Joe Comartin

[Sustaining Canada's Economic Recovery Act, November 1st, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak on Bill C-47 and address a couple of issues in the bill, both hearkening back to the original budget bill, which this is just apart of, and also some specifics in this bill.

In that regard, the budget, last time, was a classic of opportunities missed, and even where issues were addressed, government having gone offside.

I want to address in particular the funding that was promised, first, in the throne speech back in late February or early March of this year, then the actual dollars put into the budget, and then an announcement made just this past weekend on the issue. It was with regard to the horrendous issue of the number of aboriginal women who have gone missing in this country over the last decade or longer.

The sad part about this is not just the tragedy of all those women going missing and presumably, in a lot of cases, having been killed, but the fact of both the current government and the prior government not paying any attention to the issue at all. The dimension of the problem was raised by groups coming out of the first nations and having to do work that should have been done by our police forces, our justice system and our governments, which was ignored in large part by all of those sectors of our country.

It is inevitable, I think, to conclude that had the issue been treated seriously from the very beginning as these women went missing, a great deal of the loss of these women to our society could have been prevented. The current government in particular, but the prior government as well, spent way too much time on prosecuting crimes, on punishing criminals, as opposed to spending much more effort as is needed to prevent those crimes from ever happening.

Again, the announcement that we saw on Friday is just typical of that.

What was promised in the throne speech was that $10 million would be spent on what in effect I thought, from reading the speech and hearing the speech, would be mostly on prevention and assisting aboriginal groups in particular in identifying the loss of these women and trying to use methodologies that would teach us what happened to them and ways to prevent that from happening in the future.

One group in particular, the Sisters in Spirit, had done tremendous work. I was totally amazed when they brought it forward both to this House in a standing committee and to various members of Parliament who have responsibility in these areas. What was clear was that they had done very effective work in identifying how severe the problem was, but they were also literally begging the government to provide them with additional resources. That is what I thought part of that $10 million was going to be used for.

Did that happen? No, it did not.

The announcement on Friday by the minister responsible for women's issues made it very clear. When we look through the individual areas where these funds are going to get spent, it is not focused, certainly, on first nations people, aboriginal people, Métis or Inuit women. It is much more broadly dispersed among the whole population.

In spite of that promise in the Speech from the Throne that it was going to be dedicated to first nations, the aboriginal population, in fact it is not. If we do any kind of apportionment of the dollars, less than 10%, or maybe 15%, would end up aiding those communities. The rest is going to be spent on the general population.

In addition, this is not an issue that was new this past weekend. We have known about it for some time because of the work, over the last couple of years, done by the Sisters in Spirit and other groups like that from the first nations.

However, what has happened? The government says that it is going to spend the money. It is only $5 million per year for two years. That is all it has committed to. We get the announcement of how it is going to spend it, more than six months after the promise, when in fact Sisters in Spirit in particular were ready to go immediately. They had an outstanding application for funds. The government could have given them a portion of the $10 million back in March, quite frankly, when the budget first got passed. It did not do that. It spent all this time, I am not sure doing what, because when we see what it is proposing to do, it did not take six or seven months to plan that out.

In any event, we are now here, again too late, unfocused, for the $10 million. Some of that money is supposed to be spent this year on aiding some of the groups that would be providing some preventative work. It is very small amounts of money, maybe as little as $1 million per year for the next two years. I cannot see how any of that money is going to get spent this year, given how late the government has come down with it. We are going to have to wait for proposals to come forward. With the year-end break, very little of the $5 million for this year is going to get spent this year, and of course, with the risk of an election next year, it may not get spent at all.

However, it is typical of the government's attitude towards this problem, that it is not taking it seriously. Nothing could make that clearer than the way it has handled this money. There have been lots of photo ops, lots of press conferences and press releases about how it was going to do something, but the reality is that it is too little, not nearly enough money, for sure, for the problem that the aboriginal community is faced with. It is too late and what little it is doing is going in the wrong direction.

We look at this and ask why we are bothering with the government even doing this. The answer, of course, is that it gives the government the opportunity to do those press releases and have the photo ops.

The other reality with regard to this particular money is that it is quite clear from our discussions with first nations people and aboriginal communities generally that they are not at all happy, but we are not hearing any negatives from them because they are intimidated by the government. So often with so many other groups, it has intimidated them into silence by not renewing contracts and cutting off funding, KAIROS being a classic example of that and any number of other groups that it has cut funding to because they did not toe the government line, and this is again another example of that. The $10 million is really of questionable value, and whether it is going to get spent or not is questionable as well.

