Derek Lee

[Criminal Code, May 17th, 2007]

Well, maybe I won't. The member does not like my remarks about the minister but this is a public forum.

[Criminal Code, May 17th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, as I begin my remarks I thought I should refer to the remarks made by the Minister of Justice who spoke earlier. He clearly was speaking in an effort to articulate good politics as opposed to good public policy. What the minister was articulating was in part lousy public policy but, from his point of view, good politics.

He said that the government wanted to send a message. I think he meant the government was trying to send a message to criminals on the assumption that we have in every case identified who those criminals are. He wants to send a message to criminals, but really what the Minister of Justice and the government are trying to do is send a political message to Canadians. It is political. It is not good public policy. The whole exercise smacks of politics and not public policy.

My colleague from Yukon mentioned a list of witnesses who appeared before the justice committee, the vast majority of whom had good public policy reasons not to agree with the mandatory minimum sentencing regime proposed in this bill.

One of the assumptions underlying mandatory or harsh sentencing is that it will deter. There is a sense that the higher the sentence, the higher the deterrence. There may be some logic in that, but statistics, sociologists and criminologists now consistently tell us that it is not the severity or length of the sentence which deters, it is the prospect of being caught that is the major component of deterrence in society.

Whether it is a potential life sentence or a two day sentence, the person who may or may not commit a premeditated crime is thinking more about the prospect of getting away with it as opposed to what sentence might be imposed later. It is false logic to presume that by increasing sentencing or imposing a mandatory minimum sentence there will be a direct linkage into the mind of a potential criminal.

By the same token, my party and I readily accept that there are envelopes within the Criminal Code, components of activity where society needs to denounce the criminal activity in a way that requires the use of a mandatory minimum.

I will point out for the sake of reference that the Criminal Code was amended relatively recently, just in the last three or four years, to impose one year mandatory minimums for firearm offences and a four year mandatory minimum sentence for a robbery with a firearm. I believe that is section 344. We also have mandatory minimums for drunk driving, particularly on a second offence. If someone reoffends, the offender will do time. Parliament, government and Canadians accept the existence of mandatory minimum penalties.

The false logic underlying this bill, however, is that by creating and delivering a whole raft of mandatory minimum penalties, it will cause a direct response and a reduction in crime. This is not the way it works. I do not think any credible witness at the committee that reviewed this bill was prepared to accept that if we bump all these sentences into mandatory minimums, the crime rate is going to drop. There might have been a feel good part in putting criminals away.

I will quote the Minister of Justice. I found it hard to believe, but the Minister of Justice said that the criminals will have time to think about it in jail. The question raised by the member from the Bloc Québécois was whether or not the potential offender might have thought about it before he or she committed the offence. The minister's logic was the person would have time to think about it afterward. That is like the horse going out the barn door; once the act is done, it is done. There is no deterrence there. I regretted that logic and I regretted the fact that the minister did not want to address the logic pattern that was introduced by the member from the Bloc.

The minister was also, in my view, trying to send a message and another example of that messaging is a quite inappropriate use of the term “house arrest”. House arrest actually has nothing to do with the bill that we are debating. Bill C-10 deals with mandatory minimum penalties. The minister was referring to Bill C-9, the bill dealing with conditional sentences. Purely for the sake of a twisted messaging, the Minister of Justice, the Attorney General of Canada, resorted to a street term that is not used in the Criminal Code and he referred to the concept of house arrest.

Most Canadians would ask what is house arrest, does it have something to do with bail or prison? Anyway, if the minister wants to use these silly street terms instead of the proper terms, that is his business. He also referred to “sending the offender to camp”. What nonsense. We are hearing this from the Minister of Justice. Surely he could use terms that are properly in use in the Criminal Code instead of using street terms to try to send some subliminal message to the public.

Anyway, I thought that his use of the terms “house arrest” and “sending people to camp” was really a disingenuous and dishonest attempt to deprecate our current corrections procedures. I personally do not like that coming from a government minister, but that is his business and if he were here now, we would probably have a little debate on it. Having had an opportunity to address the minister's remarks on this bill, I will now get to some of my own.

[Criminal Code, May 17th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I sincerely tried to listen to and absorb the remarks of the hon. member. However, in the end I found his remarks to be partisan, simplistic and misleading in many respects. I am not saying everything he said is misleading, but simplistic to be sure. As a result, they are not credible and I will ask him a couple of things.

He said that the proposed new sentencing will cause gangs or criminals to reconsider if they really want to go ahead and do the crime. Has he ever been to one of these crime meetings where they sit down and consider if they really want to do the crime? Do they use a calculator? Do they have a lawyer come in and tell them what the sentencing might be if they are convicted? Do they have a chart on the wall and a road map that tells them exactly what the sentence will be?

