Mr. Speaker, continuing on the subject of my question, the Bloc Québécois has opposed Bill C-10. In my previous question, I said that one of the aberrations of this bill is that the proposed increase does not apply to hunting rifles. This bill creates two classes of firearms. There are long guns, as they are called in English—hunting rifles—and then there are hand guns. Some clauses in the bill even refer to prohibited weapons.
This seems rather odd at the stage of defining offences in the Criminal Code. As legislators, normally it is our responsibility to establish the relative severity of each of these sentences.
In this bill, however, there are instances where minimal sentences will not be not the same, depending on whether the crime is committed with a long gun or a prohibited or restricted firearm.
Let us take the example of section 239 of the Criminal Code, which deals with discharging a firearm with intent, sexual assault with a weapon, aggravated sexual assault, kidnapping, hostage-taking, extortion and robbery. Bill C-10 proposes to impose a minimum five-year sentence for a first offence, seven years for a second, and to leave it at four years if another type of firearm is used, namely, a long gun.
If this bill is passed, the message it sends is that it is considered more serious to commit an offence such as attempted murder or sexual assault with a hand gun than with a long gun. This is, in my opinion, completely ridiculous and totally baseless.
That was what lay behind my question to my NDP colleague as to why the NDP were, as legislators, backing a bill in which committing a murder with a hunting rifle is less serious than committing a murder with a hand gun.
I think this illustrates the approach taken by the Conservative government and its view of how to fight crime, to which the NDP has subscribed for the last few months. Under this approach, they take care of repression after the crime has already been committed but do nothing about prevention. This is not the first time under this government that we have seen this dichotomy between how hand guns and long guns are treated.
We saw it as well with the firearms registry. It was the same thing. To look good, the government says it wants to keep the firearms registry, but just for handguns and restricted weapons. They want to abolish it for long guns. What does that mean? Where did the Conservatives get the idea that long guns were less dangerous than other guns?
Give me a couple of seconds here to find a very interesting statistic showing that a good proportion of crimes are committed with long guns. Unfortunately, I do not remember the exact figure, but it was not negligible.
The differing treatments depending on the type of firearm highlight the inconsistency in the message conveyed by the government and the NDP, which supports it. This inconsistency can be seen again in the supposed intent of the bill, where they say they want to be tough on crime and fight criminality.
As the minister himself admitted when he came to testify before the committee, there are no Canadian studies showing that minimum sentences are effective at fighting crime.
We could obviously debate it from the standpoint of vengeance or punishing people for having committed a crime. If that is the purpose of the government’s bill, it should clearly say so and not try to make people think that the purpose is to make Canadians safer, when that is clearly not the case. Minimum sentences only apply after the crime has been committed. All the studies show, though, that minimum sentences do not have any impact on the commission of crimes. Some other studies have been done in Canada. One very large study showed that the recidivism rate hardly changed on the basis of the length of incarceration or whether the offender was given a prison term or a community-based sentence.
This is very interesting because it shows once again that the sentences criminals receive has no influence on the recidivism rate. Another study followed up on offenders. These authors even concluded that quite the opposite was the case and that increased prison terms led to a slight increase in the recidivism rate. I will provide a reference for this study so that my Conservative colleagues can read it.
I am referring to a study done by Paula Smith, Claire Goggin and Paul Gendreau of the Psychology Department and the Centre for Criminal Justice Studies of the University of New Brunswick entitled The Effects of Prison Sentences and Intermediate Sanctions on Recidivism: General Effects and Individual Differences. The study was delivered in Ottawa in 2002, and was written for the Solicitor General of Canada. The government will have ready access to it. The conclusion that I quoted is on page ii of the introduction.
I wanted to talk about this to show, once again, that there is no connection with the length of time a prisoner is incarcerated and serving a community-based sentence or a prison sentence. As well, there are certainly no automatic deterrent effects.
There are other useful statistics in this regard and the Conservatives would do well to consider them: there are three times more homicides in the United States than in Canada and four times more homicides in the Untied States than in Quebec. In Quebec, in fact, an approach based much more on rehabilitation than punishment has been adopted, and this is the part of Canada where there are the fewest violent crimes and the least crime.
Apart from a particular kind of popular morality or the simplistic discourse that amounts to saying that we must punish criminals severely, that we must be hard on them and impose longer sentences, ultimately reality will catch up to us. Everywhere in the world where a jurisdiction has tried to fight crime with punishment, we see higher crime rates than in jurisdictions that place greater emphasis on rehabilitation.