Let me switch to the other point that I want to raise in this brief speech, which is with regard to the pension issue.

We have in Bill C-47 one paragraph on pensions. We have had the finance minister running around the country, as well as in this House, making all these forecasts that the government is going to do something about reform of the Canada pension plan. We are promised repeatedly that it is coming, and again what we see in this bill is one paragraph that really has nothing to do with reform of the Canada pension plan.

We had been promised repeatedly, and even some dates were put on this. We were supposed to have something by the spring. Then we were supposed to have something this fall when we came back from the mid-term break. There is nothing in regard to pensions. We know, and I say this from a really negative personal experience as a member of Parliament, how traumatizing this is to a large number of our constituents.

I come from a city that is heavily dependent upon the auto industry. When it looked as though both General Motors and Chrysler were going to go into bankruptcy, and that the pensions were going to be in serious jeopardy, we expected more from the government. We expected them to deal with it. We expected them to deal with reforming Canada pension plan.

Let me conclude by saying that paragraph 70 in this bill does nothing for any of those issues.

[Veterans Affairs, October 27th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, this November our veterans should be honoured for their service and sacrifices to our nation. Instead, on November 6, across the country veterans and their supporters will be gathering for a national day of protest. They will be asking for the reinstatement of pensions relating to injuries they have sustained in the service of Canada. They will also be seeking the reinstatement of Colonel Pat Stogran as the veterans ombudsman.

New Democrats have long been fighting for fairness and practical results for veterans and their families. Among our accomplishments are: passing a veterans first motion; calling for expanded access to veterans' hospital care; extending VIP home care; and calling for a public inquiry into the violation of the privacy of veterans.

I am proud of the work of our veterans critic, the member for Sackville—Eastern Shore. He recently received the Veterans Ombudsman's Commendation Award for his tireless efforts on their behalf.

I call on all members of Parliament and all Canadians to get out on November 6 for the protest and to support our veterans.

[Taxation, October 25th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, the reality is that Conservative members voted to increase the tax by 8% in Ontario. The reality is that heating costs will increase. The reality is that people will be struggling this winter.

Why would the government increase the cost of living right in the middle of a recession? When will the Conservatives give Canadians a break this winter, starting by eliminating the heating tax?

[Ending Early Release for Criminals and Increasing Offender Accountability Act, October 18th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak to Bill C-39 with mixed concerns. The bill is 35 pages long and has 66 amendments to the act which are of mixed value.

The government, and so typically of it , has taken what I can only say are significant recommendations in terms of their length but which in many respects are housekeeping-type amendments from the Correctional Service of Canada. We can see that in the way the bill is drafted and in terms of the specific sections and the detail in those specific sections. They are obviously concerns from Correctional Service of Canada of problems it has run into. I would say that at least half of the bill addresses those specific problems, ones that we would generally be supportive of.

On the other hand, which is again typical of the government, once it receives those recommendations, it piles on what are in some cases quite extreme changes to the legislation and the corrections philosophy that we have had in this country for at least 50 years.

The government is attacking some of the fundamental beliefs that we have and that we have used to establish what is the best way to deal with those people who commit violent acts or non-violent criminal acts and who are incarcerated in our federal penitentiaries for more than two years. These are more serious crimes, whether they be property crimes or violent crimes. Those are the people we are talking about.

We currently have between 13,000 and 14,000 people incarcerated at the federal level. One of the concerns we have is that because of this piling on of some of the government's ideological inclinations to punish people rather than rehabilitate them, there is no indication from anything we have heard from the government side as to what the impact will be on the incarceration rate. Are we going to keep, on an annual basis, another 1,000, another 1,500 or another 2,000? Those are the kinds of figures I would suggest are likely to come out of this legislation if it were to pass.

It is obvious from the comments that we have heard from the Bloc just now that they will be supportive. I am not sure what the Liberals are doing because typically Liberals do not know what they are doing yet. The Bloc will support this going through second reading and on to the public safety committee.

What hopefully will happen at the public safety committee is that those sections of the bill that are offensive to some of the fundamental principles that we have lived by in our corrections system for the last five decades can be stripped out of the bill. I will address my comments with regard to some of those.

As the bill stands right now, there is an expression in clauses 3 and 4 of the bill that set out the guiding principles for Correctional Service of Canada. What it does now is it sets a balance between the safety of the staff and the inmates in our prisons and, looking forward to those inmates being released at some point, the safety of the public in general when they are released.

