Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to offer a few observations with respect to Bill C-15.
At the outset, the Liberal Party will support the bill. However, there are some issues that we wish to raise in a collegial fashion as much as possible in this place. There are some questions that do bear some exploration. Hopefully that will take place at committee and that the committee will be given a fulsome amount of time to discuss it.
The bill has been kicking around for a while, somewhat like the previous bill. Its previous iteration was Bill C-41 and before that I have lost track of what numbers it has seen over the course of several Parliaments.
I will confine my remarks to basically three points: first, with respect to sentencing; second, with respect to judges; and third with respect to the supervisory power of the vice chief of the Defence Staff as it relates to the provost marshal.
The first observation has to do with military sentencing generally. It is beyond arguable that military sentencing is harsher and less flexible than is civilian sentencing for comparable offences. The bill does make some effort to reconcile the sentencing that would take place in a military tribunal with sentencing that would take place in a civilian tribunal. That is by and large a good thing. We recognize that flexibility in sentencing is to the benefit of the justice system. It is to the benefit of the Crown and the accused.
However, I would note that it is somewhat ironic that the government on the one hand is introducing flexibility in sentencing with respect to Bill C-15 and military personnel, while simultaneously in other legislation introducing more and more minimum mandatory sentences, all of which takes away from flexibility in sentencing where a judge, Crown and defence may arrive at a better sentencing option than possibly a minimum mandatory does.
To be consistent, the Liberal Party agrees there should be greater flexibility in sentencing, such as in Bill C-15, and where appropriate, the sentence should be more flexible and possibly less harsh.
We do hold our military personnel to a higher standard than that of civilians. There are cases where the sentence should reflect not only the civilian component, but also the code of discipline that applies to all military personnel. It is one thing to go running around the countryside as a drunk driver in a civilian motor vehicle, but it is another thing altogether to be drunk with a military vehicle, which could have far more serious consequences and is clearly a breach of discipline. The law should recognize that concern as it is an additional responsibility that a person in the military takes on. It should recognize that these are very serious accusations and breaches of not only the Criminal Code, but of the code of conduct expected of military personnel.
The second point I want to make is with respect to judges. It is a good idea that part-time judges be made available in various tribunals. There is, after all, a population of only about 68,000 serving personnel, while the gross population of the military is roughly 100,000. The availability of part-time judges is a good idea.
Interestingly, the bill maintains the retirement age of 60 years of age. Where I come from, judges are actually just coming into their judicial career somewhere between 55 and 65 years of age, because of the argument that not only does it takes quite a while to accumulate the knowledge base for reviewing Criminal Code offences, but also to arrive at wise and intelligent judicial discretion.
It is somewhat counterintuitive that we do not limit civilian judges until they are age 75, but we limit military judges to age 60. The argument is that the judges need to be deployable. At one level, that is probably a good argument. At another level, I do not know that they need to be terribly deployable while actually sitting as a military judge in places like Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto or any other base in Canada, where the issue of deployability is not as necessary.
It strikes me as counterintuitive when we walk away from some very capable people who are, in fact, quite able to administer justice to those members of the military who find themselves on the wrong side of the law.
The final point I want to make has to do with section 18.5, which concerns the Canadian Forces provost marshal. In the ranking, the vice chief of the Defence Staff is, in effect, the second most powerful military figure in our hierarchy. He or she, as the case may be, under subsection (2), “may issue general instructions or guidelines in writing in respect of the responsibilities described in paragraphs 18.4(a) to (d). The Provost Marshal shall ensure that they are available to the public”.
As a general proposition, the vice chief may issue guidelines. Those guidelines are communicated to the provost marshal and the provost marshal in turn is able to make those public. This is the military police. This is telling the police officers what they are supposed to do in terms of investigations as a general proposition, which, if it were left there, would be perfectly acceptable.
However, there is a further section with respect to the same issue. It says, “The Vice Chief of the Defence Staff may issue instructions or guidelines in writing in respect of a particular investigation”. What is objectionable about that?
Let us cast our minds back to Somalia. We will recall that as a blight on the otherwise exemplary record of our forces operating abroad that led to an inquiry. It was not a happy outcome for any of the parties involved, particularly the military.
This section, in effect, gives the vice chief the option of shutting this whole thing down, shutting any investigation down on his or her say so. That, I would suggest, is a significant departure from what we expect of civilian police officers.
The analogy is imperfect but is an analogy which may help people appreciate the significance of this section. It is as if police officers were faced with an investigation and the mayor came along and said, “Don't do it”, or the premier came along and said, “We don't want you to do that one”, or the Prime Minister came along and said, “We don't want you to conduct this investigation”. That is inconsistent with the general independence of police officers, the independence that they have from political supervision.
The government from time to time will rightly say in question period and elsewhere that it has no authority to intervene if a case is under police investigation. That is a recognition of a file called Campbell and Shirose, the case that was decided by the Supreme Court, which gives an enormous amount of protection to the independence of a police officer to pursue a police investigation in the fashion and the manner and with the distance it requires in accordance with the views of the investigating officers. That, however, is being pulled back in this particular case, and it will be potentially circumscribed by the Vice Chief of the Defence Staff, presumably on the instructions of the Chief of the Defence Staff.
Therefore every investigation that potentially could get launched and investigations that could go in directions that maybe the CDS or the Minister of National Defence or the government of the day does not want it to go, could be yanked. The way it could be yanked is through this particular section. It would violate some of the core concepts of police independence. It would allow the vice chief to issue instructions and guidelines in specific cases.
That is possibly one of the more difficult sections of this particular bill, which should be explored at committee. I am hoping members will be given a real opportunity to mine into this issue. For those who hold the independence of the police as, for want of a better term, sacrosanct, this is a very significant pullback of the authority of the police to do their job. Anytime the state intervenes in a police investigation, whether it is through a vice chief, the CDS, the military, the government or the minister, it is potentially a bad thing for our system of government and probably quite offensive to our way of government and our way of life here. Allowing the second highest ranking officer in the Canadian Forces to shut down a military police investigation, in our judgment, would not be the way to go.
We need to understand that we respect the RCMP, for instance. I am just using the RCMP as an example. There is no comparable section in the RCMP legislation, which would allow the minister of the day or the deputy minister of the day to shut down an RCMP investigation, and were it to happen, there would be a political price to pay.
We agree that, on the sentencing aspect, there should be a significant overlap between the code of discipline and the Criminal Code. We question the advisability of limiting judges to age 60. We really want to ask some questions with respect to Section 18.5(3), which gives the vice chief what I would argue are extraordinary abilities to limit investigation.