Obviously a balance has to be struck, and in the Bloc Québécois we believe that punishment is necessary in many case. We must keep that balance, however, so that we do not have to invest extremely large amounts of money in keeping people in prison. I gave the example of the United States, where the homicide rate is much higher, and the prisons are bursting at the seams because the incarceration rate is much higher than ours. The United States is using that money to put all those people in prison for longer times, rather than investing in fighting crime.
Some of our government colleagues rose in the House earlier to give some examples. They asked me what sentence I would like to see given to the guilty person if I were the parent of a person who was killed.
Personally, I would prefer that that individual not have committed a crime. It seems to me that it is essential, and more important, to prevent crimes than to console ourselves by saying that the person who committed the crime will go to prison for a long time and will suffer, because he or she will not like it there. That does not cancel out the crime. That does not mean that the families who have had members killed, families in which women have been raped, families of people who have been terrorized by home invasions or the like, are going to be able to turn back the clock.
Minimum sentences raise another problem, and I think that this should prompt us to use them very sparingly.
Minimum sentences have perverse effects. This is documented, and is a known fact. I would like to talk about two of those effects.
First of all, there will be instances in which judges will be forced to impose a minimum sentence that they find unwarranted. In such cases, they might acquit an individual entirely, rather than be forced to sentence that individual to a penalty they consider excessive under the circumstances, for cases in which a more appropriate penalty would be a conditional sentence, community service or a few weeks in jail.
This has happened in the past, and this should be a real concern to those people who wish to get tough on criminals. By trying to force the hand of judges, we would be creating situations in which judges could not sentence certain individuals to a minimum sentence that would be inappropriate. They would therefore acquit the individual instead.
Another problem is likely to arise, André Normandeau, a criminologist at the Université de Montréal, reminded us. With minimum sentences, lawyers often negotiate plea bargains for their clients in exchange for charges that do not require minimum sentencing. This involves some negotiation and ultimately does not lead to an appropriate outcome.
This measure leaves judges with no flexibility and, in certain cases, could lead to situations that are questionable, to say the least, because, when passing legislation, we could not possibly take into consideration all parameters and every case that could make its way to court. Judges are appointed specifically to consider these cases.
I would like to highlight the example of Robert Latimer, the father who killed his 12-year-old daughter, who was severely disabled, in an act of compassionate homicide. This is a subject that concerns us considerably and that many people are talking about. Mr. Latimer was convicted of second degree murder, which automatically forced the judge to sentence him to 25 years in prison, even though the jury that convicted him asked for a much more lenient sentence, given that it was an act of compassionate homicide.
The judge did not even have this option, because, quite simply, the law did not allow it.
In a future case, a jury could be faced with the same dilemma and could go to the other extreme by saying that it makes no sense to send someone to prison for 25 years for a murder committed out of compassion and that, in that situation, it would acquit him completely. In the end, that is what happens when we meddle in the judicial process.
I was astonished, because so often we hear the Conservatives complaining of judicial activism, which is when the judges—those who are close by, at the Supreme Court—use the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, for example, to amend or to strike down laws and influence our judicial and legal system.
The Conservatives repeatedly complained about this state of affairs, whether in the case of same sex marriages, or abortion or other issues. After having said that it is not right for judges to get involved in politics, the Conservatives table a bill that does the opposite and where members of Parliament want to do the work of the judges. I am sorry but it seems to me that as legislators we should be concerned with the issue of the gravity of crimes, establish maximum penalties in the Criminal Code to put into perspective the relative gravity of crimes, compared one to another, and leave to the judges the task of evaluating each situation in detail and determining what sentence is the most appropriate.
Another important point should be emphasized, which is that there is a major issue of perception in this whole debate, with the explosion of the all-present media—especially a certain class of media—which puts out the news as performance. In fact, there really is a perception among the population that crime is increasing and that we are living in a society that is becoming more and more violent. It is unfortunate to see that government members, instead of doing the work of explaining the real facts to the population, will manipulate and use people’s fears to advance their right-wing cause.
In general, I would emphasize that between 1991 and 2000, the rate of crime went down by almost 26% in Canada. That is true in almost every area: the rate of crime is in constant and general decline. To claim that crime is a growing problem and that, therefore, we need tougher penalties does not in any way correspond to reality. The proof is that the place where the fewest violent crimes per 100,000 population are committed in Canada—I referred to this earlier—is Quebec. The government, therefore, should focus on getting results, take inspiration from the Quebec model of combating crime rather than that of the United States, which I spoke about previously and which has met with a resounding failure.
I would like to conclude by saying that there is a little hypocrisy in what the government is proposing. In order to fight crime it should fully reinstate the gun registry and free up all the grants for programs to combat crime in all of our ridings that the minister has blocked and that are languishing on his desk. That would be a real campaign against crime rather than the appearance of a campaign.