Bob Mills

[Justice, April 7th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, my constituent, Lisa Dillman, just received horrifying news. Her ex-husband and convicted child molester, John Schneeberger, has just reapplied to force his young children to visit him in prison.

Nearly two years ago, I saw the sheer terror of those little girls as they were forced into that prison. He sexually assaulted those little girls' 13 year old stepsister.

Will the government now support my bill, Bill C-231, Lisa's law, to prevent this injustice from ever occurring again?

[Motions for Papers, April 2nd, 2003]

Yes, Mr. Speaker, I would.

[Sex Offender Information Registration Act, March 31st, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, again we have heard common sense. That is exactly what we have to do. We have to protect against having future victims. That is what it is all about. That is the bottom line and that is why it has to be retroactive. We do not want to see people persecuted. There does not have to be a picture on every fence post, but we have to protect those future potential victims. As the member says, it has to be just in the school system and in the police system so they know where to go when someone reoffends or there is an offender from that list.

[Sex Offender Information Registration Act, March 31st, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I do not think I got through to the member about common sense. That sort of answer would be great in a courtroom. Because we have a Charter of Rights and Freedoms and because we have a Supreme Court appointed by the Prime Minister, people of his choosing and his political belief, we opt for mediocrity. We are just going to put through a weak piece of legislation that is not going to have much of a challenge and really will not do much.

That is exactly what has brought us to the problems we have. That is why there are those victims out there. We opted for mediocrity and said we could not change anything. The status quo prevails. Damn it anyway, we can change things. We have to change things. We need to have a Supreme Court that is chosen by the people, whether it is the Senate or the House of Commons. It has to be one that represents the views and beliefs of the people of Canada. And the views and beliefs of the people of Canada are that sex offenders should be registered, that we should keep track of them, and that if they reoffend we should get them back in jail right away and make the penalties harsher. That is what the Canadian people want and that is where it has to come from.

Let us talk about common sense. Let us not talk about mediocrity and say that we cannot change it and we have to go with the way it is. The status quo is not good enough and the House has to recognize that.

[Sex Offender Information Registration Act, March 31st, 2003]

And it's retroactive. It was probably great-grandpa's and did not have a serial number.

[Sex Offender Information Registration Act, March 31st, 2003]

Yes, Mr. Speaker, I got 13,000 letters from people in my riding about Bill C-68 when it came through. There are an awful lot of those long guns that came from great-grandpa yet they are retroactively covered under this law and they have to be registered.

The most interesting part of this, which does not really fit the answer but I want to tell members anyway, is that I know one fellow who has 12 registration certificates. What those registration certificates say is: make of gun, unknown; length of barrel, unknown; serial number, unknown. So he has the registration for his guns and members can tell me how that is going to stop anybody from committing a crime with those guns. The make is unknown, the length is unknown and the registration numbers are unknown. The only thing that is known is the owner of the unknown gun--

[Sex Offender Information Registration Act, March 31st, 2003]

And 4,000 more victims. Surely there must be a way to get those people on that list. I am sorry that I cannot give a legal answer because I do not know one, but common sense says that we have to find a way.

[Sex Offender Information Registration Act, March 31st, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for her comments and the sincerity with which she brings forward the argument that it should be something that will really work. This is about kids and about people who are victims out there and unfortunately there are so many of them.

It is good that I am not a lawyer. I guess I am just a little too practical for that. I have a little too much common sense. There are those who always hide behind the law and say “We cannot do this because of the law”. For those 83 victims out there, it was the law that made them go to those prisons. Fix the law. There has to be a way to do that. There has to be some way when we are talking about this issue if for no other reason than that psychologists say that 40% will reoffend. If 40% will reoffend, that means that 40% will not be on that list. That is about 4,000 people, as I understand it, so of the 10,000 sex offenders in Canada, about 4,000 are going to reoffend--

[Sex Offender Information Registration Act, March 31st, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I was not going to speak to this bill today, but listening to what has been going on and listening to some of the questions that some of the members across have been asking, I realize that they just do not get it. They do not understand what a sex registry is all about or why we might want one. Let me take some time to explain to them with some examples of what it would mean to have a sex registry.

I wish to pay tribute to our member for Langley--Abbotsford, who from day one started talking about this issue. It has been front and centre for him. He thought he had a victory when the House voted in favour of having the sex registry. He thought that maybe the government finally got it, that it finally understood what this was all about in protecting those victims.

We are talking primarily about victims, many of whom cannot defend themselves against this sort of crime and we are talking about people on the criminal side of things who are quite often sick. They have mental problems and for whatever reasons they have become sex offenders.

