Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak to Bill C-15, An Act to amend the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act and to make related and consequential amendments to other Acts.
Some of the proposals in the bill are minimum penalties for the production, possession, trafficking, importing and exporting of marijuana, cocaine, heroin, methamphetamines and other drugs. It also moves amphetamines, all its 19 byproducts, and GHB and flunitrazepam, also known as the date rape drugs, from schedule 3 to schedule 1. Tougher penalties will be introduced for trafficking date rape drugs.
The maximum penalty for Canada's production would increase from seven years to fourteen years imprisonment. Mandatory sentences would be introduced for the production of even one marijuana plant, with a minimum sentence of six months. The legislation would impose six months imprisonment for any act of cultivation of cannabis, irrespective of issues of violence and gang involvement. These are some of the provisions in this bill.
Prior to my election, I worked at Dalhousie Legal Aid Service, a legal clinic in Halifax's north end. Dal Legal Aid is a teaching clinic where students, who are in their last year of law school, can come and spend four months with us, working on poverty law cases and developing their skills in a clinical law setting. The mandate of Dal Legal Aid is to provide legal assistance to low-income Nova Scotians, while also working with low-income Nova Scotians to help change the laws that oppress and penalize poor and marginalized Nova Scotians.
Our mandate was to deal with poverty. Inextricably enmeshed with poverty are the issues of race, gender, ability, sexual orientation and identity and age. My clients came to me for help with asserting their rights as tenants and asserting their rights under welfare and their entitlements. They came to me for assistance with their CPP disability applications and for help understanding the law generally.
To ensure that Halifax's most vulnerable people had access to their rights and an understanding of the law, the students and I would staff monthly clinics around the city, ensuring we had a presence at places like Direction 180, Halifax's low-threshold methadone clinic, Stepping Stone, an organization that supports workers in the sex trade, Metro Turning Point and Adsum House, Halifax's men's and women's shelters, as well as food banks and soup kitchens around the municipality.
Many of my clients used drugs and while I never counselled them legally or otherwise on their drug use, many of my clients would share with me the details of their lives as we built a relationship of trust. None of my clients used drugs because they got a thrill from breaking the law. None of them used drugs because they were bad people, criminals or people not worth caring about. All of them talked to me about stopping their drug use. None of them talked to me about getting off crack because the jail time for offences was on the rise. They talked to me about getting off crack because it was destroying their lives.
None of them talked to me about enrolling at Direction 180 because they had heard that Parliament may be rescheduling certain substances from schedule 3 to schedule 1. They wanted to enrol at Direction 180 to deal with their opiate addictions, rebuild their lives and re-establish contact with their children or families.
The Conservatives have manufactured a debate that tells Canadians that if we oppose this bill, then we oppose enforcement and think that drug users should run free, terrorizing children in their schoolyards and corrupting the very fabric of our society. The government has manufactured this debate to make itself look tough on crime and the opponents of this bill soft on crime.
The truth of the matter is that this bill would not do anything to solve the drug problem in Canada. The bill is not smart on crime. We need legislation that is based on best practices. We need legislation that will work.
A four-pillar approach has been developed and has been proven successful in cities in the U.S., the U.K. and Europe. It is based on the four pillars of prevention, treatment, harm reduction and enforcement. Each pillar is equally important and must be integrated and jointly implemented to be effective. This is what the best practices are telling us to do. This is the direction in which we must move. This is the approach that the NDP supports. The NDP is not soft on crime. We are smart on crime.
Mandatory minimums do not deter drug use. A 2002 Justice Department of Canada report concluded that mandatory minimum sentences, or MMS, were least effective in relation to drug offences. It stated:
MMS do not appear to influence drug consumption or drug-related crime in any measurable way. A variety of research methods concludes that treatment-based approaches are more cost effective than lengthy prison terms. MMS are blunt instruments that fail to distinguish between low and high-level, as well as hardcore versus transient drug dealers.
The supposed targets for these mandatory minimums, the kingpins, are in the best position to negotiate lighter sentences or no sentences at all. They have access to resources that enable them to challenge these sentences. Therefore, who gets scooped up by these provisions?
In June 2004, the American Bar Association's Justice Kennedy Commission called on Congress to repeal mandatory minimum sentences stating, “Mandatory minimum sentences tend to be tough on the wrong people”. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, MMS disproportionately targets visible minorities. According to the HIV/AIDS Legal Network, mandatory sentencing policies have produced record incarceration rates of non-violent drug users in the United States.
The U.S. Sentencing Commission also concluded that mandatory minimums failed to deter crime and reported that only 11% of federal drug defendants were high-level drug dealers, and 59% of crack defendants were street-level dealers, compared to 5% who were high-level crack dealers.
The bill is based on a deterrence theory of punishment for which there is no evidence. In their article called “Sentence Severity and Crime: Accepting the Null Hypothesis”, Anthony N. Doob and Cheryl Webster concluded that 25 years worth of research, sometimes in ideal conditions, had shown that there was no support for the idea that harsher sentences reduce crime. They also point out that:
Deterrence-based sentencing makes false promises to the community. As long as the public believes that crime can be deterred by legislatures or judges through harsh sentences, there is no need to consider other approaches to crime reduction.
In other words, adding a harsher sentence is pretending to do something instead of actually doing something. The bill makes a false promise, to use their words. This approach is not smart on crime.
While mandatory minimums do not work, we do know what does work, and that is the four pillars: prevention, treatment, harm reduction and enforcement. Each pillar is equally important and they must be integrated and jointly implemented to be effective.
Sadly, we are not following the four pillars approach in Canada. In fact, we are doing the opposite. Listen to these numbers. Canada spends 73% of its drug policy budget on enforcement, 14% on treatment, 2.6% on prevention and 2.6% on harm reduction. These pillars clearly are not integrated and jointly implemented. They are clearly not even being valued equally by the government. We have a government that is solely focused on enforcement, which is only one piece of the solution. As a result, drug use continues to rise.
In 1994, 28% of Canadians reported to have used illicit drugs, but by 2004, this number was 45%, almost double.