There is a balancing act that is in the legislation now. This bill would upset that balance and set as an absolute fundamental priority the protection of the public, again being driven by that ideology that we hear from the Conservatives that somehow the protection of the public and rehabilitation of the incarcerated individual are mutually exclusive. Quite frankly, that is absolutely wrong.

In fact, if we do not rehabilitate, if we do not reduce the recidivism rates with an effective treatment for the person incarcerated, we enhance the likelihood of that person committing more crimes, often more violent crimes, when they are ultimately released. We have that from all sorts of sociological studies, not only in Canada, but in any country where there is a reasonably vibrant democracy.

When we see the shift in this fundamental approach, we have to say that we cannot support it. At committee, we hope a majority will see it that way and those provisions will be struck out, so that we stay with the existing balance that has served us so well. It is not perfect, and that is why we are supportive of some of the other amendments. There are changes that could be made that would enhance the safety of staff in our prisons, the inmates, and ultimately society when those inmates are released.

There are other provisions in here, and we are hearing this from some of the critics of this bill, that are an attack on the fundamental rights of Canadian citizens, which rights should continue when a person is incarcerated. As I am sure most members of this House know, there was a battle at one point under the charter on whether people incarcerated at the federal level were entitled to vote in federal, provincial, and municipal elections. Ultimately, the Supreme Court of Canada decided that this was a fundamental right that was not taken away by a conviction and sentence in a federal penitentiary. That was not implied in the charter. Corrections Canada could not take away the right to vote and it was reinstated.

Because of the way Bill C-39 is drafted, there will be attempts in the future to undermine the basic rights that our Supreme Court has said continue to exist under the charter. For instance, there are several paragraphs in which rights that are now recognized under the existing law are being called “privileges”. If they were called “privileges” before, they are now being removed from the law completely. We can see this shift quite clearly in several sections in which there is an attempt to undermine the ability of the inmate to continue to function, at least to some degree, within the normal parameters.

We know this is important. Anybody who has worked in corrections knows that even somebody serving life is ultimately, in the vast majority of cases, going to be released. They have to be released in a position to function in society. If we take away all those rights, if we turn them into non-citizens, the chances of rehabilitation go down dramatically. The likelihood of recidivism goes up correspondingly and dramatically. It is important to maintain that balance. There is a clear attempt on the part of this government to undermine that balance at this time in this bill.

The other significant concern that I have, and that my party has, with regard to Bill C-39 is that, although we support the concept, it is proposing that the responsibility should lie with the inmates to take advantage of programs that would assist in their rehabilitation.

That can take a number of different directions. Sometimes it is just teaching basic life skills. It was one of the reasons we heard such a negative reaction to the decision by the government to close the prisons in farm settings. Above and beyond just about anything else, they taught inmates, often young inmates, some basic life skills. They had to get up in the morning. They had to get ready to do their work. They had to go to their work. They had to perform the jobs they were assigned to. They had to do everything with a reasonable amount of diligence.

We learn those skills by experience. It is hard to learn them when sitting in a cell for 23 hours a day. It does not work that way. It is one of the major reasons we saw such an overwhelming response and opposition to the government's decision to close those prisons. It was a major mistake, one that the rest of society will suffer from for quite some time, at least until we get rid of the government and reopen those prisons, which allow people to learn on-the-job life skills.

There is other programming such as education, but the most important is psychiatric counselling and treatment. I say this from the experience I had sitting on both the justice committee and the public safety committee, where I listened to the staff in the corrections services who actually worked in the prisons. A number of those were in administrative positions but came from front-line positions. Psychiatric counselling and treatment may include pharmacare to deal with what are often chemical imbalances. Our prison system is woefully inadequate in providing those services.

I remember one time the deputy head, now the head of Corrections Canada, estimated that of the 13,500 inmates in the federal penitentiaries close to 50% had serious psychiatric problems, and that a majority of that 50%, if they were out in society, could be confined to a psychiatric institution. The sad part was his admission that they were getting nowhere near the treatment that they required, which was an absolute necessity if they were going to be rehabilitated.

The other point that he made was that, with respect to education and lifestyle-type programs, all too many of our inmates have access to them only late in their sentences. A large number of them are released before they can complete the programs, whether it is psychiatric treatment, an educational program, or a lifestyle program. They never get to finish them because they are not available to them. They are put on a priority list when they come in, but those who are already there get the first shot at them. As they move up the list, they are also spending more time. By the time they get to the top of the list, they are about to be released. In effect, few inmates benefit from the programs because there are all too few of them available.

