Mr. Speaker, I would like to begin my remarks by referring back to the response I received from the member for Terra Nova—The Peninsulas when I asked him how we came to be debating Bill C-14 at the report stage today.
As mentioned, there has been a lot of talk about Bill C-9 in committee but, unfortunately, nothing has come of it because the Bloc Québécois proposed an amendment that sought to remove the religious exception as an excuse for promoting hatred. This frustrated the Conservatives, to use my colleague's wording, and as a result, we wasted a lot of time on this bill.
As also mentioned, Bill C-14 was a bill that the public wanted, that the Conservatives wanted, and that the Liberals wanted. Bill C-14 had to be passed quickly, which is why the two parties reached an agreement to speed up the process of getting it passed. I would say that this is where the problem lies. Corners were cut for political purposes, and I find that more than unfortunate.
This bill is important, not to mention substantial. At 40 pages long, it contains 84 clauses pertaining to both the Criminal Code and the YCJA, the Youth Criminal Justice Act. Some of the amendments, those that cleared up legal uncertainties and filled in gaps, were entirely welcome. Others, however, touched on crucial aspects of criminal law, including the presumption of innocence.
Following an agreement between the Liberals and the Conservatives, we ended up finding a way to set aside the debate of Bill C-9 on hate speech in order to discuss Bill C-14 at lightning speed. We ended up studying this hefty bill in committee, where we heard from witnesses during just two two-hour sessions. After that, we conducted a clause-by-clause study that took just one sitting. From 5 p.m. until about midnight we got through the whole thing in one go, because that was all the time we had. The decision had been made that it would be a short study.
I would argue that this is a shameful way of doing things, because it kind of invalidates the whole purpose of the role of MPs, which is to do a good job as legislators, in favour of something that is much more political and partisan. Both sides were determined to come out ahead. They wanted to be able to say that Bill C-14 has been passed, and too bad if we did it quickly, too bad if we cut corners, too bad if we have to redo the work later because we overlooked certain aspects, and even too bad if the Supreme Court eventually has to review certain provisions because we did not have time to analyze them properly and, more importantly, to properly discuss them with the people on the ground who will be applying them on a daily basis.
There are several aspects of the bill that affect what lawyers, Crown prosecutors and criminal defence attorneys do every day. I find it very unfortunate that more time was not taken to hear from them to find out whether they had any additional recommendations that could have been implemented to improve the bill. In some cases, this could perhaps have been done unanimously in committee. Some recommendations would probably have been very interesting to hear, but we did not have that opportunity because everything was done so quickly.
Nevertheless, I would like to make another point. When it comes to criminal law, we sometimes tend to fall back on wishful thinking, imagining that everything can be done through legislation and that this will solve problems that should really be solved through prevention or rehabilitation measures, which generally require more funding, more money. We are content to pass cosmetic legislation, which only gives the public a false sense of security.
I will give a very basic example. Increasing a sentence from 10 years to 15 years for a given crime will not necessarily reduce the incidence of that crime. Before committing a crime, no one considers the fact that the sentence is now 15 years in prison when it used to be 10, and then decides not to commit the crime because 10 years would have been fine but 15 years is too long. We might have a tendency at times to think that everything can be solved through legislation.
That being said, Bill C-14 is not all bad. We are voting in favour of it. We managed to improve it through amendments. One of those amendments addresses something that is at the heart of our new daily reality, namely the issue of firearms. Unfortunately, in recent years there has been a rise in gun crimes, particularly among young people. They are getting younger and younger and this is happening earlier and earlier in the continuum of violence whether the crimes are committed with firearms or the individual is in possession of firearms.
One of the Bloc Québécois's proposed amendments was accepted. It sought to broaden the definition of violent offence in the YCJA to include when an act is committed with a firearm. This has a major advantage in court. The problem we had before this inclusion was that a judge could not, in a case involving an offence committed with a firearm, order the detention of a young person unless the Crown prosecutor pleaded an exceptional provision. It was therefore necessary to plead an exception in order to have a youth detained for committing a crime with a firearm. By including firearms in the definition of violent offences, we are opening the door for judges to have greater discretion in ordering the detention of youth. This is a provision that will have a real and tangible impact on the ground and will be useful. We are very pleased that the Bloc Québécois amendment was adopted.
Another amendment that was adopted called for the bill to be reviewed in five years. This was done so a committee could review the implementation of the bill and any issues that may have arisen. The committee could then make recommendations on new provisions or amendments in light of the rights set out in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms that are being amended by the bill, particularly, as I was saying, the presumption of innocence, since there is a reverse onus in certain cases for certain crimes. We believe it is important to have an obligation to review the bill again and within a relatively short period of time. The five-year review of the bill is a very welcome idea.
However, I want to come back to what I was saying earlier, which is that a little more time would probably have been useful. Some people may have held back from tabling amendments that might have seemed minor in order to focus on the major amendments, knowing that the deadline was quite short and that we might not have been able to study them for lack of time.
I will give an example that may rather trivial but that could have been discussed had there been more time. It again has to do with the YCJA. One of the legislative gaps in the YCJA had to do with the retention period for youth records. There were already provisions stipulating that, in the event of an absolute discharge, for example, a young person's record had to be kept for one year. The record is no longer retained after one year. After an acquittal or the dismissal of a charge, the record is kept for two months. However, there was no time frame for retaining records in cases where no charges were laid. The retention time for records was established by case law, and there seemed to be some ambiguity in that regard. Bill C-14 corrected this by stipulating that the retention period would be two years, but this still creates problems. The record is kept for two years if no charges are laid, but the legislation also already provides for a retention period of two years if an extrajudicial measure is imposed on the young person. The retention period is also two years if no charges are laid at the end of the investigation, so we have the same retention period for very different situations. If we had had more time, we could have discussed whether to review these retention periods so that a retention period might be 90 days in one case, one year in another and two years in a third case.
Because of time constraints, we were unable to have this discussion on issues that may seem trivial but that actually do fill in some legal gaps. Once again, I find it so unfortunate that parliamentarians were forced to work against extremely tight deadlines for purely partisan reasons, given that both sides of the House wanted to pass Bill C-14 quickly.
Unfortunately, some corners may have been cut a bit.