Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to participate in this very interesting and important debate. Many of my colleagues come to this from a legal background. I come to this with an engineering background, so I might take a little different approach.
I will begin by looking at the big picture, and the big picture is that overall, serious crime rates in this country are falling. Yes, we can find exceptions within certain demographics, possibly, and certain types of crime, but overall, serious crime rates are falling.
Secondly, from outside Canada, other countries look at our judicial system as one of the finest in the world. The best example of proof that I can provide is that Canada played a key role in establishing the international court system in The Hague, and our judicial experts are called upon on many occasions to provide advice to China and to other developing nations when it comes to creating their judicial systems.
I start from the premise that our system is not perfect. We can agree on that, that there are always ways to make things better, including when it comes to dangerous offenders and I agree with my colleague from Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine. We are not against improving measures to deal with dangerous, long term offenders, but we are against the way the government is approaching this task.
Again, we have a system that, while not perfect, is among the best in the world. Yes, we have very sad incidents where terrible people do terrible things to other people, to innocent people, and none of us here would ever say or do anything to support such activities. At the same time, we must not compromise the balance that we are seeking to achieve in our judicial system, and that balance will be put to a test in a serious way when the reverse onus is applied in situations like this.
It is easy to say when on the front page of the paper a serious crime is being reported, but we cannot make our decisions in moments of passion or moments of panic. We have to make our decisions for the country in times of calm, in times of reflection, and using the best wisdom available to us.
I would like to see improvements to the dangerous offenders legislation. Nobody wants to see dangerous offenders in situations where they are going to repeat. Unfortunately, the government did not send this to the justice committee but instead to a legislative committee. Had it gone to the justice committee, I assume we would have seen a full range of consultations and input from all quarters of the country, from stakeholders interested in crime issues.
We did not have that and clearly we have the Criminal Lawyers' Association that says this is dangerous ground upon which to tread. The justice minister and attorney general for Saskatchewan has expressed grave reservations about this, and there are others.
Let us encourage the government not to take what I call a lazy approach of throwing something out there and just seeing what happens. That is pretty careless because as my colleagues from Windsor, Montreal and others have suggested, there is a very good chance, that the constitutionality of these measures will be proven not to be supportable. In so doing, it is very possible that other sections of the dangerous offenders legislation could also be compromised.
There is also the question of whether we are going to really be putting more people in jail as a result of this because there will be less plea bargaining. I know there are concerns over the plea bargaining process but there is a place for it, if it is handled wisely. It will only mean higher rates of incarceration. What thought has been put to the extra resources that provinces will need in order to deal with more people in jail?
There are certain unintended consequences and there may be others that I am not mentioning which could happen. We are simply saying to the government to stop, catch its breath and let us take some more time. This is not an issue that needs to be resolved tomorrow.
Let us take some more time and ensure that it is right. Let us not take the lazy approach. Let us do some more homework. Let us ensure that those who have a say on this, whether they are for or against it, let them speak up and be heard, and let us find a way to improve measures dealing with dangerous offenders, but do so in a way that will not test the constitutionality of not only those sections, but of sections related to dangerous offender legislation.
I am certain there will be an election sooner or later and I know the Conservative Party certainly has a history of using jingoism in terms of getting support for its often radical and extreme views. I am reminded in this debate of what George Bush, until he got into trouble the last year or so, would say to those who criticized his position on the Iraq war, “oh, you don't support our troops”, as if speaking freely in a free society was against the troops because the troops are there to protect democracy.
In the same way the Conservatives would argue that if we do anything to provide dangerous offenders with anything but unconstitutional remedies for society, then we support dangerous offenders. That is not fair. It is not true. It is not the case.
We are as much interested in dealing with dangerous offenders as anyone in this House, but we want to do it in a smart way. We want to do it in a way that respects the opinions on both sides of the debate and in a way that will not fail before the courts.