We know, from admissions from the government, that it is going to spend somewhere around $9 billion on concrete, glass, and steel to build new prisons. There is no corresponding increase in funding for programming, none whatsoever.

It was interesting to listen to the staff who were out picketing the minister at one of those announcements, when he was running around the country making announcements of new prisons, the amount of money being spent, and the number of new beds there were going to be.

The people in those institutions now working with those inmates, our professional staff, said to him that this was crazy, that instead of more cells, they needed more programs and more staff. There is a stress level among the staff because there are not enough of them. A large percentage are often off on stress leave, which only places additional burdens on the remaining staff. So we have a staff morale problem in prisons, and it comes down to two fundamental issues: first, we do not have enough staff, and second, we do not have enough programming for the inmates.

We have a government that is quite prepared to spend taxpayers' dollars to follow its theme of punishing people, making people accountable. But it is not going to spend any money on what is really necessary: to rehabilitate inmates while they are incarcerated. It boggles the mind. Imagine historians 50 years or 100 years from now looking back at this period of time and wondering what we were doing. The government cannot see that we have a rare opportunity to turn these inmates' lives around, to make them responsible citizens so that they no longer prey on citizens.

We will blow the opportunity, because on that side of the chamber it is all about punishment. Conservatives cannot get their heads wrapped around the fact that we need to rehabilitate. If we are going to have an effective correction program, whether it is at the provincial or federal level, while we have that person in our control, and I am being serious, we have to force them to turn their lives around. To do that, they need to be provided with the necessary support.

This fundamental approach is a real problem in the bill. All it does is perpetuate the notion that, to solve our crime problem, all we have to do is build more prisons, more beds, incarcerate more people. All we have to do is look across the border to see that this does not work. It is quite interesting to see what is happening there. In many states, including Michigan, which is adjacent to my hometown, prisons have been built that they no longer can afford, just to punish people.

Conservatives will know that, for the last decade, more and more states have been closing prisons, reducing their prison populations because they cannot afford to keep them. There are states that are spending more money on prisons than on post-secondary education. That is a ludicrous position, and we are moving that way when we see these kind of decisions.

There are some fundamental changes required for this bill, and I hope that the committee will agree. On the other hand, there are provisions that our corrections staff are telling us they need. We support them on that. We would be supportive of giving authority to the Parole Board to accept victim impact statements. That is not done in parole now. Corrections Canada would advise when parole was coming up or when the person was being transferred.

A number of mechanisms that are being put in place now make good sense. They will assist victims and victims' families to deal with the reality of the person who is going to be released from custody.

Hopefully at committee those changes will be made, the good parts of the bill will ultimately get through and the bad parts will be removed.

[National Defence, October 8th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, anyone who criticizes the Conservatives' decisions has his or her name dragged through the mud. For instance, the Prime Minister said yesterday that lives would be in danger if we do not buy the F-35s.

When will the Conservatives stop insulting our intelligence and the intelligence of Canadians concerning the F-35s, and stop intimidating people who criticize the government's decisions on this file?

[The Economy, October 8th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, there is more bad news for families today. There were 6,600 net jobs lost in September. While full-time employment has inched up for the first time in memory, we need more than a little pause in the shift from full-time jobs to part-time work. Since the start of the recession, 250,000 full-time jobs are gone. That is the bottom line.

In light of this full-time job crisis, will the government come to its senses, change its position, and continue the stimulus program so that Canadians can get back to work?

[Tackling Auto Theft and Property Crime Act, October 6th, 2010]

Madam Speaker, I am pleased once again to speak to the issue of auto theft in this country. I say “once again” because I, quite frankly, do not remember how many times I have been on my feet in the House speaking to bills on auto theft. This is the third incarnation. There was Bill C-53 after the 2006 election; Bill C-26 before the 2008 election because of the prorogation at that time; and now we are on Bill S-9.

There is such a lack of credibility on the part of the government on this issue and on crime bills generally. We have been going at this for over four years. The issue actually preceded that back in the Liberal tenure because there was a bill at that time dealing with the issue of playing with VIN numbers.

With the present government, we had one prorogation and the bill went down, one election and the bill went down and then we had the spectacle of the justice committee not being able to meet because of elections and because the chair of that committee was thwarting the activities of the committee for months at a time. Those things delayed the passage of these bills. In April 2009, it finally went before the committee, which was the first time in a year the justice committee actually dealt with a bill. It sat idle a whole year because of both the actions of the chair thwarting the work of the committee and the election in 2008.

