Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure and an honour to rise in the House today to speak to this important bill.
By way of introduction, it is important to note that this bill was reintroduced from the 43rd Parliament. It is an almost identical copy, with no changes except for the omission of coordinating amendments, which made some changes to the Firearms Act and adjusted some penalties for firearms offences. The reason I point out that it has been reintroduced is that this shows how slowly sometimes very important legislation moves in this place. That is particularly regrettable when we see the profound impacts that this legislation has on communities and people in this country.
Bill C-5 is the result of the justice minister's 2021 mandate letter, in which he was instructed to “introduce legislation and make investments that take action to address systemic inequities in the criminal justice system, including to promote enhanced use of pre- and post-charge diversion and to better enable courts to impose sentences appropriate to the circumstances of individual cases.” This bill responds to that, in part, and it does so by proposing to eliminate mandatory minimum sentences for all drug offences. It would also remove mandatory minimums for some tobacco and firearms offences. It is important to note that all of these mandatory minimums were added by the Conservatives in their Safe Streets and Communities Act, Bill C-10, in 2011. This bill would also make conditional sentencing orders more widely available by removing the prohibition of using them for more serious offences, and it would make it possible for police and prosecutors to divert more drug cases from the courts.
This bill raises fundamental questions of effective criminal justice in Canada. It is fair to say that all parliamentarians across party lines share a number of goals in this area. We all want to see reduced crime, and we all want to keep people safe. We all want to protect victims, and we recognize that there is much more work to do in that area. We all want to reduce recidivism and make sure that in our criminal justice system, when people transgress and are part of the system, they come out and hopefully do not reoffend. Finally, we all want to address the root causes of crime.
I will pause for a moment and speak about the root causes of crime.
I was part of the public safety committee back in 2009 and 2010, when it conducted a study of mental health and addictions in the federal corrections system. In conducting that study, we toured federal corrections facilities across the country and went into federal penitentiaries to meet a wide variety of stakeholders. Among other facilities, we went into the Kent, Mountain and Pacific institutions in British Columbia. We went into an aboriginal healing lodge in British Columbia, as well as Ferndale. We went to an aboriginal women's corrections facility in Saskatchewan called Okimaw Ohci. We went to Kingston, an infamous Canadian federal penitentiary that is now closed. We went to Dorchester in New Brunswick and Archambault in Quebec. We also, by the way, went to the U.K. and Norway and toured institutions in those countries as well, to get a comparative example.
We talked to everybody in these institutions. We talked to offenders, guards, wardens, nurses, chaplains, families, anybody who had anything whatsoever to do with working inside a federal institution. What is burned into my brain to this day is a shocking number, which is that across all institutions in Canada, the common number we heard was that 70% of offenders in federal institutions suffer from an addiction or a mental health issue. Probingly, we asked everybody, including the guards and wardens, what percentage of those people they thought would not be in prison but for their mental health issues or addictions. The answer we got, again reliably and consistently, was 70%. What that told us was that we are not, by and large, locking up criminals or bad people. We are locking up people with mental health issues and addictions, and most of their crimes are related to those two issues.
I think it is important to pause for a moment and talk about social determinants of crime, because there are highly correlated factors, like poverty, marginalization, childhood trauma and abuse, and others, that go into that prison population. By and large, I did not see a lot of white-collar millionaires in a single one of those institutions. What I saw were a lot of poor, indigenous, racialized, addicted and mentally ill Canadians.
The other thing I think we need to talk about, when we talk about root causes, is how well Canada's justice system and our federal corrections institutions respond to that. At that time, the answer was “not very well”, and worse. At that time, the Conservatives did something that I consider to be politically worthy of condemnation, which is that they politicized the issue of crime for political gain. They pursued a tough-on-crime agenda, because they thought that by preying on people's fears and sense of victimhood, they could gain political points, and they used prisoners and the prison system as pawns in that regard. By doing that, the very small number of rehabilitative services in Canada's correctional system at that time were closed by the Conservatives.
For instance, when I was visiting Kent, I walked into a huge, dark room, and when the lights were turned on, I saw it was full of equipment, such as band saws, Skilsaws and all sorts of construction equipment. There was a program where federal offenders were taught basic vocational skills, and they were making things like furniture, which was then purchased by the federal government at cost. Not only were we teaching marginalized people actual skills that they could use in the workplace when they got out, since more than 95% of offenders in federal institutions come back into society at some point, but the federal government was getting quality furniture at a below-market price. It was a win-win. However, that program was closed by the Conservatives.
When I visited the Kingston penitentiary, and also Dorchester, they had extraordinarily successful prison farm programs whereby the people inside were able to earn credit for good behaviour and gain privileges to work with agricultural projects and farm animals. By the way, there was a prize cow population at Kingston. The bloodlines were fantastic, and it was an absolutely outstanding herd. Members should have seen the impact that these programs had on the emotional and rehabilitative personalities of the people inside. However, those programs were closed by the Conservatives.
To this day, I say that we are doing a terrible job in Canada's correctional institutions of actually responding to the real needs of most offenders and ensuring that when they come out they do not repeat their offence. Here is the bottom line: I am not saying this out of a sense of compassion only; I am saying this because I do not want a single offender in Canada's correctional institutions to come back into society and reoffend, and that is exactly what they are going to do if we do not adjust and respond to their real needs.
I want to talk quickly about mandatory minimums. The bottom line is that I, and my party, oppose mandatory minimums, except for the most serious of crimes, where, of course, they are appropriate. Why? It is because they do not work; they do not have any deterrent effect. It is because they have a discriminatory effect. It is because they are largely unconstitutional. All we have to do is look to the United States, which is the pioneer of using such sentences, to see what effect they have on crime. The United States locks up the largest percentage of its population of any country on the planet.
I support Bill C-5. It is time that we start adopting progressive, rational, effective policies to keep Canadians safe. Punishing and keeping people in prison longer without access to the services they need does not work. It is cruel, and it does not keep Canadians safe. It is time to have policies that actually keep Canadians and victims safe in this country. Let us adopt the bill and take a first step towards that.