Mr. Speaker, Bill C-5 is in its second incarnation in this House. It was first introduced as Bill C-59 in November 2009. Of course, it got killed as did so many other really important pieces of crime legislation that absolutely had to be passed immediately. Because of the Prime Minister's prorogation of Parliament in late December 2009, it went down the tubes as did all the other bills at that time. In spite of the protestations and advocacy we heard from the government side about the absolute need to pass these bills immediately, of course prorogation was more important. The bill was then reintroduced in April when it had three hours of debate. The government never did bring it back in the spring, but finally brought it back in the fall of this year.
This bill is quite offensive to a fundamental principle of our democracy, and western democracies in particular. That principle is the rule of law. This is not the only bill where the government has attempted to do this, and in some cases has done it, but it shifts significant power into the whimsical hands of ministers. When I see that, I sometimes think we are back at the point where we have the divine right of kings, that rule where the government of the day gets to make whatever decision it wants based on whatever reason it wants. That basically is what the bill would do.
We just heard from my colleague from Burnaby—Douglas that the system as it is right now, since 1993, has had four cases of recidivism out of 620. That is a rate of .6%.
I will come back to this point in more detail vis-à-vis the two cases that came down on Tuesday of this week from the Federal Court where the decision, again a whimsical decision, of the minister of public safety of the day was overturned. If we proceed with this bill and more prisoners in other countries are refused access to this program, what happens then is they will come out of prisons in other countries where there has been no rehabilitation program at all and will come back to Canada without any criminal record, which makes it difficult for our police forces to be able to pursue them. They will come back to Canada without any parole provisions or any supervision post-custody, because of course that is all done in the other country. They will come back here because they are Canadian citizens and we have no basis for not letting them back into the country. That may be something the current government will try taking a shot at, again. However, we cannot do that under international law. They will come back to Canada without a criminal record, having received no rehabilitation while they were incarcerated and with no supervision control over them when they are back in Canada.
I ask the government to stop and think for a minute about what that means vis-à-vis recidivism and the likelihood of more crimes being committed by those individuals who oftentimes have been convicted of fairly serious crimes in other countries.
We talk about safe streets and safe communities; they are speaking points, buzzwords. How safe are our streets, how safe are our communities going to be when we dump those people back into our communities with no supervision, no rehabilitation? Oftentimes they are coming out of prisons in other countries that just hardened them. Oftentimes they come back with serious mental health problems as well, if they did not have them before. That is what is going to happen if we reduce the number of cases that are allowed access to this program.
It has been an extremely successful program. There is no other program that anyone can point to with that low a recidivism rate. There is not one in Canada. I do not know if the government thinks that by doing this it will somehow reach perfection. The opposite is going to happen. Many more people will come back after many years of incarceration elsewhere and commit serious crimes in this country.
If we keep the program as it is now, it could use some fine tuning. If we keep it as it is now, we allow access to it. When people are incarcerated here, we see to it that they go through the rehabilitation programs in Canada. When they are released, it will be under parole supervision, oftentimes for extended periods of time. They will have a criminal record in Canada. All those mechanisms will exist to protect our communities. They absolutely disappear if people do not get access to this program.
There is another point I would like to make with regard to the actual provisions in the bill itself. The government has listed eight criteria, all discretionary on the part of the minister to consider. I listened to my colleague from the Conservative Party who spoke just before me. He said that these things do not have to be taken into account. Sure, it would be good to know whether an individual in a prison in another foreign jurisdiction had refused rehabilitation programs, but the minister does not have to take that into account. All eight of the criteria are met.
This brings me to the kind of exercise of discretion that we have seen. On Tuesday, two rulings came down from the Federal Court. I have to apologize that I was not able to get the actual rulings and I am working with some of the quotes that have been taken by media out of the rulings. There are two separate cases.
In one case the court clearly and bluntly said to the minister, “We don't understand how you could have drawn these conclusions. The facts in the case are this. You made your determination and said the facts of the case are exactly opposite”. That is the kind of whimsical discretion we are seeing exercised by government ministers in the face of legislation that requires them to exercise their discretion reasonably, which was another determination the court made in that case, that it was not exercised reasonably.
The reasons given were completely contradictory to the actual facts as found by the trial judge in that case, completely contradictory. It was not just the trial judge, by the way, it was also the prosecutor. The case was overturned and sent back for reconsideration by the minister. One can only guess what is going to happen if that case comes up under the legislation being proposed. The current legislation will not apply because it will not be retroactive.
The court very clearly told the minister that he did not know what he was doing, that he was doing it all wrong and completely backward. Now the government is proposing to give other ministers unlimited discretion. The wording in the last of the eight criteria reads this way, “any other factor that the minister considers relevant”. If the minister considers the colour of the prisoner's skin, the colour of his eyes, whether he has short hair or long hair as relevant, he or she can determine that. There is absolutely no limit to what is relevant because it is all at the whim of the minister.
We are hearing from the Conservatives that this is sub judice, but there is no realistic possibility for an appeal of this case. The Federal Court judge decided that case on the facts of these two cases. The second case is troublesome from one standpoint. I believe that the wording is accurate, but I am only quoting from the article in the newspaper.