I have not heard of these meetings, these deliberations, so maybe he could inform the House about where these meetings take place and what they consider. It is a revelation to me that criminals or potential criminals sit down and go through the deliberation about whether they will really do the crime and measure up what the penalty will be.

The second thing I want to ask the hon. member, and he is really being quite misleading, is this. He said, “The Liberal government, in 13 years, did absolutely nothing to address the issue of firearms crime”. I will not use the harsh words, but what he said is absolutely untrue and misleading. The member clearly omits to mention that the House, under a Liberal government, did enact additional penalties, mandatory minimum penalties of one year and four years for firearm crimes. That does not equal absolutely nothing.

The member should be careful about what he says. Could he answer those two questions, please?

[Privilege, May 15th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I am very surprised to hear the government whip make a statement to the effect of how audacious it is of members of the other parties to determine who the Conservatives have as chair of a committee.

I have to say to the member, with all due respect, our rules were changed very explicitly to provide that the members of committees elect the chairs. They are not appointed by the government. They are not appointed by the government whip. They are elected by the members of the committee by secret ballot.

Those remarks in my view are presumptuous and allow me to infer as a member that the government is purporting to name chairs or vice-chairs.

I accept and we all accept that the government whip and the parties have a role in putting forward people for election, but once that is done, it is up to the members of the committee and the Chief Government Whip should know that.

I also state, and I will wrap up here, that if the government whip in taking that view is also of the view that he and they, his members, will refuse to perform work on a committee, then that in my view constitutes a constructive obstruction to the work of a committee created by this House and given a mandate by this House. That is what the leader of the official opposition is trying to say this afternoon.

We have a serious problem that if not a privilege borders on privilege. We have to get it fixed, because I as one member cannot allow this attitude to prevail.

[Business of Supply, May 10th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased that we could spend a moment or two on this issue.That was 14 or 15 years ago. I am very pleased that the red book phrases have been read into the record because they often get forgotten. At the time members will recall there was a desperate attempt to do what we could to get rid of Brian Mulroney's Progressive Conservative GST which had been imposed on Canadians. The Conservatives now seem to be trying to avoid that whole issue.

I recall cobbling together a political platform which had in it this commitment to replace the GST with a tax that would be revenue neutral and would accommodate the two other objectives.

In the end, it is a fact that the Liberal government did not succeed in putting in place right across the country what became known as the harmonized sales tax. We were able to implement it in only the maritime provinces. That was the end of our ability because of lack of cooperation with the provinces to develop that.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to set the record straight.

[Points of order, May 1st, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I have two very short points that may be helpful or not helpful, depending on the outcome.

First, Bill C-257 is not now on the order paper. Bill C-415 is. Therefore, there is not, on the face of the order paper, a conflict between these bills.

Second, you will probably be aware that the private members' business bundle of which Bill C-415 forms a part is still yet to go through a private members' business subcommittee, a procedure that would look at all private members' business for votability. It might be that your decision could await the outcome of that procedure, which I believe is imminent. I do not believe that any of these new bills in the private members' business envelope will be coming before the House in the imminent future. They will come at a later date.

[Criminal Code, April 30th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, you are correct. I will try to use my eight minutes well.

When we were interrupted by question period and other valuable proceedings, I was referring to what I regard as misleading comments about the position of the official opposition Liberals here, but I will move on because the record has that.

The second part of it was that Liberals have accepted the need for mandatory minimum penalties in the Criminal Code and, as has already been pointed out by members on both sides of the House, the code is replete with examples. We have mandatory minimum sentencing for some drinking and driving offences. The mandatory minimum sentence for first degree murder is life in prison, a life sentence. These are all existing minimum mandatory sentences in the code.

However, the one thing that the opposition Liberals did not agree to as a party was the development or the creation of an escalating series of mandatory minimums, an escalating meat chart, so that a first offence would be three years, then it would be five years, then seven, then ten, whatever the various proposals were coming forward. This is not something that I agreed with. I still do not. There are some members here who apparently do. I have accepted the mandatory minimum sentence, but not the escalating series of mandatory minimums. That is an important distinction in some quarters.

I would point out that all of the sentencing alluded to in the mandatory minimum proposals is currently available to judges now. Judges are perfectly capable of sentencing a person convicted of the crimes involved in this bill to the types of sentences described in the mandatory minimums; it is just that they are not obliged to give the mandatory minimum. They can still give five years, seven years, ten years or whatever the sentencing range allows.

