Madam Speaker, I rise today to speak to Bill C-238. This bill would amend section 738 of the Criminal Code so that courts could make offenders pay back community organizations, like shelters, emergency services and victim support groups, that have faced rising costs because of human trafficking and serious drug offences under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. This is a worthy idea, and I applaud the member for grappling with it.
These organizations deal with the damage caused by crime every single day. They are the ones that respond to overdoses, find safe beds for victims and support survivors through trauma in my community and across Canada. When crime rises, their workload rises and costs go up. I am certain that the intent behind this bill is to recognize that reality and help these organizations be better funded as a result, but good intentions do not always make good law.
While what this bill seeks to create sounds wonderful in theory, as a former litigator and adjudicator, I can tell members that, in practice, all this law would deliver is more legal complexity, higher costs, more parties with standing to intervene in cases and, ultimately, longer delays in a criminal justice system that is already stretched well beyond its limits. I truly appreciate that this bill recognizes that the costs of crime do not stop with the direct victim. When traffickers exploit vulnerable people or drug dealers poison our streets with fentanyl, we all suffer. Our hospitals, our shelters, our police, our paramedics and our families are all left to deal with the aftermath, and this aftermath is one we see and deal with every day in Nanaimo—Ladysmith.
Under the current law, judges can already order restitution when losses are clear and can be easily proven. For example, if someone breaks a window or steals property and the offender is caught, the loss can be connected to the offender, the cost can be easily quantified and the offender can be ordered to pay it back to the victim. What Bill C-238 would do is cast a wider net, allowing community organizations and others to claim their costs, reflecting the real costs to society of those crimes. That is what it would do in theory.
In the case of a broken window or theft of property, the costs could be the expenses of the local neighbourhood watch and community associations or the costs to the municipality of increased police patrols in that neighbourhood. In the case of drug trafficking, the costs could include the increased costs of medical care, harm reduction supplies, security equipment, counselling for staff and so on. I genuinely appreciate and support these goals, but causation is a problem.
If a community organization wants to recover its costs from an offender, causation requires it to link those specific costs to the specific offender by showing that, but for the offender's crime, the organization would not have had that cost. The idea is that we should not make one person pay for another person's crime, or make one person, no matter how bad we might think they are, pay for something the organization would still have had to pay for if the crime had not been committed. Restitution works really well for direct victims, but by casting this broadly, the problems would mount until they become insurmountable.
Take a shelter that helps victims of trafficking. It has rent, utilities, salaries, security costs, food costs and counselling costs. How do we tie those costs to a single trafficker's actions? What percentage is this one responsible for, as opposed to that one? Think about a hospital that treats overdose victims. How does a judge decide how much of an emergency room's budget is related to or how many doses of naloxone were used because of one particular dealer's drugs?
The bill tries to help by listing examples of eligible costs, but that would not solve the problem. The issue is not defining what the costs are; it is proving that those costs were caused by a specific offence committed by a specific offender. That comes at the sentencing phase, which could be years after the arrest.
Pulling that evidence together means a mountain of paperwork that would eat at the valuable time of frontline workers and ultimately hurt the very communities the bill seeks to help. It also means more time in court. The bill would turn sentencing hearings into mini-civil trials in which defence lawyers and prosecutors bicker back and forth over spreadsheets and receipts, arguing about which costs count and which costs do not. Documents would need a witness to put them into evidence, diverting more resources from the community organizations we are trying to help. In the end, expert witnesses, consultants and lawyers will be the only ones who make any money.
This brings me to enforceability. Restitution is not meant to be a fine or a punishment. It is meant to put victims in the position they would have been in but for the offence. It is not linked to crime in general. It is linked to a specific crime and a specific offender. However, the costs that community organizations face are linked to crime in general, and most criminals do not have regular bank accounts that courts can garnishee.
What would happen if an organization successfully cleared the causation hurdle? The court would issue a restitution order that will almost certainly never be collected, as my colleagues who have also spoken to the bill have explained. The organization would look well funded on paper and may cease to be eligible for grants because, in theory, it has a judgment it can collect on. It would usually have 10 years to collect on that judgment even though it will realistically never see the money. That does not help anyone.
Unrealistic restitution orders feel great on judgment day. They sound good, and they create the kind of hope that the hon. member sponsoring the bill spoke about in her remarks. However, that hope is almost certain to be false hope, embodying the illusion of accountability without the reality of it.
What should we do? Conservatives believe strongly in victim-centred justice. We believe offenders should be held accountable for the harm they cause. We believe in supporting the people and organizations that keep our communities safe. We also believe that there are better ways to achieve this than what the bill is trying to do. We believe in mandatory minimum sentences for the offenders who traffic in drugs and create havoc in our communities. We would try fentanyl dealers as murderers.
We could strengthen our asset forfeiture laws so that the proceeds of trafficking and drug crimes are seized and directed more directly to community recovery programs. We could work with the provinces to expand funding for victim services and trauma counselling. We could provide stable, predictable funding to frontline organizations so that they can plan ahead and deliver services without worrying about whether they will get restitution from a convicted offender who may not have any money.
These solutions would make a real difference. These solutions would ensure that the money actually reached the people doing the work without having to prove direct causation related to a specific case, without the need for participation in litigation and without creating an additional burden on our already overtaxed criminal justice system.
I have no doubt that the member who brought forward the bill did so out of a genuine desire to make the system better. My colleagues and I share that desire, but, as legislators, we have a duty to pass laws that are workable. Bill C-238 is not a workable law. It creates false hope, complexity and cost without achieving its goals. Unfortunately, it would not help victims. It would not help fund community organizations. It would mostly benefit consultants, accountants and the professional expert witness class while adding cost and workload to our already overburdened courts.
For those reasons, but with real respect and appreciation for the intentions with which the bill was crafted, regrettably, we will not be supporting Bill C-238. I would be happy to sit down with the member any time and work on better solutions.