Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Mississauga South.
Just about 40 years ago Canada espoused for itself the goal of building a just society, characterized by truth, fairness, equality of opportunity, and a high degree of social cohesion.
Despite 40 years of mostly progressive social policy at the federal level and a decrease in the general crime rates, we are today debating a piece of legislation meant to crack down on crime and to get tougher on criminals.
The Conservative government does not expect this legislation to deter people from committing crimes. In his budget speech the Minister of Finance admitted as much when he allocated more money to the correctional system to accommodate “the expected increase in inmates” that would result from his law and order agenda.
No, Bill C-10 is not going to prevent crime. It is not going to deter criminal activity. The government does hope it will take some criminals off the streets and keep them in jail longer. It hopes that removing the bad apples citizens will feel safer and less fearful.
The general public is naturally fearful of violent crime, particularly when innocent bystanders are its victims, but that natural fear is exacerbated and extended by the culture of fear in which we live. On television most serious drama revolves around violent crime, whether it is Law & Order or Da Vinci's Inquest, murder is usually at the centre of the plot. Even newscasts are filled with crime, terrorism, war and all the accompanying death. Journalists and editors admit making decisions about publication by the code “if it bleeds, it leads”.
In addition to this encompassing fear, citizens are also caught in a clash of values as they teach their children not to shove or hit to solve a dispute. Adults are solving disputes by bombing and destroying whole cities full of people. As teachers lecture that each person is unique, special and deserving of respect, our own Chief of the Defence Staff states publicly that his soldiers are trained to kill and will go after the “scumbags”. It is hard to find respect in that statement.
The contradictions are endless between the values taught by parents, teachers and clergy, and the behaviours observed by adolescents and young adults. Is it any surprise that they are confused about right and wrong?
They see many people whose lives are characterized by vice rather than virtue, and they see those people achieve great wealth and fame. Steroid using professional athletes, drug using entertainers, and money stealing business leaders seem to have lives of ease and pleasure and celebrity. And our media does seem to celebrate these lives of the rich and famous, no matter their route to fame.
We both celebrate wealth and we accommodate the wealthy with friendly tax policies. Between 1986 and 2000 the incomes of the wealthiest 1% of Canadians rose by a whopping 65%, an average increase of $157,000 a year. During the same period, welfare recipients in Alberta saw their incomes drop by 38%, from $14,000 a year to a shameful $8,800.
While young Canadians may be mainly unaware of these statistics, they do have eyes that see increasing numbers of homeless people begging on the streets and they see more monster homes at outrageous prices advertised in the newspapers. They question what they see. They ask, is this fair? Is this just?
I ask, will Bill C-10 help us create a more just society for all? Will the bill bring Canadians together to build supportive communities? I think not.
Bill C-10 is built on a faulty premise, that is the good versus evil vision of the world. In this world people whose behaviour causes harm are identified as evil. The role of justice is to keep our good society safe from this evil.
Even in our good society there have to be some bad people who need to be corrected through punishment. This good versus evil theory encourages quick fixes, such as removing the bad apples to keep the rest of us safe. It leads us to think crime is only the result of a few evil persons and implies that we collectively bear no responsibility for what goes on in the hidden corners of our communities, and that individually we have no connection whatsoever to it. According to this theory we could eliminate crime by isolating all the bad people in jail.
Over the last 30 years North America experienced a doubling and a tripling of incarceration rates, but this had absolutely no effect whatsoever on the amount of crime processed by the state. It appears that as we put away more and more bad apples, a constant stream of fresh apples spontaneously began to rot. Increased incarceration rates did not reduce crime, but did create a tremendous amount of suffering for a rapidly increasing number of prisoners, most of them young males.
The government is obviously committed to the good versus evil vision of the world and the removal of the bad apples methodology, even though it has not been proven to bring about the desired result of safer streets and a more cohesive society.
Instead, the result will be more Canadians in jail for longer periods. Longer sentences will increase the rate at which released prisoners who have served their sentences are inclined to reoffend. The longer they have lived inside the unique and brutal culture of a prison, which some call criminal school, the more difficult it will be for them to adjust to the norms and expectations of mainstream society when they come out.
Who will these new inmates be? Aboriginal people make up only 3.3% of the Canadian population but make up 21% of admissions to provincial custody and 18% of admissions to federal custody. I predict that with the 1,000 more RCMP officers announced in the budget that this overrepresentation of aboriginals in prison will at least continue but will probably increase.
Another group I worry about is visible minority youths in cities. Why? Because one can predict the potential for criminal activity by examining the social determinants of criminal behaviour.
The first determinant is family poverty. Family poverty results in a poorer health status, less optimism about life, less self-confidence and less resiliency to setbacks. The second determinant is a lack of parental involvement and supervision. Parents working very long hours to make ends meet and therefore are not around for the kids. Nobody is at home to help them with homework et cetera. This leads to the third determinant, a lack of success in school and little engagement with extracurricular arts or sports activities. Without classroom or sporting field success, these kids have little chance of feeling included in the school community.
In Ontario the strict rules around behaviour in school expanded the social exclusion already felt by some who were struggling there as they were struggling in life. Once expelled, these children found there was still no one at home and no space for them at school. Everybody needs to feel included somewhere, and in Ontario, during the Harris government years, these abandoned young people found their somewhere on the streets.
Now we have Bill C-10 brought to us by the same sponsors who brought us the Harris education policies. When they would not put money into educational supports for struggling young people, they sewed the seeds for the crop of desperate young people we have today. Now Canadian taxpayers are being asked to pay for the harvest in more correctional spaces for the expected increase in inmates. The price tag for this? It will cost over $80,000 per year for one federal inmate.
In Australia and in the southern United States mandatory minimum sentences overcrowded the prisons and required the building of new ones. After some years of experience taxpayers are lobbying their governments to end mandatory minimums as they have proven to be too expensive and they have not reduced crime rates.
When other jurisdictions have tried a justice strategy and it has failed, why would we try now? When it would result in more Canadian graduates of crime school re-entering our society later, why would we implement it? Have we learned nothing from the studies that show that punishment and retribution are less successful and more expensive than upfront social investment?
Bill C-10 adds to the climate of fear. Its terms dictate that Canada will never achieve the just society envisioned by Trudeau. As one Canadian, I will never stop trying to build that just society and therefore I will be voting against Bill C-10.
