Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise to speak to this bill because it concerns justice and I find very interesting what the Department of Justice is involved with these days.
I always find it a bit comical, however, when I see this type of omnibus bill, which seems to be a catch-all affair. It deals with a number of subjects—I would not dare to say in a not entirely serious manner—and mixes together a number of things. I believe that, overall, this bill is perhaps a bit short on seriousness.
I listened earlier to the parliamentary secretary telling us about Bill C-36, which we are examining. There is one section on which he said nothing at all. I will remedy that quickly at the end of my speech, since it is a subject close to my heart.
For our audience, I should explain that when I refer to an omnibus bill that touches upon a lot of different subjects, as we will see, the bill seeks to codify and clarify the review process for applications to the Minister of Justice with respect to allegations of miscarriage of justice.
The same bill also seeks to increase the maximum penalty for criminal harassment. Then, in the same bill, there is reference to making home invasions an aggravating circumstance for sentencing purposes. And it goes on to address the procedural aspects of preliminary inquiries, the disclosure of expert evidence, rules of court in relation to preliminary inquiries. It will even address electronic documents and remote appearances, private prosecutions and the selection of jurors.
This is, I think, a bill that is going to solve certain problems here and there, but lumping them together is not necessarily going to solve the problem.
It is certainly not accelerating the settlement process. On this, I may be echoing the member for the Canadian Alliance. Some parts of the bill could probably have been dealt with outside the omnibus bill, and those matters requiring a more in-depth consideration could have be dealt with much more quickly. We would certainly have achieved much quicker results.
In all I have mentioned, there is one aspect missing in the summary. This might explain why the government member did not say a word about this. It has to do with Bill C-3, the young offenders bill. While it has yet to be passed by the House, this bill is already amending it.
I will come back to this because I find it quite exceptional. I do not know what kind of country this is, but where I come from, we would say that they are putting the cart before the horse. It may be necessary to dot the i's and cross the t's , and I will do so in my speech.
I will first talk about the judicial errors. When reading the bill, we can actually notice an improvement in the review procedures. It is obvious. Greater openness is sought. I think an effort is made to speed the process. Perhaps the government is trying to make it more accessible. But is it trying to make it more transparent? I might say that I really doubt it.
In any case, there is evidence of openness and of the desire to modernize the criminal code. Nowadays, with the new DNA tools available, when we want to present evidence that could not have been gathered previously, we realize that the justice system is not perfect. Throughout the years, there were some dreadful miscarriages of justice. People found guilty of criminal offences spent 20 or 25 years in prison before their lawyers were able, thanks to modern day techniques, to prove their innocence.
The process used to be rather cumbersome. With Bill C-36, the government wants to improve the process and make it more accessible, which is a good thing and deserves to be examined.
In fact, I want to congratulate my hon. colleague from Repentigny, who introduced a private member's bill to speed up the compensation process for these people. I do not know if his bill is what prompted the government to act, but it could not have come at a better time and both pieces of legislation go in the same direction.
The government would be well advised to go a little further, as the member for Repentigny proposes to do, to compensate these people as soon as possible.
Even if, at first glance, no one can be against the bill introduced by the minister, the fact remains that the minister wears two hats, one as Minister of Justice and the other as Attorney General of Canada.
I do not know if the government understands the system as I do, but at first glance, there appears to be a potential for a conflict of interest involving the two hats on the same head.
The Minister of Justice has a lot of power and many jurisdictions, but she is the protector of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, among other things. The attorney general has a responsibility to examine irregularities in proceedings. It is sort of as if one works to condemn and the other to check that everything is fine.
On the very face of this we can see a potential conflict of interest. If I were going to amend the criminal code, I would have done it all and set up a real independent commission, which would be accountable to parliament. Accordingly, the minister would still be wearing these two hats, but at least, we would ask her to try to correct an injustice caused by one of her hats, to put it clearly.
I do not understand the government member who said he examined this whole possibility, that the department existed in Great Britain. He mentioned Great Britain as an example.
This may do nothing to speed things up, but at least we have the impression that justice has been served. It is very important in a matter in which an individual did not obtain justice to have some procedure to follow when a request is made to have the file re-examined, when there is an error in law and justice is served the second time.
Law and politics are pretty much the same thing: public perception is very important. It bothers me that the same person who sentences someone can also grant a pardon, or that the person who sentences can assess the case to determine whether there was a miscarriage of justice. For this alone, it would be important to send this bill to the justice committee. The situation would be examined, questions would be asked, and we would try to improve this bill and the amendments introduced by the minister in Bill C-36.
There is also the whole issue of criminal harassment. The only solution the government has found is to increase the maximum penalty from five to ten years. At some point, the government will have to stop and look at the problem in Canada. What is the problem in Canada? It is not only by increasing penalties that the problem of crime will be solved. This is too easy.