I want to take this opportunity to explain to the members across what it means to real people out on the street to have sex offenders that are not registered running around with police officers admitting that they often lose track of where they are. They come out of prison and often change their names. That is one of the first things they do. At Bowden prison in my riding many sex offenders change their names before they leave prison. They then hope to disappear into society and no one will know who they are. Some of them become truck drivers and drive across the country so they can carry on their sexual deviant activities wherever they happen to be. Some of them move back to the communities where they came from. However, many of them do not want to be identified.

That would be fine if they would not re-offend, but the record for sex offenders is that at least 40%, and some would say even 50%, will re-offend. That is the problem. Psychologists, prison wardens, and the police will tell us about the records. We can check them but that is exactly what happens.

What we are saying is that when sex offences are committed, the names of the individuals should be put into a record and that record should be kept current. The offenders should be forced, when they move to some other place, to take those records with them. If they do not re-offend after a point in time, 10 years or whatever the number, they are removed from that record. That is for the ones who do not re-offend. However, if they re-offend that record continues.

Let me make it even more real. Let me talk about the sex offender that was in my riding. It was one of the first serious cases that I became involved with.

When we all saw this bill, we thought the member for Langley--Abbotsford had finally won something here. He had the sex offender registry. As we read the first few clauses we thought the government had got it, but then we saw that it would not be retroactive. Therefore all of the federal and provincial sex offenders would not exist. Only the new sex offenders would be included in the registry.

Then we saw the final clause of the bill which said that offenders could apply to not be on the sex registry because it might affect their chances of getting a job or moving into a community or going back home to live with mommy. We would not want to do anything that might affect this criminal who has been charged with a sex offence.

When I saw that I could not believe it. I have been around politics long enough to see the game plan. Canadian Alliance will vote against it, so it does not really want a registry. Yes we do, but we want one that will work.

The registry will not work if it is not retroactive and it will not work if someone can opt out of it. This is the same as criminals who own long guns. They will not register them. Bank robbers will not tell the police to fingerprint them before they rob a bank, as I heard some other member mention today.

Let me give the House an example. A 38 year old man who was a nine time sex offender was about to be released into my community. He was going home to live with his mother who lived across from an elementary school. This was in a section of our city called Oriole Park. When I received this information I felt it was my duty to inform the people in the community. With the help of the RCMP, his name and picture were released. A meeting was held in the school gymnasium across from where he was living and 200 parents of young children attended. Our guest speakers were the prison warden, the chief of the RCMP, a psychologist from the prison and an independent psychologist. Each one of those individuals indicated that the person had refused to take treatment, refused any help while in prison, had served his full term but that they felt he had a 75% chance of reoffending. That was the message given to the parents of young children about this sex offender.

At that point in time I came to the House and asked the then justice minister what I should tell the parents if that individual were to reoffend. What would I tell them the justice system did for them? I was told that he probably would not reoffend and that because I was a Reform Party member I was jumping to conclusions and saw the legal system as not working, et cetera.

That person was released. The parents and the police were very alert to the situation. In the year after his release he was arrested once and it happened at my office. A fireman and one of my staff members caught him painting swastikas on my door and they chased him down the back lane. The judge refused to hear any of the reasons that he was doing that. The judged fined him $50 and told him not to do it again.

The man then proceeded to stalk me for a few months but the police could do nothing because he was not harming me. He was just following me around. I must say that it was not very pleasant for my family.

When I was at home on a Saturday afternoon in June, I received a call from the RCMP in Black Falls, about 15 kilometres away from where I live. At the same time, I received a call on my cell phone from one of the parents in Black Falls. Two five year old girls had been taken out of their backyard by that criminal. One of the fathers, fortunately, saw something strange and with another father tracked down the car. As the criminal was preparing to photograph these young girls the two fathers accosted him. They accidentally pulled down his pants and inside were pictures of naked little girls. We know what he had in mind. These young girls were his tenth and eleventh victims.

The man will be released in June. This is how our justice system works. Everybody knew the man would reoffend. The psychologists, the prison warden and the RCMP are now saying that he will reoffend again.

What will we tell the next set of parents? Will we tell them that we did not bother to do any DNA recording? Will we tell them that we did not bother to have a sex registry that would work? Will we tell them that we did not bother to worry about the victims, that we only worried about the guy getting out of prison and not being harassed by anybody?

That guy will reoffend again and we will do nothing about it. Maybe he will move to another community but does that matter? He likes five year old girls. The scary part of this whole thing is that the psychologist said that the offender will likely get more violent in future offences.

As a parent in any community in Canada we should think about that for a minute. Is the House doing the right thing by not making the bill retroactive so that the guy will be on the list and will not be allowed to go before a court and say that he does not want to be on a list? Are we doing our job here by not having those two things on the sex registry? I do not think so. I could not defend that in front of any young parents. I could not defend that in front of anybody, old or young, who had been sexually assaulted.

Before I finish I want to be sure to mention another case in which I have been involved and one with which the House is very familiar, the case of Lisa and Lisa's two little girls.