Finally, in 2009 the committee was finally working again and we were dealing with the bill before us today, which, if I have time today, I will actually get to. The committee did a lot of work and extensive evidence was taken. It then went back to the House with all party support and then on to the Senate. When we got to the end of 2009, we all know what happened. We had another prorogation. We had three prorogations, one election and dirty tactics by the chair of the justice committee.

Here we are, four-plus years later, and the bill still has not been passed, a bill that has widespread support in the House from all parties. However, it is because of, quite frankly, the indifference of the government to what is a significant issue in the country and a government much more concerned about protecting its political stature than it is about dealing realistically, effectively and efficiently with a major crime problem in the country.

We already have a backlog in the justice committee because so many other bills have been impacted exactly the same way. This bill will probably go through the House tomorrow and get to committee, which is backlogged significantly. If it is dealt with in its proper order, it is highly unlikely that this bill will get out of the justice committee in 2010. It almost certainly will not be, given the other bills before the committee. It has been my forecast for some time that we will have an election in the spring and that this bill will never become law before the next election. We need to be very clear that the responsibility for that lies entirely in the hands of the government.

All three of the opposition parties have dealt responsibly with the bill. When it was before committee, we did our proper work. We analyzed the problem, saw that the bill would work the way it should work, passed it, and then we see this again and again.

That is the reality of what we are dealing with. It is almost frustrating to say, “Why am I bothering to stand here today, because we are going to have an election before this bill becomes law?”. We will then start all over again and it will be another couple of years before we get it into the books as law.

The bill, as I see it, has only one significant problem, which is where I take some issue with what my colleague from Scarborough said. The mandatory minimum in the bill is only after a person has committed his or her third offence. As my colleague from the Bloc has raised, we are not quite sure what that would do. One of the reasons we should not be supporting mandatory minimums in some cases is that it sets the standard and judges feel compelled to work to that standard.

We can think of any number of scenarios. When a person has been convicted for the third time, six months is a ridiculously low sentence, especially if it involves individuals who are involved in organized crime in the theft of autos. Six months is a joke in those circumstances after a third offence. However, that happens because it is sometimes easier for judges who are overworked to say that the legislature has said that six months is the target after the third offence, so that is what they will invoke, when it should maybe have been two years or a penitentiary sentence, especially if it involved organized crime.

At the end of the day, my friend from Scarborough may be right, we may see an increase in the number of people incarcerated for this theft but it is also possible that we will see a reduction in the amount of time that they spend in our provincial jails.

The member has a very good point, though, in that the government does not know. Its simplistic solution is that everything can be solved by a mandatory minimum penalty. It just throws it at the problem. It has absolutely no idea what the consequences will be of that provision. Will it dramatically increase the prison population? It is building all those jails to the tune of $9 billion and there was another announcement for more jail cells. For those crimes that are not being reported, so we cannot put those people in jail because they will never get to court, we can maybe increase the population here to justify spending that $9 billion. The bottom line is that the government does not know. It has absolutely no idea what the consequences will be of that mandatory minimum in this situation.

The other point of significant concern, which came out of the work done by the justice committee, is that the bill would empower, which is necessary and we are supportive of it, the Canada Border Services Agency to take additional investigative methods to deal with the illicit importing and exporting of mostly autos and auto parts. The CBSA does not have enough jurisdiction right now and it is the agency that is on the front line.

When that was explained to us as we heard the evidence on it, we understood the necessity of it, but what was corresponding to it was that there were no plans by the government to provide the additional resources. This will be a significantly increased workload for the Border Services Agency but there were no plans in the last two budgets to provide additional funding to that agency. I am sure we will hear again, when this issue comes before the justice committee, that the government still has not planned for it. By that, I mean doing a basic business plan. How much more will we need? How many additional staff will we need? How much more equipment and investigative tools will we need? The government has no idea of that at all.

We are seeing this in terms of complaints coming back from governments at the provincial and municipal level, where these additional burdens are being put on our police officers, our prosecutors and our judiciary with no additional resources being provided by the federal government.

In this regard specifically, this is a federal government agency and this responsibility is entirely ours. We do not have any analysis of how much it is going to cost, how many more people, how long it is going to take to get it fully staffed. Are funds going to be available to fully staff it, or are we going to dump this responsibility on the officers who will have no ability to carry it out because they are under-resourced? They are under-resourced now. If we had additional staff at the Windsor-Detroit border, we could be doing much more, for instance, in the illicit import of guns. There is no capacity to do it. Now these officers are going to be forced to do more work with no particular ability to carry it out.

