Mr. Speaker, you are correct. I will try to use my eight minutes well.
When we were interrupted by question period and other valuable proceedings, I was referring to what I regard as misleading comments about the position of the official opposition Liberals here, but I will move on because the record has that.
The second part of it was that Liberals have accepted the need for mandatory minimum penalties in the Criminal Code and, as has already been pointed out by members on both sides of the House, the code is replete with examples. We have mandatory minimum sentencing for some drinking and driving offences. The mandatory minimum sentence for first degree murder is life in prison, a life sentence. These are all existing minimum mandatory sentences in the code.
However, the one thing that the opposition Liberals did not agree to as a party was the development or the creation of an escalating series of mandatory minimums, an escalating meat chart, so that a first offence would be three years, then it would be five years, then seven, then ten, whatever the various proposals were coming forward. This is not something that I agreed with. I still do not. There are some members here who apparently do. I have accepted the mandatory minimum sentence, but not the escalating series of mandatory minimums. That is an important distinction in some quarters.
I would point out that all of the sentencing alluded to in the mandatory minimum proposals is currently available to judges now. Judges are perfectly capable of sentencing a person convicted of the crimes involved in this bill to the types of sentences described in the mandatory minimums; it is just that they are not obliged to give the mandatory minimum. They can still give five years, seven years, ten years or whatever the sentencing range allows.
This bill would remove that judicial discretion and impose on judges the need to give a sentence of whatever was prescribed in this escalating series of penalties. It is important to keep this in mind: that we would actually be removing some of the discretionary aspects in sentencing.
I do not want the word “discretionary” to be taken too loosely here. Our judges fully take their responsibility seriously. They realize that the sentencing they impose is done in the context of community standards. I do not think there is any place in the country where that is not the case.
I would have to say that the bill is being driven in part by a degree of political pretence. There is a pretence out there that Canadian society is beset with crime, that crime is escalating, and that violent crime is taking over our communities.
It is true that television and the Internet are giving us access to a lot of this information. We are seeing a lot more of it, but data on crime shows the opposite. It shows that crime is reducing. I do not have to repeat too much of that. The data is out there. Since 1991, for reasons that sociologists have not ever been able to fully explain, our violent crime rates and our overall crime rates are decreasing and continue to do so.
Thus, there is a pretence that we have a crime problem. While we actually do have crime problems, we just do not have the escalating crime problem that some politicians are urging upon us.
The second thing that is being urged upon us is that a more severe sentence would actually deter but that has not been proven. What normally deters criminals is the prospect of getting caught. If they did not think they would get caught, they might be more likely to do the crime. I suppose there might be the odd exception to that little equation but I think sociologists are pretty clear on that as well.
I want to refer to the experience in Toronto over the last couple of years. One of the factual backgrounds that gave rise to the sense of considering increased sentencing was the uptick in the number of shootings and homicides in Toronto in 2005-06. As a result, Toronto's policing became a lot better.
As a result of those policing efforts, and I will need to allow room for the sociological impacts, crimes of this nature have dropped just as much as they spiked. I will deal with some of the data. From January through to the end of April 2005, 73 shootings; 75 shootings in 2006; and in 2007, 51 shootings, a drop of 33%., which is huge no matter how we look at it or what side of the House one sits on.
The point here is not that there was no crime. The point is that crime is not increasing. The attention that the increased shootings received in 2005-06 allows us to now look back on it as a spike. The data is showing that we are ending up with violent crime rates that are even less than before the spike. That would be consistent with the overall demographic trends of the last 15 years that are clearly out there. If anyone is in doubt, they should go to Juristat or Statistics Canada and look at the data. The most recent publication is there for all to see. Although it shows crime, it shows a reduction in crime. I still accept that crime is always a problem with a community and that one crime is too many.
It is easy to say that by passing a law in here that we will affect the incidence of crime. That may be politicians thinking they are a much too valuable part of the system. Just because we pass a law in here does not mean that it will produce a reduced crime impact. A lot more is involved in this than politicians passing laws.
The public needs to be educated, the police need to do their job, which they do admirably well across the country, and prosecutors need to do their job. A whole constellation of factors enter into crime rates, such as enforcement, sentencing, corrections, prosecutions and police enforcement.
However, I would say that just putting people in jail or threatening to is not the big answer. It costs $75,000 to $80,000 to keep somebody in a prison. Three good students could be put through medical school for that kind of money. These mandatory minimums will actually put people there, irrevocably, no choice. We will just keep throwing another $75,000 or $80,000 at this problem when the real problem is probably out on the street and needs to be addressed in ways other than just warehousing inmates.
Our American friends have learned this. Many states have taken steps to reverse the warehousing of inmates. They have some very serious problems there. We have always had a chance to do it right. We will have to see what the outcome of the vote is but--