Mr. Speaker, remember how good life used to be a decade ago, before the Liberal government? We had the wealthiest middle class. Now the middle class is poor, and Canada is the only G7 country in a recession. However, the best thing we had was how safe our country used to be. My city, the beautiful city of Toronto, anywhere, anytime, day or night, any neighbourhood, was safe.
After a decade of Liberals, violent crime is out of control. Residents are no longer safe. Parents are afraid for their kids to take the transit. There are robberies on the street, home invasions and extortion. It seems like every day I wake up and a person has been shot in my North York riding. Last week, there was a murder at Sheppard and Magellan, in the beautiful community of Downsview. Three men shot a man to death outside his house.
What is happening? What is happening is Liberal bail and sentencing laws. Every police officer will say that. We need to close the revolving door in the courts. First, we got the Liberal failure of Bill C‑14. That was for bail. Now we are here on Bill C‑16, to deal with sentencing. Again, we have a Liberal failure. Instead of increasing mandatory minimum sentences, the Liberals do the opposite. They create what they refer to as a “safety valve”, which would allow judges to disregard mandatory minimum sentences.
Under the Criminal Code, mandatory minimum penalties apply to a range of serious offences. These mandatory minimums are designed to set a sentencing floor, a minimum term of imprisonment that Parliament deemed necessary for denunciation, deterrence and public safety for specific categories of crime.
In recent years, courts have been striking down mandatory minimum penalties under section 12 of the charter as cruel and unusual punishment. That, of course, includes the Supreme Court. The Liberals frame the safety valve as a response to this jurisprudence of striking down mandatory sentences. They point to recent decisions like Senneville, where the Supreme Court struck down a mandatory minimum penalty for possession and distribution of child pornography. I will come back to this decision.
What would they do with a safety valve? The valve would allow courts to impose seLiberalsntences below the mandatory minimum if a judge thinks that applying the mandatory minimum would amount to a cruel and unusual punishment. The Liberals ironically say they would strengthen mandatory minimum sentences, but instead they do the opposite. They make them non-mandatory. Effectively, the valve would allow a judge to disregard mandatory minimum penalties, so a minimum penalty is no longer a mandatory minimum penalty.
Jail time would still be required, but a judge would be free to sentence the convicted person to one day in prison. If they feel that this House, Parliament, has prescribed a sentence that is too extreme, they can just disregard what we say. This is crazy. It would result in lighter sentences for serious repeat offenders. The Liberals are doing the exact opposite of what is required. In effect, what previously required a constitutional argument would be an automatic argument every time at sentencing, that something is cruel and unusual.
The safety valve is a major concession to judicial activism. It would undermine the role of this Parliament. We are the ones who set sentencing policy. Worse, the principle of deterrence is lost. I listened to some comments a short time ago from folks saying that there are empirical studies that state mandatory minimum sentences do not work. They do work, because someone cannot commit a crime if they are in prison. Many of these violent offenders who offend repeatedly, again and again, should be left in jail, away from the community that they seek to terrorize again. Therefore, we need to do the opposite.
This is especially in response to the Supreme Court striking down the mandatory minimum sentence on distribution and access to child pornography. At the justice committee, I moved a motion to invoke the notwithstanding clause to protect mandatory minimum sentences on possession and distribution of child pornography, but the Liberals voted it down. Again, they failed to protect children. This is not just about kids who have already been abused and exploited in these pictures and videos. It is about kids in the future who, God forbid, could be raped because the courts have failed to punish these perverts and deter future perverts.
We had to go hard here so that we could kill this awful industry, but the Liberals refused. Why? They say, “All we heard from the Attorney General was that it is a sunset clause, and in five years we would have to do this again.” Well, fine, let us do it again.
What was the point of the notwithstanding clause? It was to prevent absurdity. Attorney General Jean Chrétien used the clause to seal the deal on the charter, and he specifically used an example for absurdity that the Supreme Court could potentially come up with. It was a hypothetical that Chrétien used: that the Supreme Court would find possession of child pornography protected by freedom of expression. I think everyone in this room, even the Liberals, would agree that such a finding would be absurd.
Now, that is not the scenario we had in Senneville, but pretty close. Senneville pleaded guilty to possession and access to over 300 images of children, mostly girls between the ages of three and six, being sexually exploited. The co-appellant, Mathieu Naud, pleaded guilty to possessing over 500 images and almost 300 videos, most of which were of children ages five to 10, in many cases being subjected to rape and sodomy. This is disgusting. Striking down a mandatory one-year sentence for each of those two counts is precisely the type of absurdity that Attorney General Jean Chrétien had in mind. This is precisely why section 33 was explicitly inserted in the charter.
We said to the Liberals at the justice committee, instead of narrowing down and diluting the mandatory minimum sentences, let us preserve the mandatory minimum sentences for the worst of the worst, and this is one of them, but the Liberals refused the amendment.
I am proud of the Leader of the Opposition and my Conservative colleagues. We will invoke section 33 to protect children from these monsters and to prevent this absurdity that the Supreme Court arrived at. The Attorney General is refusing to invoke the clause, refusing to do his job, refusing to protect children and safeguard the law. Instead, the Liberals weaken sentencing laws with a safety valve. It is a shame, and it is regrettable.
I spoke to a police officer in my riding. I do not want to name them, and I do not even want to name the division. He said to me, not too long ago, “Roman, you know how upsetting it is when we arrest a guy again and again. We had a situation where an officer got injured during the arrest of a guy he arrested again and again, and a couple of days later the same offender was out on bail again.”
We tried to deal with bail, but the Liberals refused to remove the ladder principle, and still the courts are required to release at the earliest opportunity under the least restrictive terms. We dealt with sentencing and with activist courts that refuse to impose the mandatory minimums that the House prescribed. Instead of preserving mandatory minimums, what did the Liberals do? They did what Liberals do: They weakened mandatory minimum sentences. They now tell judges to go ahead and disregard the mandatory minimum if they think the mandatory minimum is disproportional.
I do not understand what it is we are doing here with Bill C-16. We need to do the opposite. We need to protect Canadians. We need to take a bite out of crime and not let criminals loose, as this bill would do.