I am not a great fan of making auto theft a separate offence, although there is nothing wrong with doing it. It just does not add anything to the front-line police officer who enforces the law.

I want to acknowledge the work we saw in Manitoba. It came up with a solid, practical solution that dramatically reduced auto theft rates, particularly in the city of Winnipeg. In 2007 Winnipeg was the auto theft capital of the country by a long shot, running at about 1,700 thefts a year. The next closest city was Abbotsford at just under 1,000. Montreal, which traditionally until about 2000-01 had been the auto theft capital in the country, was only at 550 thefts a year.

Those numbers have altered somewhat in the last two years, since the last study available from Juristat. Winnipeg has dropped dramatically. It is no longer the auto theft capital of the country. Abbotsford still is and Edmonton is right behind. Montreal is running fairly close.

[Serious Time for the Most Serious Crime Act, October 5th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, it is a relatively simple analysis here that I think has been made by the government's strategists: create a bad guy, create the devil, create the demon, and use that as a way of avoiding other issues. Appeal directly to a relatively small percentage of the population, but then spread that message throughout society.

On a short-term basis, and we have seen this any number of times in our history, it works. However, as people begin to recognize what the major issues are that are confronting Canada, whether it is within the criminal justice system or in any number of other sectors of our society, they begin to say, “What are you doing?” And that is what has happened. I think the breaking point for them occurred during the summer when, as my friend already indicated, we had the Conservatives saying, “We are building prisons. We are going to need to prisons because we have all this unreported crime”. That was absolutely so shallow that the average Canadian, even a number of the hard-core supporters of the Reform-Alliance-Conservatives, identified it. That was probably the breaking point. When $9.5 billion is spent on prisons when we have declining crime rates, the average Canadian says, “Enough is enough”.

However, it has worked for them up until this point. That was their strategy. It is going to fail on an ongoing basis now if they pursue this.

[Serious Time for the Most Serious Crime Act, October 5th, 2010]

First, Mr. Speaker, I am not advocating at all that we should not advise victims of the process. I am saying that we have to look at whether it makes sense in what would oftentimes be a short period of time, and since victims are not going to be allowed representation at that time, there is no need to put them through the pain if in fact the initial application is going to be rejected by a judge as having no merit.

It is very limited. There were 30 cases as of October of last year. In those 30 cases, the families would not have been notified. There would have been no reason to notify them because there was nothing further to do. It is a question of trying to save them pain. It has nothing to do with ideology. That is just humanity.

With regard to whether this is an ideological debate, I want to be very clear that this is not for us an ideological debate. It is for the Conservatives. This is all about their very typical American right-wing agenda of wanting to portray themselves as being tough on crime. This should be a practical debate. What is the proper practice? How do we best protect the victims? This does not do it.

The member used all these buzzwords, such as truth in sentencing. Yes, we want to be truthful about sentencing and tell people that the average time that a person is incarcerated in Canada for first degree murder is not 25 years. That is not what convicts are going to spend in jail. They are going to spend 28.5 years in prison and 80% of them are going to spend even longer than that. That is truth in sentencing.

[Serious Time for the Most Serious Crime Act, October 5th, 2010]

Madam Speaker, as I have been listening to the debate today, I must admit I have been suffering from some real pangs of frustration. This is a terrible bill; it really is as simple as that. The background behind it and the role the Conservative Party has played, and the Reform and Alliance parties before it, and I cannot put it any other way, in using the faint hope clause as a way of stirring up fears among the families of the victims of murderers in this country is, quite frankly, shameful.

As we have already heard from the Liberal member for Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe this bill has sat around for quite some time. It is a typical example of a government and a political party that claims to be concerned about victims and sees its members as self-appointed champions of victims, but when it came to prorogation last December, the Prime Minister had no hesitation and, I believe, gave absolutely no consideration to the various crime bills that were going to go down and to the delay it was going to cause in dealing with issues.

I am also frustrated because the way this bill has been handled by the Conservatives is a classic example of the government refusing, as we saw most recently with the census, to deal with facts and reality if it at all clashed with the government's ideology.

