Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to rise and speak to the bill because the issue of protecting our citizens is a fundamental priority of all members of Parliament, regardless of our political stripes. The question is whether or not the legislation that we bring forth will achieve that end. Questions must be asked.
The other question is in terms of trying to come forward with a one size fits all solution and whether that is good social policy in the end. I would say that there definitely has been a trend. We have seen it in our neighbours to the south, where politicians never seem to be defeated if they demonize criminals. I am not ever going to defend criminal activity, but there is this sense of continual demonization and this sense that they are going to get tougher and tougher on them until they have large segments of the U.S. population in jail for incredible lengths of time.
I would like to speak about my own background. When I was much younger, and in another life perhaps, my wife and I dealt with men coming out of prison. They lived in our home. We visited many of the provincial institutions in southern Ontario and had to interview men who were looking for the opportunity to start a new life.
One of those men, and I will mention his name here, Pierre Fontaine, is dead now. He lived with our family for 17 years. He needed someone who was willing to take a chance. His record extended back into the 1950s. It is very difficult in the climate of today to say whether he would even be allowed out, because he was considered a repeat offender.
Mr. Fontaine moved in with our family. He was a grandparent to my children. He was part of every family celebration we had for 17 years. In fact, he died at our home, and our family, our neighbours and our community came together and held a wonderful funeral. It was actually one of the most beautiful funerals I ever attended. In our community he was considered such a true gentleman. People from across the community came out for that funeral and to take part in it.
What I want to say about this is that my experience with criminals, and mostly we dealt with men, is that at the end of the day they were not bad men, but they made, my God, such incredibly stupid choices. If stupidity is a crime, and I guess it is, then these men were all incarcerated for doing very stupid things, mostly to themselves. They ended up with a prison record.
The problem we found, especially in dealing with young men who were facing prison, is that there was a tipping point with them. They had done something stupid in their youth and they were facing going to prison. The problem with them was that if we did not have alternatives, if we did not have choices to offer the judge to give them another opportunity, we were basically putting them into a factory, a foundry, in effect, for hard crime.
We saw those young men come out of juvenile detention and go to the Don Jail. When they came out of that jail they were a much different breed of person to deal with. The recidivism among those young men was appalling. The levels of violence increased dramatically the more people were put back into situations.
I think the whole notion of conditional sentencing was speaking to the need to find alternative ways to get some people out of the criminal system. The question is, has conditional sentencing worked across the board? Perhaps it has not, because one of the original agreements or understandings among lawyers and judges was that it would always be used for non-violent crime. Certainly if we are dealing with threats to persons, threats with guns and any kind of violence, the issue of conditional sentencing should be looked at again by legislators. It is a fair discussion to have take place. Legislation looking at whether or not the system is working is certainly within the purview of Parliament.
Once again, the problem I have with this bill, and I have said this many times, is that legislation is a very blunt instrument. The blunt instrument that we are bringing forward with this legislation will hammer many people. For example, cattle theft has been added to this list. Some of the issues we are dealing with, such as minor property crimes, are being added to take away the power of conditional sentencing. Rather than looking at whether or not violent criminals are getting away with conditional sentencing, we are looking at extending dramatically who will be caught up in this and we are taking away the ability of the courts to look at issues and find alternatives.
The problem with the bill, and again, I think it has to be looked at in terms of good social policy, is that we will see two results. One is that there will be more plea bargaining and more willingness by judges to bring in suspended sentences. Once we have suspended sentences, then we can put on no conditions whatsoever. The other problem will be that many of these offenders will be turned over to the provincial systems.
If we look at the number of conditional sentences today and multiply that by what it costs to maintain a provincial incarceration, we are looking at an additional cost of at least $250 million. We are looking at costs that are being borne by the provinces. I am wondering why it is that we are looking at something here in Parliament that will affect the provinces and will affect the courts, putting more people into provincial institutions who do not need to be there.
If the bill is looking at the issue of violent offences, violence against families and the misuse of conditional sentencing, then certainly it is within the obligations of Parliament to look at that issue. However, are we looking to broaden it dramatically to include, for example, mail theft or break and enter? Let us go back to my own experience in my younger days and look at stupid crimes.
Let us look at break and enter. I know many people who have been involved in break and enter and the last thing we needed to do at the end of the day was to send them away for 10 years. What we needed to do was put them away for a period of time but also give them the opportunity to make amends to the community. We need to make sure these people have counselling and that we get these people back to being productive members of society.
The other big issue is the issue of aboriginal youth who are incarcerated. Canada often looks at its own record and we pat ourselves on the back for our wonderful treatment, but let us look at the failure of the U.S. incarceration system and the issue of race. We see that by far in the United States it is blacks who are continually put before the courts with no conditions. No options are put forth. They are put away. In our own system, we see more and more aboriginal people being put behind bars, and again, for crimes that need to be addressed at a social level. We are not doing any of those aboriginal communities a favour by taking someone out of the community and throwing them away without having any options for the courts or the community to alleviate the problems. So many of these problems are based on social failings within the communities themselves.
We have looked to the aboriginal communities for their own way of doing restorative justice. I think it is a model. Obviously it cannot be used widely across the board, but we have already started to look at the aboriginal restorative justice model for youth offenders in the province of Ontario. We really need to see that it is a system that is grounded in some very strong principles. The principle it is fundamentally grounded in is that at the end of the day the only way we can solve some crimes is to rebuild and to heal a community. That is where the restorative justice system has proven itself.
In terms of where the NDP stands on these issues, it is that on the issues of serious crime and violence we certainly need to take a very strong line, but we do not need to simply throw the net wide open to grab a lot of people who are not nearly in the same league as violent criminals and throw them into a system that is fundamentally run by violence. It does not matter how well an institution is run, all jail systems are run on a principle of predatory violence. As for the effect this has on persons who are incarcerated, when they come out they are a very different class of person from what they were when they went in. I can testify to that from my own personal experience of dealing with men who come out of prison.
The other issue we need to look at is what I referred to earlier. It costs about $51,500 per inmate for provincial incarceration per year. It is $81,000 per federal inmate. My God, do we need to spend all that money on all these people all the time when we have not put the money into proper prevention and into protecting communities?
I point, for example, to the gun registry, where we spent a billion dollars tracking down people in northern Ontario, some of whom are 80 year old senior citizens, to fill out their possession only licences. That money could have been spent on police services, on border patrols and on working in communities to stop the gang violence. In my case, an 82 year old man came before me the other day whose possession only licence had expired.We do not have possession only licences any more and he has to take a safety course because he is somehow a threat to society.
What we do in Parliament has profound implications for all sectors of society. What I would suggest is that we have to be prudent. We have to be careful. We have to--
