Mr. Speaker, this has been a very difficult debate, and in the brief time I have, I want to thank members for contributing to this from all sides of the House. Canadians are crying out for bail reform, but we are still crying with a certain amount of lack of knowledge. This debate needs more evidence. Now, Bill C-14 attempts to balance things and attempts to recognize that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is fundamental, but there are some other principles here that are being, I fear, so politicized that we are losing track of a basic reality.
Bail is granted to people who have not been convicted of anything. Bail is so that people who are innocent can continue to hold down a job, be with their families and contribute to society until we have determined whether they are guilty of anything, so we must recall that our system of justice is based on the presumption of innocence.
Lawyers have studied this bill in the Canadian Bar Association. I used to be a practising lawyer, so I used to be a member, but do not hold it against me; there is a recovery program for lawyers as well. The Canadian Bar Association has looked at this and said that the effect of Bill C-14 would be that innocent people would be jailed when they place a reverse onus on someone and they have to prove why they should be allowed to be out on bail. The expression “out on bail” is used in this place as though we are talking about convicted murderers who suddenly get a free day pass.
We do need bail reform, but let us look at it with a larger lens in the time I have. The administration of justice is not purely a federal responsibility. For example, are sureties ever required to provide the money that they put down as a surety for someone who is out on bail? The answer is no. If a person is out on bail and has asked someone to provide a financial guarantee, a surety, that they will abide by bail conditions, and they then violate those bail conditions, almost never is the surety asked to provide the money they have said they would provide. This is all provincial jurisdiction.
Another really significant issue is that the provincial courts are understaffed and underfunded, and it takes so long to get people through the system to determine their guilt or their innocence that many of the jails can be overcrowded. Provincial and territorial jails are overcrowded, yet 71% of the people within provincial and territorial jails who apply for bail do not get it. Much of the debate in this place since Bill C-14 was tabled has been based on the presumption that people get bail in Canada easily, but the data does not show that.
I also want to mention that we have a real problem with the collection of that data. Federally and provincially, we have no data at all on how often a person on bail commits a crime. We have lots of anecdotal evidence, and it must not be discounted, because the conscience of a community and the pain and grief of the stories that we have been hearing may be anecdotal, but they are important and cannot be dismissed. However, making significant changes to bail reform should be based on evidence. That evidence needs to be collected. There is no standardized data collection from the federal, provincial and territorial governments on how people conduct themselves on bail. It is not collected, so we do not know.
Passing laws in this place is serious business. Passing laws regarding criminal justice that could result in more innocent people being in jail is very serious business. I do not like flying blind. I do not like knowing from the experts that we simply do not have the data to know how many of the people who receive bail and are on bail conditions honour those conditions, whether bail contributes to crime and whether we could do so much better if we funded provincial courts and funded more judges in provincial courts to make sure that the time between arrest and release is very, very brief.