This bill would remove that judicial discretion and impose on judges the need to give a sentence of whatever was prescribed in this escalating series of penalties. It is important to keep this in mind: that we would actually be removing some of the discretionary aspects in sentencing.

I do not want the word “discretionary” to be taken too loosely here. Our judges fully take their responsibility seriously. They realize that the sentencing they impose is done in the context of community standards. I do not think there is any place in the country where that is not the case.

I would have to say that the bill is being driven in part by a degree of political pretence. There is a pretence out there that Canadian society is beset with crime, that crime is escalating, and that violent crime is taking over our communities.

It is true that television and the Internet are giving us access to a lot of this information. We are seeing a lot more of it, but data on crime shows the opposite. It shows that crime is reducing. I do not have to repeat too much of that. The data is out there. Since 1991, for reasons that sociologists have not ever been able to fully explain, our violent crime rates and our overall crime rates are decreasing and continue to do so.

Thus, there is a pretence that we have a crime problem. While we actually do have crime problems, we just do not have the escalating crime problem that some politicians are urging upon us.

The second thing that is being urged upon us is that a more severe sentence would actually deter but that has not been proven. What normally deters criminals is the prospect of getting caught. If they did not think they would get caught, they might be more likely to do the crime. I suppose there might be the odd exception to that little equation but I think sociologists are pretty clear on that as well.

I want to refer to the experience in Toronto over the last couple of years. One of the factual backgrounds that gave rise to the sense of considering increased sentencing was the uptick in the number of shootings and homicides in Toronto in 2005-06. As a result, Toronto's policing became a lot better.

As a result of those policing efforts, and I will need to allow room for the sociological impacts, crimes of this nature have dropped just as much as they spiked. I will deal with some of the data. From January through to the end of April 2005, 73 shootings; 75 shootings in 2006; and in 2007, 51 shootings, a drop of 33%., which is huge no matter how we look at it or what side of the House one sits on.

The point here is not that there was no crime. The point is that crime is not increasing. The attention that the increased shootings received in 2005-06 allows us to now look back on it as a spike. The data is showing that we are ending up with violent crime rates that are even less than before the spike. That would be consistent with the overall demographic trends of the last 15 years that are clearly out there. If anyone is in doubt, they should go to Juristat or Statistics Canada and look at the data. The most recent publication is there for all to see. Although it shows crime, it shows a reduction in crime. I still accept that crime is always a problem with a community and that one crime is too many.

It is easy to say that by passing a law in here that we will affect the incidence of crime. That may be politicians thinking they are a much too valuable part of the system. Just because we pass a law in here does not mean that it will produce a reduced crime impact. A lot more is involved in this than politicians passing laws.

The public needs to be educated, the police need to do their job, which they do admirably well across the country, and prosecutors need to do their job. A whole constellation of factors enter into crime rates, such as enforcement, sentencing, corrections, prosecutions and police enforcement.

However, I would say that just putting people in jail or threatening to is not the big answer. It costs $75,000 to $80,000 to keep somebody in a prison. Three good students could be put through medical school for that kind of money. These mandatory minimums will actually put people there, irrevocably, no choice. We will just keep throwing another $75,000 or $80,000 at this problem when the real problem is probably out on the street and needs to be addressed in ways other than just warehousing inmates.

Our American friends have learned this. Many states have taken steps to reverse the warehousing of inmates. They have some very serious problems there. We have always had a chance to do it right. We will have to see what the outcome of the vote is but--

[April 30th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, funding more efficient court challenges is all right, provided there is a program that is out there and is accessible to the little guy.

The member says our laws are in pretty good shape after all of these years. One of the reasons they are in good shape is that these types of challenges have occurred. They have helped to fine tune our laws to the extent that Canada internationally is seen as a country that has a pretty good set of equality and rights legislation.

If the member feels strongly about what he has just said, perhaps he could put on record just what is this other government program that will allow the little guy to challenge the administration based on constitutional right?

[April 30th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, the member has quite properly articulated the circumstance that exists from time to time and place to place across the country where ordinary Canadians have a gut feeling that something is just not right or fair in the administration of the law. They question the administration of the law. They believe they have been short-changed in their rights in some way. They feel they are not getting fair treatment in some way.

Their problem is that they face big government in trying to get redress. They only have the ability to speak to the people who have already turned them down or do not believe that they are being fairly treated. They have very few other places where they can turn.

It is a fact, some people do not like it, that there is a class of profession called lawyers, many of whom have the skills necessary to bring that challenge forward, to articulate it in a way and describe it and bring it forward procedurally to bring about a good result. That is what the court challenges program enabled many Canadians to do.

