Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak to Bill S-6 and the amendments that made their way through the committee in recent days. After reading the transcripts of the committee, I see that it was a fairly acrimonious environment for the members in that committee.
The government wants to make three amendments. the first one being to restore the title. Its slogan on this bill is “serious time for the most serious crime act”. I cannot say that is just peculiar to the Conservative government because I have seen that sort of sloganeering in my own province lately, in the Manitoba legislature. I guess the new trend is to somehow take a bill, attach a person's name to it and give it a good slogan that can be pushed to the public in an election campaign.
The Conservatives seem to think that dealing with crime is all about electoral success and image. However, they raise a lot of expectations when they take on challenges like this. I believe that if we were to do a poll of the public after this bill passes, the majority of the public will believe that somehow the faint hope clause has disappeared, thanks to the government. However, that is not the case at all. It will take 15 years because the law will not be retroactive. It will not apply to anybody who is convicted of murder today. It will only apply in the future. And, because it will only take effect 15 years into the sentence, a lot of us members of this House will be long gone when this legislation sees the light of day.
In committee, I sensed that the Liberals thought they could manoeuvre their way through this process by sitting out the vote and allowing the bill to pass and that, by doing that, they would not get hurt in the election as a result of what they had done, and then, in the future, if they were to form the government, they would simply revisit the whole issue and bring back the faint hope clause. That is the brain trust over there in the Liberal leadership in figuring out how to deal with this. I have seen a lot of manoeuvring before but this one has certainly used a lot of imagination to sort out.
Nevertheless, the expectations that the government has brought upon itself for this legislation and other legislation will fall short at the end of the day when the public realizes that there will be more and more stories over the years about faint hope clause applications. People are going to say, “We thought they eliminated that”. The government will then need to explain that somehow it is 15 years.
It is not only this bill that causes a lot of confusion on the part of the public. Just recently, as a result of information that Clifford Olson was collecting pension cheques in jail, the government got excited and produced a bill, obviously not checking things out too closely, to eliminate pension cheques for prisoners convicted of murder. The government did this without doing any research, obviously, because if it had researched it, it would have found that it was the Joe Clark Conservative government in 1976 that started mailing pension cheques to Clifford Olson every month.
The government needs to reflect on the confusion that will be out there in the public. The public has this image of a minister stuffing Clifford Olson's pension cheque into an envelope, licking it shut, licking the stamp and mailing it every month. While the public is having difficulties making ends meet, the government is sending these pension cheques. It was a Conservative government that brought it in. It was the Conservatives' idea in the first place.
I have asked the government many times to explain what went into the decision-making. What sort of studies did it have? What was it thinking, as the member for Winnipeg Centre asked? What could the Conservatives have possibly been thinking when, in 1976, it decided to send pension cheques to prisoners in jail? We ask the question but we get no response. Nobody over there can explain or wants to try to explain why this happened.
I want to get further into the legislation that is being dealt with here and talk about another one of the three amendments the government is attempting to deal with here.
Part of the second amendment deals with the issue that if a person convicted of murder does not make an application within the maximum time period allowed by this section, the Commissioner of the Correctional Service of Canada or his designate shall immediately notify in writing a parent, child, spouse or common-law partner of the victim that is a convicted person and did not make an application.
If it is not possible to notify one of the aforementioned relatives, then a notification shall be given to another relative of the victim. The notification shall specify the next date on which the convicted person will be eligible to make an application under subsection (1).
That was there to be helpful to victims. The member for Marc-Aurèle-Fortin has explained many times and has given the statistics of the number of people who are eligible. I believe he indicated it was around 900 people who are eligible under the faint hope clause, and maybe only 100 or so apply and then fewer than that actually make their way through the process.He points out, and truthfully so, that there are no re-offenders out of the process.
What we are trying to do is make things as easy as possible for the victims of crime but the government is trying to eliminate that. A government that pretends to support victims' rights is acting against something here that would be seen as supportive of victims' rights.
There was a victims' rights advocate, who the government got rid of because he did not agree with the government. He did not think it was moving far enough and fast enough on victims' rights. We have a criminal injuries compensation fund, which was brought in by the first NDP government in Canada under Ed Schreyer back in 1970-71, and it has been providing benefits to victims of crime for the last 40 years. Ontario also has such a fund but there is no fund at a federal level.
Where is the tough on crime government? Where are the Conservatives? They have been in power for five years.They say that they believe in services that help victims of crime but where is the criminal injuries compensation fund on a national basis that would be there to help victims of crime? That is the approach the government should be taking but that is not the approach it is taking. It is all about public relations.