moved:
That, in the opinion of this House, the government should consider the advisability of amending section 3 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, according to the amending formula provided for in section 38 of the Constitution Act, 1982, which amendment would read as follows: "Every citizen of Canada, except one who is (a) confined in a penitentiary, a prison, or a psychiatric institution, or ( b ) at large from a place referred to in paragraph ( a ), with or without a lawful excuse, has the right to vote in an election of Members of the House of Commons or of a legislative assembly and to be qualified for membership therein.''
Madam Speaker, less than 100 years ago a woman from Victoria, B.C. shocked local citizens by showing up to vote. As a widow she had inherited property from her husband and as a new property owner she was therefore qualified to vote according to the way the franchise was limited at that time of Canadian history.
How times have changed. For the law-abiding adult citizens of a nation to have a real voice in how affairs are conducted now is regarded as a hallmark of democracy. In our lifetime thousands of young Canadians have fought and died on foreign soil to defend that basic principle.
Most recently much of the world was shocked when mainland China conducted war games using live ammunition to discourage the citizens of Taiwan from casting their ballots for Taiwan's new president, the first time voting for president had been allowed in the 5,000 year history of the most populated nation on the planet. With great courage over 76 per cent of eligible Taiwanese voters cast ballots, a great testament to how much those free Chinese valued their new found democracy.
Within our commonwealth of nations the Republic of South Africa based the right to vote on racial qualifications which allowed a small white minority to control the much larger black majority, including through a seemingly endless list of human rights violations until the practice of apartheid recently was ended.
I mention these examples to point out what a precious privilege it is to be able to vote and to be able to run for public office rather than have our lives controlled by totalitarian dictators, or by communist or fascist parties, or by members of a particular race.
Citizens of Canada value that right very highly. Therefore many Canadian citizens were shocked when they realized that our charter of rights and freedoms now has given the right to vote to criminals. Section 51 of the Canada Elections Act disqualified many citizens from voting:
The following persons are not qualified to vote at an election and shall not vote at an election:
(e) Every person undergoing punishment as an inmate in any penal institution for the commission of any offence;
(f) Every person who is restrained of his liberty of movement or deprived of the management of his property by reason of mental disease.
These election act provisions were what Canadians expected.
It is also interesting to note that in the United States, a great democracy and our nearest neighbour, the 14th amendment to the United States Constitution excludes prisoners from voting. Its Constitution has been in the possession of the American people since the 1700s, whereas the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms dates from only the 1980s. It is not surprising that Americans have passed many Constitutional amendments.
At the present time section 748 of the Criminal Code of Canada provides that persons convicted of an indictable offence for which they are in prison for a term exceeding five years cannot hold public office or any employment under the crown. They cannot be elected or sit or vote as a member of Parliament or of a legislative assembly and cannot exercise any right of suffrage.
However, convicted killers have challenged section 51(e) of the Canadian elections act based on the charter of rights and freedoms which now states this in section 3:
Every citizen of Canada has the right to vote in an election of members of the House of Commons or of a legislative assembly and to be qualified for membership therein.
This issue has been taken before various courts a number of times. For example, in 1992 the federal government lost a case to Richard Sauvé, who was serving a life sentence in Kingston Penitentiary and had sued the government for the right to vote.
Decisions of the court have been divided and appeals have gone to the highest levels regarding both provincial and federal elections. The courts have decided that the Canada Elections Act does not stand up against the charter of rights and freedoms.
I know from talking with Canadian people that the fact the courts have removed those limitations on who gets to vote is offensive to
the majority of Canadians who are too busy earning a living to appear before royal commissions.
It is a typical example of bleeding hearts who are more concerned with advancing the rights of prisoners than with demonstrating that serious punishments are attached to the commission of crimes.
One of the biggest complaints I hear from many voters in my riding is that offenders get a slap on the wrist for virtually any crime they commit. Working police officers also tell me they feel it is not even worth the paperwork they must complete to get an offender convicted and sent to jail.
It is not as though we throw people into jail at the drop of a hat, even though Canada has one of the highest per capita prisoner rates in the world, second only to the United States. It is not because the Canadian law is so tough that we have so many people in jail. The truth is that crimes of violence have increased by 782 per cent from 1971 to 1994 in Canada. Property crime has increased by 1,031 per cent, although our population has increased by only 27 per cent.
