children living in poor families. The second is the percentage of families who are living in poverty, defined generally across the country, dropping from 12.1% to 8.5%. That is a huge drop. Governments, not just the federal government but provincial and municipal, are collectively making progress. We have to keep that data in mind as we make public policy decisions about poverty, anti-poverty measures or what we will do to deal with children growing up in poverty.
It is the same thing in the area of crime statistics. I am not going to do a crime show. This is not politics of fear. What I am trying to highlight is real data about where we stand in Canada in terms of crime. I have selected a quote from Juristat, the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics. We pay for this as taxpayers. It is available on the Internet and the government relies heavily on this information.
After reaching its lowest point in more than three decades in 2003-04, the national homicide rate jumped 12% to 1.95 victims per 1,000 population. That was the data for 2004. That was a spike upward of the rate of homicide in Canada. It sounds like a significant spike and if we were one of the victims or the family of one of the victims, it is a huge spike. In that case it is binary, that my husband or my son was killed.
Overall, the trend is down and it has been going down since about 20 years ago. Since 1961, when national homicide statistics were first collected, there have been two distinct trends. Following a period of stability between 1961 and 1966, the homicide rate more than doubled over the next 10 years reaching a peak of 3.03 homicide victims per 100,000 in 1975. That was 30 years ago.
Since 1975, despite annual fluctuations, the rate has gradually declined from 3.03 to where it is now at 1.95 following the spike I just mentioned. That is a conspicuous drop of roughly one-third. In fact, it has dropped by more than one-third and I hope it will continue to drop.
I will point out for reference only that the homicide rate in similar data from the United States, our closest neighbour, is 5.70 per 100,000 compared to our 1.95. That is a huge difference. It appears to be a lot safer in Canada than it is south of the border. I am not sure why but if we look at what governments are doing or not doing on how we sentence people, I suggest it might not be appropriate to look south of the border when we look at how to sentence. Whatever we are doing here now seems to be working in terms of the long run trends.
Another notable statistic in the homicide envelope was also one having to do with youth. The total number of youth aged 12 to 17 accused of homicide fell from 57 in 2003 to 40 in 2004. That is a significant one year drop and it says that the rate of youth accused of that crime was at its second lowest point in more than 30 years. Over that trend line, we do not have a huge crime problem developing. The trend line is down.
The reasons for that probably are not related just to what government does or does not do, the various governments across the country and the federal government. There is a huge demographic component to this. People will recall the post-war baby phenomenon. As those post-war babies hit their most active years in the seventies and eighties the crime rate went up. I referred to it earlier in the general rates. It went up and then it started to go down. As those post-war babies reach their retirement years, which the Canadian pension plan says is really soon, they do not appear to be out robbing banks.
I represent a riding in Ontario. Juristat states that Ontario's crime rate was the lowest in the country for the second year in a row. The violent crime rate has dropped by 2% from the prior year to 2004. The youth crime rate dropped 4% in 2004. The rate of youths charged by police dropped 6% while the rate of youths cleared by means other than formal charge also declined. It states that over the past decade the national crime rate has fallen 12%.
The 1990s was a period of general decline in crime followed by relative stability from 2000-02. I could go on but the data is available for anyone who is interested. We spent good taxpayer to collect it. My purpose in raising these stats is to show that the problem is not so bad that we need to double all our sentences and change all our laws to deal with crime.
I was a member of this House when we finally produced, after a century, Canada's first bill on sentencing. That was in the mid-nineties and it was a huge exercise. It followed some bad years when how we sentenced, how we incarcerated and how we looked after public safety were justifiably questioned. There were a lot of escapes which were followed by killings, and a lot of parole problems. I am happy to say that a lot of the bad stuff that was around then is not around now. I will give appropriate credit to colleagues in this House, the Canadian public, Corrections Canada, governments from time to time and the people who run the penitentiaries and jails. They are doing a much better job of managing sentencing.
The reason I refer to the sentencing bill is that it makes it really clear what the criteria should be for sentencing a convicted person. The three most important parts are: first, the denunciation factor, not the revenge factor, the denunciation of the state and the public with respect to the offender. It is the mantra that “you do the crime, you do the time”. Denunciation is one factor when a judge passes sentence or when we in this House pick a sentencing range for a crime.
The second criteria is deterrence. The existence of the penalty should deter a potential offender. I am not speaking about the guy in front of the court now because he has not been deterred. I am speaking about deterring another person in the public. Deterrence is a factor.
The third criteria is the rehabilitation phase. In addition to denunciation and deterrence, sentencing should enable the offender to choose a path that will allow him or her to become law-abiding citizens and to get into a lifestyle that will not bring them back into conflict with the law.
At the same time as the sentencing bill was put in place, we adopted the conditional sentencing rules. Conditional sentencing allows a judge to place a convicted person into a regime where the standard sentencing provisions are not followed. They do not necessarily have to go to jail and the parole provisions are altered to accommodate them. In every case, it was the intention of that legislation to enable a judge to pick a conditional sentence appropriate to the offender with reference to those same sentencing criteria, denunciation, deterrence and rehabilitation.
If a judge could obtain those objectives by using a conditional sentence, that was a good thing. It was good for the public, good for the offender and good for the institution that did not have to be used because our institutions cost us between $60,000 and $80,000 a year to house one offender. If we could get denunciation, deterrence and rehabilitation by using conditional sentencing that was a good thing.
As things evolved, it appeared that some judges in some locations made use of the conditional sentencing provisions. I am sure they were coached properly by prosecution and defence lawyers perhaps in cases where the public felt that not enough attention had been paid to the denunciation factor.
As a result of that, it is easy for a public policymaker here in this place to decide that we should restrict somewhat how conditional sentencing should be used, particularly where violence is involved in the offence.
In the previous bill, which never made it all the way through this House, it had a range of sentences involving violence where conditional sentencing was to be restricted, and I can support that. I think most Canadians would see that as reasonable.
This bill, in my judgment, goes a little too far and maybe a lot too far. If it passes the House at second reading, the committee will have a chance to review that and there will be lots of experts with lots of opinions.