Mr. Speaker, I want to begin by reading the motion moved by the member for York West. I think it is important because we have just heard the government talk around this motion and allude to things that are not contained in it. For the benefit of the Canadian people I would like to read it:
That, in the opinion of the House, the government should reaffirm that: (a) there is no death penalty in Canada; (b) it is the policy of the government to seek clemency, on humanitarian grounds, for Canadians sentenced to death in foreign countries; and (c) Canada will continue in its leadership role in promoting the abolition of the death penalty internationally.
There is not one single word in the motion about bringing anybody back to Canada. If anybody has been getting that message from the government, it is the wrong message.
When I decided to run for this place I considered what I had to offer. As with many people here, it comes from personal life experience. I made a commitment to the people of my riding of Hamilton East—Stoney Creek that I would bring their message, the average person's message, to this place instead of bringing the government's message to them. I have worked hard to do that.
Mr. Speaker, you are going to find in my remarks some very personal things. I am going to pause for a second. This may sound strange, but I say to my sister Audrey in Alberta, sit down, Audrey, you will understand in a moment.
Oftentimes, in fact most times when we rise in this place, we talk about the privilege that it is to stand and speak to an issue and the pleasure at times it is to speak to an issue. I cannot say that about Motion No. 411. I can speak to its intent, but I am deeply troubled that we find ourselves in a position of having to debate a matter that was supposedly put to rest some 32 years ago in an off-handed fashion.
This House decided at that time that it did not support the right of the state to put one of its citizens to death. Let us not talk death penalty; you are killing somebody; you are putting them to death. That ended capital punishment in Canada. As others have stated, it put us at the forefront working for the abolition of capital punishment around the world, our rightful position.
Logically, following the decision, the government of Canada adopted as policy that it would seek clemency on humanitarian grounds, as in the motion, for Canadians condemned to death in other countries. That was the right position and it remains the right position today. It is also consistent with the views of most Canadians.
Personally, I feel it is an affront to Parliament that the Conservative government has taken upon itself to start a change that is so diametrically opposite to what Canadians believe and what Canadians want.
On a regular basis, as other speakers have said, DNA evidence and other evidence have thrown conviction after conviction out of court and returned people to the streets after six, eight, ten years in prison, and some of them had been on death row. How can we look at something like that and not respond? Often the only reason these people were in jail in the first place was that they were poor. I alluded to that in a debate earlier today.
I am going to go to that place that I just warned my sister Audrey about and I am going to get emotional. In 1949 my sister was strangled to death. My father was accused of the murder of that child. Over a period of investigation it became clear that another member of our family, who was mentally ill, had committed that crime. Our family never quite recovered from that in many ways. My father died an alcoholic at 51 years of age as the result of living with the system. He was poor. He was a labourer on the railway, and he did the best he could for his family. Simply because he happened to be the last person to go in to say goodbye to that child in the morning, and she was covered to her eyes, he was accused that crime.
I want to put the timeframe in perspective. As I grew to be a child of about 10 years of age, it was during the time of Steven Truscott, a young man who was taken away and, at first, sentenced to death. At my age of 10 or 11, of course it was a frightening thing to hear. Coincidentally, my father had been picked up for impaired driving and was in our local jail in Perth-Andover, which is close to Plaster Rock, where I am from.
I went with some people to post bail. It was a small-town jail. There were a couple of cells in the place. The person who was maintaining that jail offered me the opportunity to see a jail cell. Just a year before, I had learned what happened to my sister. It had been hidden from me for a number of years. When I walked into the jail cell, I looked up and saw a ring in the ceiling. I was standing on a trap door. The person, not knowing the family history, said that this was where they dropped a person through to hang them. It struck me to the heart, to the bone and to my very soul. That was the door my father would have dropped through had the system failed him.
We have to step back from all the rhetoric. We have to step back from where the government is trying to take us and understand the humanity of what we are doing. We have to understand that in the prisons there are many people who are totally innocent of the crimes. Many times they are there simply because they cannot afford a defence.
My notes have kind of gone out the window here, but let me say that there is a built-in discrimination in our society and even more particularly south of the border. Let us look at the fact that those who are on death row are more often than not poor and even more often than not black. If we look at the correlation that happens between who it is that commits crimes, we see that the black race and the white race commit crimes fairly equally, but when there is a white victim, more often people are put to death.
I am not going to bother with statistics, as I am a little bit emotionally past the point where I could deliver them anyway.
In the U.S., though, an important point is that 53 people were executed in 2006. That makes for a total of just over 1,000 since 1977, but what is happening even in the U.S. is that people are starting to take another look at this. They are starting to understand more clearly, because of DNA evidence, a system of computers and better investigative processes, that more people can disprove the charges against them. Thank God. Many of them have spent years on death row and many will be freed.
However, even so, called into question today in the southern states and many states where lethal injections are used is the failure of that mechanism to work properly. When we start talking about hanging, the method that was used in this country, we need to do some reading about its effects.
I am very close to concluding my remarks. I will say only that Canada has been a leader on many fronts and I do not believe that there is anything more fundamental than the protection of human life and having the grace to say that we are not going to take that life.
I have no sympathy for a criminal who kills. I have no sympathy for a person who commits rape or harms children in any way. However, I still do not believe it is the right of the state to take a life. We can put them away and lock them up. Again, I want to stress that nobody was talking about bringing them back to Canada.