What I am referring to is that evidence came forward from Correctional Service Canada on this particular bill and on the whole issue of the faint hope clause in the Criminal Code. As a result of questions from me and the Bloc, further evidence was required. The department prepared a report in answer to those questions. It sat on the desk of the minister of public safety at that time until after we completed clause-by-clause study. The evidence that came out in that report was quite damaging to the government cause and it was never heard by the committee. The bill came back to this House without that evidence having been considered.

The evidence was clear that this bill is not going to do anything in terms of dealing with the one problem that exists with the faint hope clause, and that is how we treat the victims in the process. That is the only issue that has some validity here. Unfortunately, I do not believe it is an issue that can be dealt with in any serious way by legislation.

There are practical solutions. One of them is for the government party to stop the fearmongering around this issue, to tell the victims how the system actually works, how it has worked for almost 35 years, what the effect is on the murderers who are incarcerated, and what impact it is going to have on them. There are ways of doing that. The Conservatives have not done any of that in the five years they have been in power. There are ways of softening it.

It is important to put this into context. The faint hope clause came into effect when we did away with the death penalty. At that time we looked at what the penalties were going to be for first degree murder. Most of my comments today are going to be with regard to first degree murder.

When we investigated it at that time and looked around the globe to our normal allies, that is, societies that are close to what Canadian society is, the average maximum sentence for first degree murder in those other countries was 15 years. We did not do 15 years; we did 25 years.

We then said, “Okay, we trust our judges and our juries”. This bill is really an insult to both of them. We trust our judges and our juries to look at individual cases, to say that 25 years is too much, that the person is rehabilitated and will not be a risk to society and the recommendation is to allow the person to apply for parole earlier than 25 years. That is what the faint hope clause did at that time.

It was in consideration of looking around the globe at societies similar to ours, and those societies have lower murder rates than ours and some of them have 15 years as a maximum for eligibility for parole, and in a good number of them, it is 12 years. That is still the case today. In fact, in that period of time, most of those countries have reduced it from 15 years to 10 or 12 years. That is the factual situation. That is how it works elsewhere, and it is how it works here in the sense that the clause does work.

The parliamentary secretary stood up in the House today and put forward figures and facts that are grossly misleading.

Here is a fact that every Canadian should know. This is a fact that the Conservative government should be passing out to every Canadian. The average time that someone who commits first degree murder in Canada is incarcerated is 28.5 years, not 25, not 15, before the person can first apply, and most of them do not, but it is 28.5 years. That is the longest incarceration period in the world. That is the situation in Canada today.

These facts came out during the course of hearings on Bill C-36, which preceded this bill but is identical. We are dealing with a problem that does not exist in terms of the years. I repeat that 28.5 years is the average incarceration period in Canada and it is the longest in the world, longer than that in any of the United States. That is the so-called problem we are dealing with.

I made earlier reference to the request that I and the Bloc made for more information. We did get it. These were the facts, and I want to read them into Hansard today.

I have a letter from Don Head, the commissioner of Correctional Services Canada. None of this evidence got into the record at committee before the bill was returned to the House. I wanted to know the factual situation. I would have thought the government would have wanted to know this before it drafted the legislation. Here are the facts of the situation in Canada.

For those people sentenced to first degree murder, there is no eligibility for parole under 25 years. As of October 18, 2009, there were 622 people in custody who were in that category. Of those 622 people, 174 applied for and received a decision from our courts as to whether they could apply for an earlier parole. Thirty of them were rejected; 144 were granted the opportunity to apply.

On the first application, 140 were granted the opportunity to apply--and let us consider this carefully--by a jury composed of people who live in the region where the crime was committed. That is how the system works. This was not one of those, as the Conservatives like to think, elitist juries or an elitist judge totally disengaged from the community. They are people who live in the community. They are given all the evidence as to the nature of the crime. They are told all the facts about the individual's record while incarcerated. It is an in-depth process. It is the jury, not the judge, that ultimately makes the decision as to whether an individual is going to be granted a reduction in the number of years he or she has to serve before being able to apply for parole. Even then, of the 144 cases where the individuals were granted the right to reply, those individuals still had to go through the parole process and 10 of them were not granted parole.

If we look at it, and we heard some of this from the Bloc, of those who were granted parole, there was only one serious crime that had been committed. It was an armed robbery, but they were not able to give us information. We do not know what kind of weapon was involved, whether it was a gun or not. We do not know if there were any injuries that came out of it. There was only one serious crime, and we do not know how serious it was.

There were a number of people, 14 in total including that one, who were sent back to prison. The other 13 were all because of breaches of their conditions, usually because of abuse of drugs or alcohol. In some cases the abuse was as simple as changing their place of residence and not telling the person where they had moved to, but they continued to comply with the rest of the provisions. It is a very rigid supervision that is done through that period of time, for life.

