Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to speak to a great private member's bill from my colleague from Calgary Nose Hill. This is a good bill. What I like about it is its simplicity. It is very simple and common sense. I want to commend the member for her hard work on this and her understanding of where Canadians are. This bill resides at the intersection of two key areas. One is crime, which people have lots of things to say about, and immigration is the other. When we look at polling and talk to people in, say, my riding, and I know that all of us talk to people in ridings every day, we hear about crime and immigration.
People are very concerned about the system we have today, so this bill really comes at the intersection of that. In crime, we have things like revolving doors and low or no penalties. In the immigration system, we have problems with asylum, temporary foreign workers, international students and wait-lists. The intersection is when judges in the criminal system consider sentencing and take immigration status into account when they sentence individuals. That is what this bill aims to address.
Many bills in the House, I would say, are quite complicated. Members often have to look at them multiple times to understand what they say. Others are very simple, and this bill happens to be a very simple one. I am going to read part of it. It says, “A court that imposes a sentence on an offender who is not a Canadian citizen shall not take into consideration any potential impact the sentence could have on the offender’s immigration status in Canada, or on that of a member of their family.” Simply put, a judge considering a sentence for somebody found guilty of a crime would not be able to consider the impact it would have on their immigration status. In other words, there would not be a two-tiered system of sentencing in Canada. Today, we have a two-tiered system where judges take into account immigration status, where one criminal gets a lesser sentence than another simply because of immigration status. I am going to give some examples of that and show why that is a problem.
First of all, I want to make it clear that we are talking about non-citizens, people who are not yet Canadians. In our current law, the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, it is very clear that, when certain thresholds are met for crimes, such as the length of time that has been imposed for a sentence, there are consequences. The one that most people are aware of is, if a person gets a sentence of more than six months, it means that they have to be deported. That is often a major consideration when judges are looking at sentences.
I want to give some examples because I think the help everybody to understand. We would like to think that our system is clean, that everybody is looking at it in a fair, common-sense and logical way, and it just does not work that way. I will give an example of this later, but, unfortunately, some judges are activists who want to impose their own thinking and take advantage of the the laws to do things that are not really fair and that create this two-tiered sentencing system.
In the first example, a non-citizen was facing charges of drug trafficking and possession of a weapon. This person was facing a three-year sentence and deportation because of that. This person wanted to plead guilty and the judge did not want to accept that because the judge was concerned that the accused did not understand the implications to his immigration status. The judge stopped the trial and tried to get the person to understand the implications of pleading guilty. This person somewhat understood, but still wanted to plead guilty, yet, even then, the judge stopped the trial and essentially forced this guy to talk to an immigration lawyer, almost as if to say, wink, wink, he needed to talk to somebody because he could get a better deal if he just waited. The judge was essentially acting as the lawyer for the person he was sentencing. By the way, this same person was facing a manslaughter charge, so this was not a one-off thing. This person was facing some serious time.
A second example is another non-citizen who stabbed a victim with a knife. The victim required 18 stitches and 50 staples to heal their body. This was a serious crime. The Crown asked for four years, and the defence asked for a conditional sentence. Why did it ask for a conditional sentence? It was because it would avoid the deportation angle and also allow the accused the ability to appeal their immigration status, should they need to do so. What did the judge do?
The judge said, “Oh, you are right. We need to be careful about this because of the immigration status, so we are going to go with the conditional sentence”, which is not what would have happened to any other Canadian citizen had they been in this situation. Here, again, we have a case where the judge was lenient to an extreme degree, so much so that the Crown appealed this to the B.C. Court of Appeal. The higher court found that the judge had used the collateral immigration consequences at issue here to reduce the respondent's sentence to the point where it became disproportionate to both the gravity of the offence and the moral blameworthiness of the offender. Thankfully, in this case, the B.C. Court of Appeal was able to catch this and fix it, but there have been many other cases where it has not been caught.
Another example is a non-citizen who was out on bail for trafficking cocaine. The judge cut his sentence in half, citing the tough life the criminal had, injuries and immigration status. Another example was a man who was trying to procure sex from a 15-year-old girl. The judge said the conviction would not only delay his citizenship by four years but could prevent him from sponsoring his wife and obtaining his engineering licence, and that those immigration and professional consequences were far more severe than jail. Again, here was a judge who was using immigration status to determine a sentence.
All of these cases and many more show why this private member's bill is so important. They show why this bill is critical to closing a loophole that exists in our system and that judges are abusing to give people lesser sentences, thus giving us this two-tiered system.
How did we get here? A big part of this is because of the Liberal justice reforms that happened. I want to focus on Bill C-75, which is a bill that fundamentally shifted the power balance to criminals. We talk about bail, not jail. Everyone has heard that comment many times. We have talked about it a lot. It really comes from Bill C-75, which was passed by the Liberal government.
The principle of restraint was the new thing introduced in this bill, and it essentially means this: It instructs judges to give sentences that are no more restrictive than necessary. They are to release the accused at the earliest opportunity. They are to release them on the least onerous conditions, and imprisonment should only be used when absolutely necessary and for the shortest duration possible.
These were the instructions given by the Liberal government to judges. Go easy on people is essentially what this means. The judge has the ability to go easy on the person. Guess what. Judges took this principle of restraint, married it up with the immigration issues that we have been talking about to this point and started applying this to immigration cases. That is how we ended up with sentences that were disproportionate to the crime, and how we ended up with this two-tiered sentencing system that we have.
This is something that is a big problem and that is why I am happy to stand to speak to this bill today, because this bill that was submitted by my great colleague fixes this in a very simple way. It creates a single system of sentencing for all people in Canada.
There are other problems that we have in our sentencing system. I also wanted to mention, and I talked about it earlier, activist judges. I just want to highlight this one example that really describes the problem. I am reading from an article from the National Post. I just want to read a couple of things from of it. It says:
In 2013, Toronto lawyer Avvy Yao-Yao Go described herself as a “loudmouth activist for politicians to contend with.”
This person was very aggressive in providing leniency to people who were not citizens of Canada. The government, in its wisdom, decided to make her a federal court judge in 2021. She has done incredible things to halt revocation proceedings against people. There have been all kinds of things that she has done to provide leniency through her court. At the very end, it says:
...decisions in the last year alone show a pattern of leniency for rule-breakers, country-shoppers.... Each instance takes state capacity away from cases that truly matter.
There are many examples we can think of. I just want to conclude by saying this bill, Bill C-220, is a good bill. It fixes a major gap that we have in our system. It is a wonderful, simple bill that I support wholeheartedly. I would implore all members to pass this bill when it comes time to vote.