Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have an opportunity to speak today to Bill C-299, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (kidnapping of young person), a private member's bill which was just introduced.
We all have the same strong feelings of revulsion and concern when a child, a young person, is the victim of a crime of this nature, in fact of any nature. I know we collectively have a great revulsion to the crime of sexual predation and sexual assaults. All of us have supported increasing and strengthening of sentences in the case of sexual assaults.
I want to talk a little bit about this particular offence in the context of the Criminal Code. I do not think the prayer that precedes the House opening is in camera in the sense that it is secret, but in the prayer there is an exhortation to ask for support to make good laws and wise decisions in this House. It is kind of in this context that I want to talk about this piece of legislation.
It is a private member's bill in the context of the Criminal Code. I think we all know the Criminal Code is a pretty thick and integrated document with all kinds of inter-related sentences, penalties, crimes and procedures. It has been a part of our criminal law since 1892, when the first code was brought forward.
The sentence for kidnapping of any person is life imprisonment. Although that particular sentence of life imprisonment may be rare for kidnapping, it is in fact not only available but has been used, in particular, in the case of a child. I will refer members to cases. The member said quite rightly that these are extremely rare cases. The fact is that we are going back over 20 years in British Columbia to come up with the three that the member mentioned.
There are also extremely rare cases to be found with pure kidnapping. The kidnapping offence is in the code. There is a series of them. There are abduction charges, forcible confinement charges, and abduction of a child charges, all with different types of approaches and different types of sentencing.
The essence of kidnapping is that someone abducts someone else and takes them from one place to another. In appropriate cases, and I say “appropriate” in the sense that it is the sentencing judge who looks at this. I will refer members to the case of Gillen, which is also quite an old British Columbia case. The offender abducted a child from strangers in order to raise him as his own. In this case, the offender received a life sentence for the kidnapping of a two-week-old baby.
We do see the courts treating the abduction of a child in these circumstances very seriously. I have done some research in response to the member's bill. I know that he is very sincere in bringing this forward, particularly in response to the publicity surrounding the most recent case. It is natural that we would want to follow that case and see what is going to happen to this individual.
To say that, in this case, a minimum five year sentence is appropriate in all cases is uncertain. The circumstances are extremely different in all cases. If we are talking about deterrence, sending messages or that sort of thing, the sentence of life imprisonment is not only available but has been used in the province of British Columbia. If that is not a deterrent or a proper denunciation, then one would have to question whether a minimum sentence of five years is going to have any effect whatsoever.
I do note, and I suppose we should not talk too much about this case because it is still before the courts, there seemed to be some question of mental capacity or potentially diminished responsibility, I do not know, but the family certainly seemed to be aware of something. At one time they said that they did not think that incarcerating the individual for a lengthy period of time would be necessarily appropriate, but obviously leaving it up to the court to decide what an appropriate punishment was for this individual.
We do take these crimes extremely seriously, and so do the courts, and this is one example that I brought forward.
When we look at kidnapping cases generally, whether it is a child or an adult, sentences of 12 to 14 years are not uncommon. Six years is not uncommon, even for the abduction cases where it is not called kidnapping. The starting point, and that phrase was used the other day, is four years, so for aggravating factors it goes higher. However, for kidnapping, we commonly see sentences of 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, even more years for kidnapping, particularly if it involved premeditation, ransom and other charges of that nature.
Kidnapping offences are rare and the kidnapping of children is rarer still, but we do have in our justice system a system where the legislature, through the Criminal Code, sets out the seriousness of the offence by having a maximum penalty, and for the most serious offences, life imprisonment is the punishment. There are circumstances of first degree murder, et cetera.
It is very rare to have kidnapping cases that are simply about kidnapping. Sadly, they are often in connection with other crimes, whether they be of sexual assault or, in the most horrific of cases, murder. Even though they are rare, any case is horrific, any case is to be abhorred.
I will not make any special claim for being a parent, but I think that everyone understands how excruciating it would be if one's child were to go missing, we all feel that, even just keeping track of our children on an ongoing basis as a parent is expected to do.
There is a great deal of emotion about that. We do have a whole bunch of individual circumstances. The mover and one of the other speakers mentioned the difference in spousal situations where there is a dispute over custody.
No one is condoning the other spouse taking the child in these circumstances, but these cases are treated extremely differently by the courts, even in the extreme cases where a child may be taken to another country for some number of years.
These to me are very abhorrent cases as well, where a child is being deprived of the company, custody, and being able to grow up with the mother or other spouse, sometimes without any reason. It is not that the child would be endangered or anything with the other spouse, but is abducted just for mere reasons of a custody dispute, to resolve an uncertainty, or to prevent court proceedings. These are not excuses for the kind of child abduction that unfortunately takes place in spousal disputes.
To get back to the kidnapping, generally speaking we have a problem with private members' bills changing the Criminal Code. We just had an omnibus crime bill where all sorts of minimum sentences would be imposed. If that was important to the government, why was it not part of that?
Private members can introduce whatever bills they want, but it is the government and the Department of Justice that has the responsibility for shepherding the Criminal Code. As a matter of government policy if there are wholesale changes, they could be brought forth and debated through the whole process.
Generally speaking, changes to the Criminal Code by private members are a very difficult thing for us to accept as the official opposition. We have not seen a strong need for this in terms of either the prevalence of the offence or the failure of the courts to handle it properly.
As noted by another speaker, the mandatory minimum sentences here take away the discretion of the courts to fashion an appropriate remedy, taking into account all the circumstances of the case.