What Justice O'Keefe said was that the courts “cannot condone nor accept completely unstructured discretion”. If they apply that, in the light of the charter, this law will not survive a charter challenge. It is quite clear in that wording.
What we will hear at the public safety committee, if it gets there because there is substantial opposition from all opposition parties, but if it does pass at second reading and gets to committee, is the minister saying that he has had his people look at this and that it is charter proof. We have heard that from the Conservatives a number of times with a number of cases on other bills they have passed, supported, oftentimes, by the Liberals, and then struck down because they are not charter proof.
We have heard reports in the last few weeks in the media about well qualified public servants within the Justice Department speaking anonymously that they are constantly under pressure to agree to let the courts decide. They hear from the minister and the minister's office, whether it is public safety or the justice minister, “Don't worry about it, don't worry about the charter. If we're wrong, let the judges fix it”. That is not only an abdication of responsibility but it is also a dishonest approach both in the House and to the public safety and the justice committee and to the public generally.
The Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada has a responsibility to not present legislation to the House that clearly will not survive a charter challenge. It is not a maybe might survive, but we will let the judges decide. The Minister of Justice and Attorney General of this country has a responsibility to only present legislation that he believes, based on firm opinion and on the law and the charter, that it will survive a charter challenge. That is not what has been happening since the Conservatives have taken power.
We are constantly seeing sections come through both the justice committee and the public safety committee, sections that will not survive a charter challenge, but we are hearing from the Minister of Justice and Attorney General that they will. Then cases come on and there are many more pending. We know there are all sorts of sections that will get struck down. This is almost certainly one of them based on the decision of the Federal Court on Tuesday.
We in the opposition parties are faced as a Parliament at this point of having to tell the government that based on this decision it should withdraw the bill, take it back and have another look at it. I will concede that there are some provisions with regard to the eight point criteria that we would be prepared to support. As I mentioned earlier, if we know from the other jurisdiction that a prisoner has refused to take rehabilitation programs in that jurisdiction while incarcerated, that should be taken into account, not may be taken into account, by the ministers as to whether they will allow the person into the program. We would accept that.
The bill should be sent back to the Department of Justice, redrafted to make those criteria that are acceptable mandatory, that the minister must take them into account in making a decision and, of course, removing the absolute discretion of the minister that the bill is proposing at this time.
I will now talk a bit more about some of the cases I have had to deal with in my office since the government came into effect. We are now on our third public safety minister but they have basically all acted the same way. There has been a significant increase in the number of rejections by the government minister of the day since the Conservatives came into power, cases that have cried out.
I remember one case a member from Edmonton raised and then got slapped down by the minister, and I assume by the Prime Minister's Office, involving a case of a person incarcerated in Cuba. I have had two of those myself in my office where they were denied access to the program.
In all three of those cases that I know quite intimately, under the old regime, prior to these minsters, all three of those people would have been admitted back into Canada. In all three cases, the fact that they were not, we are going to get people back in our country who are not going to be supervised, who will not have a criminal record because they did not have one when they left Canada and, as all three of those cases are in Cuba, none of them had access to any rehabilitation programs. One of the cases involves a severe health problem. I am not sure that person will ever make it back to Canada. He may very well die in a prison in Cuba. It was not a death sentence that he was sentenced to either.
Then we have that really notorious case in Florida of a young man out of Quebec suffering from bipolar or schizophrenia. This has all been in the paper and so I am not releasing any information that has not been made public by him and his family. On his way down to Florida he stops taking his medication. He gets into a fight just inside the Florida border and, in the course of the fight, the other combatant is killed. He is convicted to the equivalent of our second degree murder or manslaughter. He is receiving absolutely no treatment. He is not even getting most of his medications while incarcerated and sentenced to life. All of that information was put before the minister and he rejected him having access to the program. The state of Florida did allow him to have access to the program.
I do not know if I made this clear, but the jurisdiction where the person is incarcerated must agree first that the person will be released back to Canada and then our minister needs to go along with it. Florida officials said that they would release him back to Canada so he could serve the time in Canada but our minister rejected that.
We have those kinds of cases. Their conduct is inhumane. What we will be doing here with this bill, if it goes through, is augmenting extensively their ability to do it, if it survives the charter challenge. It is a very offensive bill from that vantage point. I go back to my opening comments when I said that we are a democracy, that we are based on the rule of law.
I happened to be flying during the summer break near the end of the summer and I watched the current Robin Hood movie. There we had it, 900 years ago. Our system began to curtail absolute discretion on the part of our rulers and replaced it with rule of law. This bill would take us back to a similar period of time where we do not have rules that ministers have to follow, exercising their discretion within those. Our charter says that we should and I hope, should this bill ever get into law, that the charter will be strong enough to reject this and say that it is unconstitutional and offensive to our rights in this country.
That is not the route we should go. We should not fall into the trap that the Conservatives have fallen into of saying, “Well, we are not sure, but this is what we want to do ideologically, this is what we want to do politically, we have to be seen to be tough on crime and so we will let the judges decide”.
This is a minority government and the opposition parties have a role to play. We will not fall into that trap. We are parliamentarians and we have a responsibility to protect all of our citizens from unjust laws. This is an unjust law and we should all vote against it and defeat it at second reading.