Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak to Bill C-39 with mixed concerns. The bill is 35 pages long and has 66 amendments to the act which are of mixed value.
The government, and so typically of it , has taken what I can only say are significant recommendations in terms of their length but which in many respects are housekeeping-type amendments from the Correctional Service of Canada. We can see that in the way the bill is drafted and in terms of the specific sections and the detail in those specific sections. They are obviously concerns from Correctional Service of Canada of problems it has run into. I would say that at least half of the bill addresses those specific problems, ones that we would generally be supportive of.
On the other hand, which is again typical of the government, once it receives those recommendations, it piles on what are in some cases quite extreme changes to the legislation and the corrections philosophy that we have had in this country for at least 50 years.
The government is attacking some of the fundamental beliefs that we have and that we have used to establish what is the best way to deal with those people who commit violent acts or non-violent criminal acts and who are incarcerated in our federal penitentiaries for more than two years. These are more serious crimes, whether they be property crimes or violent crimes. Those are the people we are talking about.
We currently have between 13,000 and 14,000 people incarcerated at the federal level. One of the concerns we have is that because of this piling on of some of the government's ideological inclinations to punish people rather than rehabilitate them, there is no indication from anything we have heard from the government side as to what the impact will be on the incarceration rate. Are we going to keep, on an annual basis, another 1,000, another 1,500 or another 2,000? Those are the kinds of figures I would suggest are likely to come out of this legislation if it were to pass.
It is obvious from the comments that we have heard from the Bloc just now that they will be supportive. I am not sure what the Liberals are doing because typically Liberals do not know what they are doing yet. The Bloc will support this going through second reading and on to the public safety committee.
What hopefully will happen at the public safety committee is that those sections of the bill that are offensive to some of the fundamental principles that we have lived by in our corrections system for the last five decades can be stripped out of the bill. I will address my comments with regard to some of those.
As the bill stands right now, there is an expression in clauses 3 and 4 of the bill that set out the guiding principles for Correctional Service of Canada. What it does now is it sets a balance between the safety of the staff and the inmates in our prisons and, looking forward to those inmates being released at some point, the safety of the public in general when they are released.
There is a balancing act that is in the legislation now. This bill would upset that balance and set as an absolute fundamental priority the protection of the public, again being driven by that ideology that we hear from the Conservatives that somehow the protection of the public and rehabilitation of the incarcerated individual are mutually exclusive. Quite frankly, that is absolutely wrong.
In fact, if we do not rehabilitate, if we do not reduce the recidivism rates with an effective treatment for the person incarcerated, we enhance the likelihood of that person committing more crimes, often more violent crimes, when they are ultimately released. We have that from all sorts of sociological studies, not only in Canada, but in any country where there is a reasonably vibrant democracy.
When we see the shift in this fundamental approach, we have to say that we cannot support it. At committee, we hope a majority will see it that way and those provisions will be struck out, so that we stay with the existing balance that has served us so well. It is not perfect, and that is why we are supportive of some of the other amendments. There are changes that could be made that would enhance the safety of staff in our prisons, the inmates, and ultimately society when those inmates are released.
There are other provisions in here, and we are hearing this from some of the critics of this bill, that are an attack on the fundamental rights of Canadian citizens, which rights should continue when a person is incarcerated. As I am sure most members of this House know, there was a battle at one point under the charter on whether people incarcerated at the federal level were entitled to vote in federal, provincial, and municipal elections. Ultimately, the Supreme Court of Canada decided that this was a fundamental right that was not taken away by a conviction and sentence in a federal penitentiary. That was not implied in the charter. Corrections Canada could not take away the right to vote and it was reinstated.
Because of the way Bill C-39 is drafted, there will be attempts in the future to undermine the basic rights that our Supreme Court has said continue to exist under the charter. For instance, there are several paragraphs in which rights that are now recognized under the existing law are being called “privileges”. If they were called “privileges” before, they are now being removed from the law completely. We can see this shift quite clearly in several sections in which there is an attempt to undermine the ability of the inmate to continue to function, at least to some degree, within the normal parameters.
We know this is important. Anybody who has worked in corrections knows that even somebody serving life is ultimately, in the vast majority of cases, going to be released. They have to be released in a position to function in society. If we take away all those rights, if we turn them into non-citizens, the chances of rehabilitation go down dramatically. The likelihood of recidivism goes up correspondingly and dramatically. It is important to maintain that balance. There is a clear attempt on the part of this government to undermine that balance at this time in this bill.
The other significant concern that I have, and that my party has, with regard to Bill C-39 is that, although we support the concept, it is proposing that the responsibility should lie with the inmates to take advantage of programs that would assist in their rehabilitation.