[April 30th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Churchill.

We are debating a committee report dealing with the court challenges program. I have always, as a member, supported the court challenges program from a distance, in the sense that the program was operated and administered well outside of Parliament, well away from the government and managed by people who had legal expertise and a good perspective on our Canadian laws and institutions.

It was not an expensive program. It was actually quite cost effective. It was a program that looked toward the effective functioning of our laws and our administration.

Set out in our Constitution and in our Charter of Rights are legal rights, equality rights and language rights. However, I should make a quick distinction here. Not all the rights we are talking about here are charter rights. Bundles of rights are contained in our original Constitution and the charter, which was enacted in 1982, 25 years ago, reflected some of those and enhanced others.

However, the point is that the court challenges program was meant to be out there to allow the little guy in Canada, the person who maybe did not have the full clout of having a lawyer on the other end of the phone, to join with others and challenge the current law or administration in Canada for the purpose of complying with those very noble objectives of our charter and our Constitution.

I for one did not get a chance to see the court challenges program work up close and most Canadians did not get a chance. The probable reason is that most Canadians take the general quality of our laws and administration for granted. They tend to focus from time to time on perhaps what they do not like rather than all the stuff that is out there that is working quite functionally and serving us well. In the case of the court challenges program, it was actually doing a pretty good job.

Some people might not like the decisions that the courts eventually came to on cases that were brought by the court challenges program but that is a completely different issue than whether or not the court challenges program was working effectively, and it was. It took care of a lot of people. It was a fine-tuning device that was out there that, from time to time, would challenge the big guys in government, the decision makers in government who refused to budge when they were challenged on fairness in the law. By fairness, I mean fairness connected to the equality rights, the language rights and the legal rights that are in our Constitution.

I will point to two cases that have come to me as a parliamentarian but I will not mention any personal names. I am of the view that the two particular cases will require a court challenge. I am not suggesting that they should have been part of the court challenges program but it is a fact that not every component of our government is functioning perfectly and in compliance with the law.

No matter where we look, we will find flaws. We are all human and our government administration is run and operated by humans. People dig their heels in and some people make mistakes. We probably make mistakes in and around the House here too but I cannot point to any right now.

In any event, there was the case of one individual who had not obtained his Canadian citizenship after having lived in Canada for several years. He heard his mother was very ill so he rushed back to his home country. His mother recovered within three or four weeks. This person had left Canada without all the documents. He left fairly quickly because he was told that his mother was on her deathbed. He then had to go to the embassy and get papers to return to Canada. Lo and behold, the embassy decided that he could not get a visa to come back because he was inadmissible. This person was a permanent resident of Canada who went back home to check on his mother and the embassy decided he was inadmissible.

Granted there was a basis for the alleged inadmissibility but our laws also contain provisions that enable him to be treated as a permanent resident abroad and he was not. I am looking at this and I know that the administration of that particular section of the immigration law is ultra vires. It is wrong. It should be challenged and that may happen.

In another case, we have a collaboration between the Canada Revenue Agency and Canada Post to circumvent a privacy law enacted by Parliament. Parliament has decided that personal mail under 30 grams in weight may not be opened for inspection. The CRA generally has the ability to inspect mail coming into Canada but it does not have the right to open and inspect mail that is under 30 grams.

What does the agency do when it has one of these little envelopes? Canada Post and the CRA will keep it. They then send a letter to the Canadian telling the person that they do not have the right to open his or her mail because it is under 30 grams but that they would like the person's consent. They then tell the person that if he or she does not give consent, they will send it back to the sender outside the country and mark the letter as undeliverable.

That is a lie. Of course it is deliverable because Canada Post and the CRA were able to send a letter asking for consent in the first place. Under the Canada Post Corporation Act that mail is in the course of post and Canada Post has a legal obligation to see that it is delivered. Just because CRA cannot open it and inspect it does not mean it cannot be delivered.

In any event, CRA could open and inspect that letter if it went to court and got a warrant. However, the procedure that CRA is using is illegal. It circumvents what Parliament has laid down for our personal privacy when it comes to mail.

One of these instances occurred under the Liberal government and the second occurred under the Conservatives. It is not the government itself that I am challenging here. It is the administration that I am challenging. I am saying that in both of these instances, the immigration department, the CRA and Canada Post are seriously off side in terms of the enforcement and the administration of the law.

I hope these incidents will be challenged. The court challenges program was a wonderful, effective and efficient institution. I regret that it is not currently being funded by the government.