Perhaps I should stop at that point. We have to remember that the sentence is a life sentence. Even when they get out in these circumstances, they are still serving life sentences and their parole can be pulled at any time, up to death. The supervision goes on for the rest of their lives.

Again as we heard, three were deported, eleven died, and one is missing. They did not know where one person was. There seems to be some indication that they thought the person had left the country, but that was the situation as of a year ago.

What we get from the government is that we have a major problem here and it is going to toughen this up. I do not know how it would toughen it up. What does it want? Does it want the average time spent in custody to be 35 or 40 years? Does it want to bring back the death penalty?

In fact, the only way we are actually going to deal with the one problem that is here, and that is how victims are treated by the system as the process happens, is by bringing back the death penalty and killing the murderer. The problem that exists is that we have people who are told that the person who committed the murder against a person's friend or family member has applied for eligibility for early parole. There is no one who was sitting on that committee who did not understand the implications for the emotional and psychological well-being of the victims' families. We understood that. That is not an issue here. We understand there is a problem in this area, but the solution that is being envisioned by this bill is not an answer to that problem.

I have been on the justice committee for more than six years and a number of different pieces of legislation have come forward. We have heard of the problems that victims have in dealing with the criminal justice system. We have seen occasions where there are some systems in place, usually regional ones, across the country that go quite some distance to support victims and their role in dealing with the criminal justice system, whether as witnesses or, as in cases like this, where they are coming in as family members or friends of the victim of the crime.

We know there are ways of lessening the burden. One of them clearly in this situation is education. So let us have the Conservative Party of Canada stop running around the country fearmongering on this issue. Let us have it simply put out the correct information.

Less than 25% of the people who are incarcerated with no eligibility for parole for 25 years apply. That is the first figure that victims and victims' families should know.

The second one they should be aware of is that the process itself takes a long time. One of the facts I have not given that came out, and this one is not nearly as clear, is that most of the applications do not come at the 15 year mark. Most of them start at around the 17 to 18 year mark.

Of the 622, we have only had one case where somebody applied immediately after the 15 years and was granted the right to apply, and in fact was granted parole. He actually came as a witness and testified before the committee. He is the only one. He was granted parole at about the 17.5 year mark. That is a fact that people should know; there was only one.

The vast majority, around 22%, of people apply on average at 17 or 17.5 years. The process itself takes more than two years. That is how long it is taking at this point. A number of them do not get out. They are rejected. Of the people who actually get out and who are released back into the community, the best figure we could see was at somewhere from 19 or 19.5 years up to 23 years. That is the range for people who are released.

When we think about the number of people who are getting out, the 20% to 22%, I want to go back to the 28.5 years. They are included in that group. The balance of somewhere between 75% and 80% of the people who are incarcerated in Canada for first degree murder spend well over 30 years in custody. A number of them, and this was an interesting fact that came out from the John Howard Society, after 25 years, are pressed by authorities to apply, and they will not do it. Some never do apply. They die in custody.

Those are the kinds of facts that victims who survived the loss of a loved one should be aware of. The education part is something that should be done. It has nothing to do with legislation. I posited, as we were going through this process, the possibility of one amendment, which would be that we do not tell the victims in the initial stage that an application has come forward, because as I already indicated and I think we heard it from a member from the Bloc, the way the process works is that when the initial application is put forward, it goes before a judge alone. The judge then takes a look at it and decides whether the application has any merit at all. As has already been said, there were 174 of them and 30 of them were rejected at that point.

It seems to me that if we said to the victims that we would let that initial phase go forward before telling them because we want to spare them from that, because they do not have the opportunity to make representations at that time, that is one of the solutions. I must admit I got both positive and negative responses from victims groups on that.

I want to make a final point with what we could be doing with victims, which is to provide them with a support system that is meaningful. Oftentimes, if there is an adjournment of the proceedings, they are not told. They travel to wherever the hearing is, if they are not in the immediate community. They are compensated for that eventually, but they are not told, so they oftentimes have to go repeatedly. Every time they go for a hearing, the memory is jogged and they suffer those emotions.

That is another area where we should be doing much more, both with our prosecutors and with the financial support we provide. The financial support is really quite limited and we should be doing more. Those would be good practical solutions. There is no legislation required. This is something the government could have done five years ago, and of course it did not, because it wanted to play politics with it.