Mr. Speaker, I am rising to continue the debate on a question regarding Bill C-10, and the government's expensive, ineffective and discriminatory approach to crime.
I have talked with people in Vancouver Quadra. I have had a stakeholder meeting with key leaders in the community on a number of issues. To discuss this approach to crime, I hosted a telephone town hall involving almost 6,000 constituents to go over the details and get input. My guest was a former minister of justice. I have had a policy breakfast featuring the head of the criminology department at Simon Fraser University.
I have had a chance to hear from constituents in Vancouver Quadra. They are most disturbed with the provisions in Bill C-10 around mandatory minimums. There are many other parts of this omnibus grab-bag of nine different laws that they are concerned about, but those provisions are the most concerning.
When I asked the question, the leader of the government in the House of Commons at that time used the words “safe streets and communities” four times in 30 seconds. Clearly, all of my constituents want safer streets and communities too, but the research and evidence shows that Bill C-10 would provide the opposite. The Conservative government would actually make streets more dangerous.
Don Head, the Commissioner of the Correctional Service of Canada, said, “Offenders who participate in substance abuse programs are 45% less likely to return with a new offence and 63% less likely to return with a new violent offence.”
Substance abuse programs make our streets safer. However, the government has put a huge amount of money into security because of the overcrowding and in-prison crime. It has cut the funding for substance abuse programs. Correctional plans include those programs for a reason. The government would actually make the streets more dangerous by denying 85% of prisoners the very programs they need to help with their rehabilitation.
In B.C., the prisons are close to 150% capacity. Recently there was news that charges against two alleged offenders were dropped due to lack of capacity to prosecute in a timely way. That problem will only be exacerbated with Bill C-10 by the influx of prisoners because of fixed mandatory sentences. This will make the streets even more dangerous.
This has been shown in other jurisdictions, such as Texas. Texas saved $1.7 billion and slashed crime rates by 27% by reversing its approach to crime which had resembled Bill C-10. Instead, Texas put that money into rehabilitation, mental health centres and so on.
The government for ideological reasons will make our streets more dangerous. It needs to level with Canadians because if that is its plan, more dangerous streets will be the outcome.