Again, it comes back to the victim part of things. On April 17, in Abbotsford, there will be a hearing. The hearing has to do with whether a person should be allowed out into society again. He pretty much has everyone convinced that he is a really good guy. Well, this really good guy raped a 17 year old patient and his 11 year old daughter. He then got a court order forcing his five and six year old daughters to visit him in prison.

Let me tell members about that May afternoon when I accompanied Lisa and her two girls, five and six years old, into a prison on a forced visit with a sex offender, a guy who had raped their eleven year old sister and another patient. He had deceived the RCMP for seven years. Yet we are worried about this guy having access to his kids. Something is wrong here. This guy will probably get out of prison on April 17 but no one will know where he is because he will change his name and we will not have it registered. We will not keep track of this person. This person will use someone else's blood. He has already deceived the RCMP and has raped at least two people.

I will never forget the look of terror in the eyes of the two year old and the six year old little girls as they were forced into that prison. As the psychologist said, “This is just too traumatic for these little kids. This will affect them the rest of their lives psychologically.”

The sad part about all this is that after doing talk shows across the country, I have heard about 83 similar cases to Lisa's. No one can tell me that one judge just happened to foul up in Saskatchewan. There are 83 other judges who fouled up somewhere else, and those are just the ones who called and said that they did not want to involve their kids in the publicity. It is a very brave thing that Lisa has done, to put her kids out like this, but she is doing it for the other 83 people. Those are just the ones who have called my office in the course of the two years that I have been involved in this, doing these talk shows and trying to get this into a law.

I have been working with the justice committee and I have to say that it has been very helpful. I hope we will get this into legislation some day, that this type of thing is not forced any more, because those are the victims out there.

Child molesters are sick. They need help. What they do not need is to be released so that they reoffend, go back into prison, refuse treatment, get out again and reoffend. We just keep creating more victims.

Our job here has to be to protect those who cannot protect themselves. Whether they are women, children or whoever it is who is being sexually assaulted, and that can just as easily be little boys as it is little girls, we have to protect them. That is our job here.

We all know how we would feel if it were our kids or our grandchildren who were being attacked by these predators. We need to know where they are and we need to identify them. We need to let parents and other innocent people know where these animals are. Child molesters are sick and they need help. We do not need to release them into society and, if we do release them into society, we need to protect the public by keeping track of them. We need to help our police to know where they are so that when there is a case the registry would immediately show them which offender was in a certain area. They probably could prevent move victims just by that simple thing.

To say that we cannot make it retroactive and to say that we can let people who have been convicted go before a judge and convince a judge that they should not be on this registry, let me tell the House about the guy whose hearing I plan to attend on April 17. The guy is a good talker. He could pretty much convince anyone that the sun is shining at midnight. He could sell refrigerators to anybody. He is a real salesman. He could easily convince any court of anything. However we cannot let that happen.

There are many other cases. I could talk about the young lady in Toronto who was forced by a judge to visit the father who had raped her. When she returned home she attempted to take her life by slitting her wrists. Her mother, fortunately, was keeping a close eye on her. She phoned for an ambulance and saved her life. She is a victim, which is what victims are like.

I know some members do not like to hear about those things, but those are the people who are shouting out for help. They want us to help them and I do not believe we are doing that.

I also do not believe that this legislation is anything more than just paper. It is worth nothing. It will not protect anyone. It will not register the many sex offenders in the country. It will not register the pedophiles. It will be a political piece of paper that we can say that party was in favour and this party was opposed. This should not be a partisan issue. It should be our job to protect the victims. All of us should want to do that and we should want to make the legislation the best that it can be.

I have often said that I do not really like the party system very much because it results in party politics. This kind of thing should not be party politics. This kind of thing should be the meeting of the minds, putting the best ideas together to come up with legislation that will really protect potential victims.

I am very pleased to speak today because I wanted to bring this to the ground level, to the real people and to where it is really at. By doing that hopefully the members across the way will understand what we should be doing. We should be making it retroactive and thereby including all sex offenders. Hopefully they can get off the registry by never reoffending again.

However they should not be given the option of being on or off. They should be on once they are convicted of a sex offence. That is what a sex offender registry is all about. It would work, it would help the police, it would help the parents and it would prevent future victims.

[Transportation Amendment Act, March 19th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, first, of course the corruption that occurs in Ottawa, the waste of money, is dramatic. We thought it would be quite bad but it is worse than most of us ever thought, a billion dollars here and a billion dollars there. Obviously that is where the $7 billion collected for transportation went. It is easy to waste it when it is done the way it is here.

As far as the Wheat Board is concerned, it is unanimous that people want a choice in terms of transporting grain. They sure are not very impressed with going to jail for trying to take their grain and market it wherever they can sell it. The Wheat Board is failing totally to move grain out of my area and most of western Canada.