That can take a number of different directions. Sometimes it is just teaching basic life skills. It was one of the reasons we heard such a negative reaction to the decision by the government to close the prisons in farm settings. Above and beyond just about anything else, they taught inmates, often young inmates, some basic life skills. They had to get up in the morning. They had to get ready to do their work. They had to go to their work. They had to perform the jobs they were assigned to. They had to do everything with a reasonable amount of diligence.
We learn those skills by experience. It is hard to learn them when sitting in a cell for 23 hours a day. It does not work that way. It is one of the major reasons we saw such an overwhelming response and opposition to the government's decision to close those prisons. It was a major mistake, one that the rest of society will suffer from for quite some time, at least until we get rid of the government and reopen those prisons, which allow people to learn on-the-job life skills.
There is other programming such as education, but the most important is psychiatric counselling and treatment. I say this from the experience I had sitting on both the justice committee and the public safety committee, where I listened to the staff in the corrections services who actually worked in the prisons. A number of those were in administrative positions but came from front-line positions. Psychiatric counselling and treatment may include pharmacare to deal with what are often chemical imbalances. Our prison system is woefully inadequate in providing those services.
I remember one time the deputy head, now the head of Corrections Canada, estimated that of the 13,500 inmates in the federal penitentiaries close to 50% had serious psychiatric problems, and that a majority of that 50%, if they were out in society, could be confined to a psychiatric institution. The sad part was his admission that they were getting nowhere near the treatment that they required, which was an absolute necessity if they were going to be rehabilitated.
The other point that he made was that, with respect to education and lifestyle-type programs, all too many of our inmates have access to them only late in their sentences. A large number of them are released before they can complete the programs, whether it is psychiatric treatment, an educational program, or a lifestyle program. They never get to finish them because they are not available to them. They are put on a priority list when they come in, but those who are already there get the first shot at them. As they move up the list, they are also spending more time. By the time they get to the top of the list, they are about to be released. In effect, few inmates benefit from the programs because there are all too few of them available.
We know, from admissions from the government, that it is going to spend somewhere around $9 billion on concrete, glass, and steel to build new prisons. There is no corresponding increase in funding for programming, none whatsoever.
It was interesting to listen to the staff who were out picketing the minister at one of those announcements, when he was running around the country making announcements of new prisons, the amount of money being spent, and the number of new beds there were going to be.
The people in those institutions now working with those inmates, our professional staff, said to him that this was crazy, that instead of more cells, they needed more programs and more staff. There is a stress level among the staff because there are not enough of them. A large percentage are often off on stress leave, which only places additional burdens on the remaining staff. So we have a staff morale problem in prisons, and it comes down to two fundamental issues: first, we do not have enough staff, and second, we do not have enough programming for the inmates.
We have a government that is quite prepared to spend taxpayers' dollars to follow its theme of punishing people, making people accountable. But it is not going to spend any money on what is really necessary: to rehabilitate inmates while they are incarcerated. It boggles the mind. Imagine historians 50 years or 100 years from now looking back at this period of time and wondering what we were doing. The government cannot see that we have a rare opportunity to turn these inmates' lives around, to make them responsible citizens so that they no longer prey on citizens.
We will blow the opportunity, because on that side of the chamber it is all about punishment. Conservatives cannot get their heads wrapped around the fact that we need to rehabilitate. If we are going to have an effective correction program, whether it is at the provincial or federal level, while we have that person in our control, and I am being serious, we have to force them to turn their lives around. To do that, they need to be provided with the necessary support.
This fundamental approach is a real problem in the bill. All it does is perpetuate the notion that, to solve our crime problem, all we have to do is build more prisons, more beds, incarcerate more people. All we have to do is look across the border to see that this does not work. It is quite interesting to see what is happening there. In many states, including Michigan, which is adjacent to my hometown, prisons have been built that they no longer can afford, just to punish people.
Conservatives will know that, for the last decade, more and more states have been closing prisons, reducing their prison populations because they cannot afford to keep them. There are states that are spending more money on prisons than on post-secondary education. That is a ludicrous position, and we are moving that way when we see these kind of decisions.
There are some fundamental changes required for this bill, and I hope that the committee will agree. On the other hand, there are provisions that our corrections staff are telling us they need. We support them on that. We would be supportive of giving authority to the Parole Board to accept victim impact statements. That is not done in parole now. Corrections Canada would advise when parole was coming up or when the person was being transferred.
A number of mechanisms that are being put in place now make good sense. They will assist victims and victims' families to deal with the reality of the person who is going to be released from custody.
Hopefully at committee those changes will be made, the good parts of the bill will ultimately get through and the bad parts will be removed.