In 1994 almost three million crimes were committed compared with just over a quarter of a million back in 1971. This is an astonishing fact. It is time the government woke up to that. The bleeding hearts, including the justice minister, like only to refer to the past couple of years when certain categories of crime have decreased a little.
Law-abiding Canadians do not feel safe and they want to see offenders punished. One of those punishments should remain that going to jail means losing voting rights. Once offenders have paid their debt to society they should get their voting rights back, but not until that debt is paid.
This position was clearly stated by some witnesses who appeared before the royal commission on electoral reform and party financing which submitted its report in November, 1991. One witness told the commission in Edmonton: "It is a punishment. The reason why they should not receive a vote is that they are not in society in a sense. Until they return to society and act within the confines of our laws, they are barred from certain privileges, one of them being, in my feeling, the right to vote in an election".
In Thompson, Manitoba the commission was told: "We believe that the right to vote is a very special privilege in our country. We believe that once you break the law of the land, part of the deterrent would be the loss of the right to vote as long as you are in prison. I do not believe the charter, at any point, says you have the right to break the law".
The commissioners pointed out that most witnesses supported giving prisoners the right to vote, but none advocated allowing prisoners to stand as candidates.
It also mentioned a brief from the John Howard Society which pointed out that prisoners have the right to vote in Italy, Sweden, Norway and Denmark but not in the United Kingdom, France, Switzerland or the United States.
The number of prisoners and costs raise two more points against allowing inmates to vote. According to testimony of Mr. Jean-Claude Léger, director of operations, office of the Chief Electoral Officer, to the procedure and House affairs committee on April 21, 1994, 6,800 inmates used special voting rules.
According to testimony of the Chief Elector Officer, Mr. Jean-Pierre Kingsley, to the same committee, there were 7,502 incarcerated electors. The cost per elector was $23.81 compared with the cost of $9.38 for the average registered elector outside the penal system.
That number of votes cast in prison could very well mean that prisoners wanting weaker laws to punish crime could determine the outcome in many elections. Votes of prisoners are being sent to their home ridings to be counted, and many elections are won and lost by small margins.
In the riding of Edmonton Northwest the Minister of Natural Resources won over the Reform Party opponent by a mere 12 votes. I wonder how many were cast from the penal system.
Another close call saw the Liberal member for Edmonton East defeat the Reform candidate by 115 votes. With those numbers, it is clear that in prison voters could readily tip the scales of an election.
How fair is that to law-abiding citizens who must support these prisoners at considerable expense? I do not think it is fair at all. Some on the other side of the House probably do.
The other section of the Canada Elections Act to which I draw attention in my motion is that inmates of mental institutions should not be allowed to vote. That may not be the best way to word my concern, but this is a motion intended to push the government in this direction, not for a finished piece of legislation.
The justice department has hundreds of lawyers. Private members have access to only three. Regarding mental hospital inmates voting, in October 1988 the Canadian Disability Rights Council challenged the present wording of section 51(f) of the Canada Elections Act. In its decision, the court basically said that any mental patient 18 and over who can recite his or her name, age and address can be on the voter's list.
Many Canadians are offended by such a low standard to determine who is eligible to vote; lest we forget that anybody who is allowed to vote is allowed to run for office. I am sure Canadians do
not want inmates of mental institutions running for either federal or provincial governments.
Since I have been here I have been told it seems as though for years perhaps the inmates are running the asylum here. Sometimes we wonder.
Witnesses appearing before the Royal Commission on Electoral Reform and Party Financing were divided about voting rights for the mentally ill or the mentally handicapped.
A member of a hospital volunteer committee stated: "We are fiercely opposed to voting by proxy for persons who are mentally ill. We believe the right to vote is essentially personal and can be exercised only by the holder of the right, not by the third party. The psychiatric population is very vulnerable in that risks of abuse are higher than for so-called normal people".
Many people pointed out how difficult it would be to develop a competency test unless the same test were applied to the general voting population. A common sense solution is simply to require that voters be able to get to their home polling station and once there to be able to complete a ballot properly.
The Conservative government issued a white paper in 1986 on election law reform which recommended that mentally disabled Canadians have the right to be enumerated and vote. The white paper also recommended that no polling stations be established in mental hospitals and that residents of such institutions should not have the right to vote by proxy. However, the legislation died on the Order Paper.
