Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise here today as the justice critic for the official opposition to speak to Bill C-299 and the amendments proposed by the hon. member for Mount Royal. These amendments are a last-minute attempt to make this bill a little better for Canada's criminal justice system.
When I was elected, I told the people of Gatineau that, especially when it comes to justice matters, as a member of the Barreau du Québec, I have always believed that justice should be a non-partisan issue. I have always believed that the Minister of Justice, the justice critics and all members of the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights must be able to rise above the fray. We are the guardians of our beautiful democracy and the separation of the legislative, executive and judicial powers.
The amendments proposed by my colleague from Mount Royal are a clear example of the fact that we are trying everything we can to correct the things in this bill that simply do not make sense. If we were to take the time needed to do a thorough, non-partisan examination, we could come up with a much better bill than Bill C-299, which is consistent with other government bills, whether they are introduced by cabinet members or backbenchers.
Here is another example of basing amendments on something as fundamental as the Criminal Code, which is the foundation of our entire criminal justice system. Everything has been codified, whether we are talking about offences against the person or against property, or any other kind of offence that can be committed. The Conservative government is using a piecemeal approach. It is chipping away at the Criminal Code bit by bit, claiming to do so for the benefit of victims. The Conservatives took one case that made headlines, that of young Kienan Hebert, and used that as the basis of this bill.
I can understand a member whose constituents react to a particular event. We are responsible people and we are supposed to be leaders in our communities. It seems to me that the answer to this kind of thing is not to pass a law to prevent it from happening again. First, because that would be an impossible promise to keep. Second, because that would prevent us from doing the smarter thing, which is check to see if the Criminal Code already contains provisions to ensure that the individual charged will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law and that the sentence will be between eight and 15 years in such cases, based on the jurisprudence.
In committee, the Conservative Party went to extraordinary lengths to give everyone the impression that Canada's criminal justice system does not cover such cases, and thank goodness the Conservatives are around to fix the world's problems. But the truth is that the Conservatives are introducing yet another minimum sentence. That is the main problem with Bill C-299. The Conservative government keeps saying that the NDP is soft on crime. But that has nothing to do with it. Even the courts are overturning—basically throwing out—bills this government introduced because they are just not good, because significant parts of Canadian law have been overlooked and the government has not done its work.
That is what the courts have been doing with the Conservatives' 2008 omnibus legislation, and our predictions will probably come true. I do not like to say, “I told you so”. That is not my goal in life. I would prefer that we do our job properly and that we concentrate on public protection and obeying the laws of this country.
Former Supreme Court Justice John Major appeared before the committee to talk about Bill C-299. For my colleagues who may not know him very well, I would like to point out that Justice Major is not considered to be left of centre. He was not viewed as a liberal judge, but rather as a fairly conservative judge. Justice Major had this to say about minimum sentences:
With a minimum sentence you're boxing in the judiciary, but you're also providing a motive for the kidnapper to perhaps act very viciously and do something to the child, so that he won't be identified. Then the minimum sentence becomes academic, because he doesn't think he's going to be caught.
I'm still a little concerned about a minimum sentence that's absolute. Cases are not all the same, as you know, and the minimum sentence may be inadequate in a number of circumstances of commercial kidnapping, but in other cases it may not be proper.
...experience shows that the severity of the crime seldom acts as a deterrent, because there's a philosophy that says the criminal doesn't believe he'll be caught.
It's interesting to look at the range of sentences for kidnapping in our judicial history where there's no minimum. The sentences, nonetheless, have been severe. By severe, I mean lengthy. The courts, to my knowledge, have always treated...kidnapping as a very serious offence, and in my experience the sentences have been 10 years and 15 years, so that the five years is not extreme. I think you'd have to look hard to find a case where a serious kidnapper was sentenced to less than that.
This is Justice Major's take on the issue and, the whole time the committee was working on this, I was wondering what message the legislator was trying to send.
When a person is brought before the courts on criminal charges, the judge takes into account sentences that have been handed down in other similar cases. A review is conducted, which is presented to the judge when the accused enters a plea for sentencing, and the usual sentence is between 10 and 15 years. However, all of a sudden, the brilliant legislator introduced a bill that sets the minimum sentence at five years. I do not have any difficulty believing that defence lawyers will tell the judge not to consider imposing sentences of 10 to 15 years any more. We are concerned about this. It is symptomatic of the problem: the government simply did not do its homework to see what would happen in similar cases so that it could say that the sentence for kidnapping is 10 to 15 years or even life in prison. The maximum is actually set out for this type of offence.
What did we work on in committee? We tried to find a minimum sentence. It does not make any sense. This was a typical provision of the Criminal Code that did not need to be amended in any way.
However, when we analyzed it in committee, we wondered who section 279.1 was talking about. It is unclear, and this shows that, if the government side had any intelligence at all, it would have tried to fix the contradictions between section 279 and the entire section of the Criminal Code that deals with kidnapping, human trafficking, hostage taking and abduction.
There is no way to amend Bill C-299 to make it into something that makes sense in the desired context, which the hon. member himself came to explain to the committee. This is absolutely not the result we would achieve if we were to pass Bill C-299.
This is therefore just another failure on the part of the government when it comes to justice.
The Conservative government is completely obsessed with its hatred of the judiciary, which it believes is just getting in the way. However, this is a very dangerous way of thinking in a democracy.