It is too easy to say “We have a problem because of criminal harassment and we will solve it by increasing the penalty from five to ten years. The problem has been solved. Since the people sentenced for criminal harassment will spend more time in jail, we have solved the problem”. Well, no. The problem has not been solved. It has only been put off.
I understand that the Minister of Justice does not want to listen to a nasty separatist. In her opinion, I must be a rare species coming from who knows where, because what we are saying is never good enough for the minister.
I understand that she is from western Canada, that there is an extremely strong right wing in western Canada, and that the minister, who probably wants to keep her seat in an upcoming election, has decided to listen to this right wing from western Canada to reinforce any legislation at the first opportunity. At some point, however, we will end up with a criminal code that will be no fun to apply and that may become a burden for the state, precisely because the emphasis has been put on incarceration, when it is not the solution.
I keep repeating it in this House, I keep explaining it in every possible way, even with drawings, but the minister just does not get it. She does not want to hear any of that. She only listens to western Canada.
If the minister does not want to listen to me, a Bloc Quebecois member, a Quebec MP, let me quote a supreme court decision, as I did during oral question period. I do hope that she pays a little more attention to what supreme court justices say.
In a fairly recent landmark decision, the supreme court dealt directly with what is going on in Canada regarding incarceration. Unfortunately, I do not have the specifics, but I can provide them later to those hon. members who are interested in this issue.
In a unanimous decision, the court said:
Canada is a world leader in many fields, particularly in the areas of progressive social policy and human rights.
The justices continue:
Unfortunately, our country is also distinguished as being a world leader in putting people in prison.
This is not so flattering. They go on:
Although the United States has by far the highest rate of incarceration among industrialized democracies, at over 600 inmates per 100,000 population, Canada's rate of approximately 130 places it second or third highest. Moreover, the rate at which Canadian courts have been imprisoning offenders has risen sharply in recent years, although there has been a slight decline of late. This record of incarceration rates obviously cannot instil a sense of pride.
These are the words, not of a separatist, but of the justices of the Supreme Court of Canada. I trust the minister listens attentively to these justices. She needs to listen to them, not just to the right in the Canadian west. The court continues:
Notwithstanding its idealistic origins, imprisonment quickly came to be condemned as harsh and ineffective, not only in relation to its purported rehabilitative goals, but also in relation to its broader public goals.
They go on:
The Criminal Code displays an apparent bias toward the use of incarceration—
I stop here for an aside which is that, with all the changes by the government, there is no longer any doubt. The belief is that there is a bias toward incarceration. Incarceration, increasingly, is the favoured approach of the government as well. I continue:
—since for most offences the penalty indicated is expressed in terms of a maximum term of imprisonment. A number of difficulties arise if imprisonment is perceived to be the preferred sanction for most offences. Perhaps most significant is that although we regularly impose this most onerous and expensive sanction, it accomplishes very little apart from separating offenders from society for a period of time.
The minister, who finds herself with a problem of criminal harassment, will not resolve it by increasing the sentence from five to ten years. That is very clear and I hope she has got the message. I see that time is running out and I will go immediately to my final point, which is a very important one for me.
When I saw Bill C-36, I pointed out immediately that I was not very fond of omnibus bills. I do not have much use for them. I think that the government is getting it off its plate quickly. However, I noticed that in clause 71 of the omnibus bill the government wanted to amend Bill C-3, a bill that has not yet been passed. It wants to amend a bill with 3,133 amendments when we have only begun to consider the first group of amendments. Worse still, a look at the background of Bill C-3 shows that it was introduced on October 14, 1999 and that it contains 198 clauses to criminalize young people in conflict with the law.
On June 8, 2000, the government introduced Bill C-36, which includes amendments to Bill C-3. On September 25, the same minister who introduced the bill on October 14, 1999 and who amended the bill on June 8, 2000 through amendments in an omnibus Bill, that is Bill C-36, tabled 170 amendments to a bill containing 198 clauses. There is a problem and the problem is the person running the Department of Justice.
She does not know what she is doing; she is acting only for political motives, and I am sure that that will play a trick on the justice minister in a very near future. I am convinced she will pay a heavy political price for doing what she is doing with legislation as important as the youth justice bill.
The amendments to the bill proposed by the minister are not simple amendments. They are about the rights of young people, the right to explain to them what is a plea of guilty and a plea of not guilty, to inform them about their right to a trial by judge and jury, to inform them about adult sentences. Those are not minor changes.
Today, the minister wants us to pass Bill C-36 even before a decision is made on Bill C-3. She wants us to examine and pass Bill C-36, before the House has passed a single one of the 3,133 amendments that are before the House.
The parliamentary secretary, who has just spoken for the minister, strangely enough, did not speak about Bill C-3. He has probably not seen that in his bill. I say no. They are trying to hide things, hoping the opposition will not see them. But the opposition has seen them. They were caught red-handed.