There is one category of residents in mental institutions which I know Canadians do not want to see voting, namely, those confined because they are not criminally responsible, the NCR, or not criminally responsible because of a mental disorder, NCRMD, the two terms used by the provinces for mental institution patients forcibly confined for criminal reasons.
Although the rules and details vary from province to province, basically these patients are detained under federal legislation which is administered by the provinces. Having that label means they were deemed to be ill at the time of the criminal offence and therefore were never convicted of an offence. It is a label which has been applied to some of the nastiest criminals in our history.
Currently in British Columbia there are 130 NCR patients detained in the mental institution which has a total of 174 detainee beds.
In Alberta, 36 NCR patients are lodged in two mental institutions. Overall Alberta has 1,000 psychiatric beds and about 10 per cent of those are for forensic.
The figures are small for Saskatchewan and Manitoba with 16 NCR patients under board review in Saskatchewan. Twelve are in Saskatchewan Hospital. Manitoba reports 35 NCR patients in mental institutions representing about half of the psychiatric patients of that province.
Newfoundland reports six to eight in the provincial mental hospital's forensic unit. There were seven or eight in New Brunswick and four or five in Prince Edward Island. Nova Scotia seems to have the greatest difficulty providing this information for me as they are in the process of restructuring.
Neither of the territories has its own forensic mental facilities. Instead NCRs are sent to B.C. from the Yukon and are sent to Alberta from the Northwest Territories.
With the largest populations in Canada, Ontario and Quebec also have the highest numbers of mental patients who are not criminally responsible. In Ontario approximately 550 NCRs account for about 20 per cent of the overall mental patient count of 2,400 to 2,600 beds.
Quebec has 750 NCR patients but it also has review board hearings on others. In 1994-95 there were 988 Quebec hearings, plus six judged unfit for hearing, for a total of 994 patients who were in some form of mental treatment for criminal reasons.
I hope all hon. members are aware that there are many Canadians with mental illnesses of one sort or another. For example, a friend checked herself into the mental illness unit of our local hospital when a drinking problem led to a suicide attempt. She was voluntarily confined but only briefly. She had absolutely no interest in politics at that period in her life.
Section 51(f) of the Canada Elections Act excluded from voting persons confined involuntarily or not able to manage their own affairs due to mental illness.
Canada's standards are changing about including people with various mental disabilities in group homes, sheltered workshops and so on where they often make a real contribution to their immediate families and to the community in which they reside.
The fact that the mentally disabled are loved and valued does not mean they must be allowed to vote. All too often the mentally disabled merely become the pawns of their caregivers. These mentally disabled Canadians are not independent. Even their sources of information can be readily controlled. Therefore, for their own protection as well as to protect the voting process, I believe it is simply common sense not to turn over the running of Canada to people who are mentally incapable either of managing their own affairs or of standing trial for crimes they may have committed.
I must repeat that the people who are allowed to vote are also allowed to run for office. That role is not appropriate for the mentally handicapped.
A final point I wish to raise is a recommendation for an amendment to section 3 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Sections 2 and 7 to 15 can be overridden by an action of Parliament alone, as provided by the override clause in section 33. According to section 33 of the charter, Parliament or a provincial legislature can insert a clause stating that it is passing a given piece of legislation notwithstanding specific provisions of the charter.
Additionally, any federal or provincial law containing such a notwithstanding or overriding clause has to be reviewed and the declaration re-enacted at least every five years or it will not remain in force.
In conclusion, I would like to quote Mr. Chuck Cadman, president of an organization called CRY, for crime, responsibility and youth. He stated:
I certainly support Darrel on this motion. Anybody who's been convicted of a crime against Canadian society has lost their right to vote. When they come out of an institution, fine, but while they are serving their time they should not be a factor in any decision making on who is in power or what the law should be.
Also, Mr. Dave Langlois of the Vernon Courtwatch Society stated:
The members of Citizens Courtwatch Society entirely support your private member's motion No. 143 to amend the charter of rights and freedoms to prevent convicted criminals from voting.
Our government, supreme court and citizens must come to realize that the charter acknowledges that all rights are not absolute and must be in balance with the rights of the law-abiding citizen. A vast majority of our democratic citizens, I can assure you, agree fully with this motion.
I would therefore like to ask for the unanimous consent of the House to make this a votable motion.
