Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Richmond.
There is a pattern here. I do not know whether you have noticed it, Mr. Speaker, and I know you have been sitting as Chair for this entire Parliament, but there is a pattern here.
Step one of the pattern is to fan the flames of fear, usually on the basis of some egregious event that happened in public and has caught the public's attention. Step two is to step up to the microphones, to great fanfare, and announce once again that the government is very tough on crime.
Step three, also to great fanfare, is to do immediate interviews and television appearances, et cetera, and announce that the government has the solution. Step four is to table a bill.
Step five is to repeat steps one, two and three for as long as the media pay any attention, for as long as the public pays any attention, or for as long as the government needs to keep the channel on the channel that is currently on.
Mr. Speaker, I know that you are an experienced parliamentarian, but you may be surprised, or you may not be, to learn that this pattern was used 16 times in the first session of this Parliament. Sixteen out of the 64 bills presented to Parliament were crime related legislation, which means that about 25% of the legislation on the floor of the House is crime related legislation.
That is a lot of criminal legislation, but it is a great pattern. It appears to generate, how shall we say it, publicity more than it actually deals with the issues. However, because it is dealt with in such a piecemeal, hodge-podge fashion with the repetition of this pattern, it gives Canadians watching the debate a very small glimpse of a very large picture, whether it is a large picture of criminality or a large picture with respect to amendments to the Criminal Code or the youth justice legislation.
By dealing with it in this way, the government in effect gets 16 photo ops, 16 press conferences and 16 TV appearances, all to great effect for the propaganda machine of the Conservative Party, but not much actually gets accomplished. When the government went to prorogation, which killed all of the activity we had in the first session, it got to do it all over again.
In this session, six out of the 29 bills that are on the floor of the House are crime and crime-related bills, so again the pattern is repeated to great effect. The Conservative Party has six more photo ops, six more press conferences and, it hopes, at least six TV appearances. It gives the appearance of actually doing something about crime when in fact nothing is getting done about crime.
Instead of a comprehensive approach, which is what Mr. Justice Nunn suggested with respect to youth in this country, we have all these little series of one-offs.
I thought it would be particularly informative for those who are listening to know that Mr. Justice Nunn had 34 recommendations. Of those 34 recommendations, about 19 were of an administrative nature and are not the prerogative of this chamber. They are largely on how the youth justice system is administered. It is administered by the province.
However, six were specific suggestions on amendments to the legislation, none of which are incorporated in Bill C-25, or if they are, it is in a very tangential way. Here we have an individual who is well respected in the field issuing a report that has 34 recommendations, six of which are of a legislative nature and none of which appear in Bill C-25. That seems to be an awfully strange way to go about being, apparently, tough on crime.
Mr. Justice Nunn has suggested that:
The Province should advocate that the federal government amend the “Declaration of Principle” in section 3 of the Youth Criminal Justice Act to add a clause indicating that protection of the public is one of the primary goals of the act.
I do not know whether that is a good recommendation or not, but it does on the face of it make a lot of sense to me. Why would Bill C-25 not contain a declaration of principle that “protection of the public is one of the primary goals of the act”?
That does seem a bit sensible to me. It also seems to be something that would be easily incorporated into a piece of legislation such as this. It would not, however, be useful to the pattern that has been established, and which I suggested at the beginning of my speech, in that it does not give any publicity hit if this kind of thing is put into the bill.
Recommendation 21 states:
--that the federal government amend the definition of “violent offence” in section 39(1)(a) of the Youth Criminal Justice Act to include conduct that endangers or is likely to endanger the life or safety of another person.
Again, why not amend the definition of a violent offence while we are at it? Why can Bill C-25 not incorporate that suggestion? It seems perfectly sensible to me.
Recommendation 22 states:
--that the federal government amend section 39(1)(c) of the Youth Criminal Justice Act so that the requirement for a demonstrated “pattern of findings of guilt” is changed to “a pattern of offences”, or similar wording....
That is an interesting one, because there is some parallel in proposed subclause 29(2) in clause 1 of this amendment. The government seems to have chosen to stick with the concept of a “pattern of findings of guilt” rather than a “pattern of offences”.
I do not sit on the justice committee, but this would seem to me to be a particularly important question to ask. It would speak to those kinds of situations when a youth who has done a series of particularly egregious offences that may not have actually generated convictions still looks like a pretty bad apple. So if in fact incarceration or detention is being considered as a way to keep this particular individual off the streets, apparently in the government's bill there must be actual findings of guilt even though this particular individual may have had a whole string of offences for which guilt has not necessarily yet been found.
I am curious as to why the government, which apparently wants to be tough on crime, is not incorporating that. There may be good reasons. I do not know. Again, this looks like a missed opportunity.
Another recommendation deals with the concept of the “responsible person” and how that responsible person should continue his or her responsibility if the person is outside of detention. There are other recommendations with respect to bail.
None of these appear in Bill C-25. It is difficult to know why these kinds of sensible recommendations do not get incorporated. They are recommendations by a respected justice on an area of law that we all agree always needs some continuous amendment and review.
Then we have some of the things that the government does put in. I want to pick up on the comment of my colleague from Scarborough—Rouge River, who said that sentencing does not reduce criminality.
In another life, I used to be a lawyer. Actually I still am a lawyer, but I do not practise. I did a very little bit of criminal law. Occasionally one would go into the prisons to interview one's client. I did make a couple of observations on the very few clients that I did actually represent.
One was that they were not the sharpest knives in the drawer. Generally speaking, people who are in the criminal business are not that sharp. Second, they frequently had some pretty horrific backgrounds, possibly due to drugs, either drugs they were taking or drugs that had resulted in fetal alcohol syndrome or fetal alcohol effect or things of that nature, which diminished their capacity to interact in society.
Frequently their educational achievements were not very high. Frequently they had dependencies of some kind, whether it was drugs or alcohol or something of that nature.
Therefore, it is a population that is not, so to speak, the most outstanding. A consistent pattern was that in each and every case they never thought they were going to get caught in the first place. Therefore, amending legislation so that you can denounce them and deter them, whether it is the Criminal Code or this particular legislation, is utterly meaningless to the population we are trying to affect.
First, none of them had any idea they were going to get caught. They all thought they were going to get away with what they were doing. Second, if they were caught, they had absolutely no idea what the sentence might be for conviction on the particular offence with which they were charged. This was consistent both with adults and with juveniles.
I just want to point out that sentencing, whether it is minimum mandatories and all the rest of the stuff that seems to go on here to great effect, does not seem to make a great deal of difference with respect to the actual criminal population that it is supposed to affect, but for some of us, it really makes us feel a lot better.
Let me pick up on a comment by Martha Mackinnon of Justice for Children and Youth. A news report states that she says:
--the Conservatives are addressing a perception that has been exacerbated by politicians and the media. She also criticized the government's move to bring back “general deterrence” for youths, saying “there's no evidence that deterrence works for young people.”
I agree with Ms. Mackinnon. I do not know who she is, but she--