Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise on this bill. It is a difficult emotional topic. There are probably not many Canadians who do not know somebody or have a family member who has in some way been touched by sexual violence. When it happens to a child, it is particularly heinous.
Obviously governments and parliaments should do everything in their power to go after those who commit the crimes, and in particular enable police, once a crime has happened, to apprehend the person quickly and to remove the young person from danger before something worse happens. When an incident of this nature occurs, the first hours are critical in finding out where the child is. Having an effective sex offender registry that allows police in a timely way to target their search and go after those who might have committed the offence is critically important.
If we look at where the legislation comes from, there was a mandatory review, as I referenced earlier, which required the committee to take a look at the sex offender registry. In undertaking that work, it became very clear to all of us that the federal registry was woefully inadequate, that other jurisdictions provincially had far outpaced us. It was certainly the case in Ontario where Christopher's law had been implemented with great success. It was a model all committee members looked at and on which we asked a lot of questions.
Witnesses came from different parts of Canada and we took the opportunity to hear from them. We were on the verge of releasing a series of recommendations, but that process was pre-empted by the bill being presented. Much to our disappointment, because the bill had been hastily crafted and prematurely presented, a number of the recommendations that we made were missing and had to be injected into the bill.
I understand that all of us want to move legislation through expeditiously, but so too it is important to have a proper study of legislation to make sure that when we pass something, we get it right. If we respond instantly to a headline and try to craft legislation on the back of a napkin and toss it out the door at a thousand miles an hour, mistakes happen, gaps are left and things get undone.
I think of the pardon legislation, as an example. I remember some four years ago the then public safety minister said in response to a horrible story, “We have got the problem fixed. Don't worry, it is all done”. It was only a couple of days after the event. There was no opportunity to study it at committee, to ask questions, to delve into the issue, and of course four years later the government came forward and said that there were problems with the pardon system, that we have to review it, renew it and change it.
There is an unfortunate tendency to ram things through. That process of ramming things through means that mistakes get made and things get left out.
What was egregious about this particular example was that we were literally a week or two away from being able to offer those recommendations, if the government had had the courtesy to wait. It is one thing to be ignored, but it is another thing entirely to not even be heard before we are ignored.
On the whole, this represents good legislation with the changes that have been made and is something which is supportable. However, I do want to comment, because as much as the parliamentary secretary talks about the co-operation in committee, I have to say I was deeply concerned that the member for Saint Boniface and a few other members, on television, when I was debating on panels both inside and outside this place, attacked me for not supporting the sex offender registry.
Where does this stem from? It stems from the fact that I asked questions, if anyone can believe such an outrageous thing. I asked questions about the fact that the list of offences was much longer than what was present in Ontario under Christopher's law. As an example, voyeurism was on the list. There was concern expressed about whether or not voyeurism should be on the list of offences that would put somebody on the sex offender registry. This concern came not only from me, but from police officers who were concerned that if the list was too broad, they would be visiting far too many houses when an incident happened. What they wanted was to have that scoped to make sure the houses they were visiting and the information they had would be directly addressed to people who commit the most serious offences.
The other example was of an indiscretion at an office party. As there was something in this bill about sexual assault, we wanted to make sure that if there was an indiscretion, and certainly somebody should not make unwanted sexual advances at something like an office party, that the individual would not end up on the sex offender registry. When a child goes missing, that would probably not be the first door to knock on to ask questions when there are other people on the list.
In raising these concerns, somehow that morphed both in the House and in television panels into some people saying that I did not support the sex offender registry. That is incredibly dishonest. Unfortunately, we see it in this House with enormous regularity. The Conservatives seem particularly obsessed with me and my riding. They rise on S.O. 31 statements saying that I love criminals and that I am against support for victims, but nothing could be further from the truth.
What the Conservatives are really saying is that I ask questions and that I do not blindly accept whatever is put in front of me. When anybody criticizes the Conservatives or asks questions, their first instinct is to attack, to try to bite off the person's head, as opposed to maybe listening and considering the fact that the points being raised are worthy of debate and discussion. In passing legislation, debate is an important part of the process that forms good legislation.
As much as I support this legislation as it is currently crafted, I have to express concern more broadly as to where the government is going with respect to its agenda. There are a lot of bills currently before the House. I think this is a good one, but there are many others that are not and it is leading us in a direction that is disturbing.
I came across an article in the New York Times that talks about the state of California's prison system. It bears reading excerpts from the article because it speaks to the model the government is chasing. While the rest of the world is running away, the government is chasing after what is happening in California.
The title of the article is “The Crime of Punishment”:
In 2005, when a federal court took a snapshot of California’s prisons, one inmate was dying each week because the state failed to provide adequate health care. Adequate does not mean state-of-the-art, or even tolerable. It means care meeting “the minimal civilized measure of life’s necessities,” in the Supreme Court’s words, so inmates do not die from rampant staph infections or commit suicide at nearly twice the national average.
These and other horrors have been documented in California’s prisons for two decades, and last week they were before the Supreme Court in Schwarzenegger v. Plata. It is the most important case in years about prison conditions. The justices should uphold the lower court’s remedy for addressing the horrors.
Four years ago, when the number of inmates in California reached more than 160,000, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a “state of emergency.” The state’s prisons, he said, are places “of extreme peril.”
Last year, under a federal law focusing on prison conditions, the lower court found that overcrowding was the “primary cause” of gruesome inadequacies in medical and mental health care. The court concluded that the only relief under the law “capable of remedying these constitutional deficiencies” is a “prison release order.”
Today, there are almost twice as many inmates in California’s 33 prisons as they were designed for. The court ordered the state to reduce that population by around 30 percent. While still leaving it overcrowded, that would free up space, staff and other vital resources for long overdue medical and mental health clinics.
I would add rehabilitation also. Further on, the article continues:
Among experts, as a forthcoming issue of the journal Criminology & Public Policy relates, there is a growing belief that less prison and more and better policing will reduce crime. There is almost unanimous condemnation of California-style mass incarceration, which has led to no reduction in serious crime and has turned many inmates into habitual criminals.
America’s prison system is now studied largely because of its failure—the result of an expensive approach to criminal justice shaped by fear-driven ideology. California’s prisons embody this overwhelming failure.
The Americans themselves are acknowledging that the path taken by California is a disaster and has led not only to less safe communities but to budgets being completely evaporated. Prisons are sucking like a vacuum from health care, education and infrastructure as they go these mega-prison complexes.
The problems are then compounded in terms of mental health. As we heard from the correctional investigator, the state of mental health in our prisons is deteriorating.