Joe Comartin

[Sébastien's Law (Protecting the Public from Violent Young Offenders), March 19th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, in terms of prevention, the model that we have to look at is the province of Quebec. It does not just provide extensive services for rehabilitation after crimes have been committed. It has a much broader program to prevent youth from getting into the gangs. That currently is the biggest problem we have. Its social safety net is, arguably, better than any in the country.

If we are to look any place in Canada, we have to look to Quebec and that has been true for at least 30-plus years, almost 40 years, since I have been monitoring this.

The approach of prevention in terms of the government, and this is true both of the Departments of Public Safety and Justice, is in the last three years it has had money budgeted for prevention work, both for youth and adults but mostly geared toward youth, and it has not spent it all. It does not know how to do it. The Conservatives are so locked into this ideology of punishment and after-the-fact response rather than preventing it. They literally do not know how to do it and they are still learning.

In a number of cases, the government has not funded the agencies that deal with youth, those agencies that had been funded under previous governments. It let the contracts run out and gave it to new people, who did not know what they were doing either. It is a real problem in terms of prevention.

The government has a model in the country. If it simply looked at Quebec and followed that model, we may see some real growth in the number of cases that do not get into our courts and the number of victims we will not have because crimes will not be committed.

[Sébastien's Law (Protecting the Public from Violent Young Offenders), March 19th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, perhaps the fastest way to look at this, in terms of the differences in the provinces, is there is a great deal of discretion with the attorneys general provincially as to how youth crime is dealt with, and that will continue in this legislation. In fact, in a couple of areas, it actually increases the discretionary call by the AGs across the country.

What has happened historically is the province of Quebec has taken a much broader and holistic view of how to deal with youth crime. As opposed to the model the current Conservative government likes, which is always just penalties and punishment, Quebec has taken that into account and it uses it when appropriate.

I always use this example in terms of the difference of how the provinces have worked on this. If we look at the number of cases where there are applications by the attorneys general to their local prosecutors to raise youth up to adult courts, it is amazing. The lowest number in the country, based on population, is in Quebec. Correspondingly, the lowest number of youth crimes is also in Quebec.

The last time I looked at these figures, and these are a few years out of date, the highest level was in the western provinces, in particular Alberta. It applied for adult charges and sentences more than any other. Ontario was somewhere in between. The highest rate of youth crime is in the prairie provinces, so it is not a methodology that works.

Finally, the province of Quebec has simply committed the funds to treatment centres in the proper settings for rehabilitation for youth. I do not know the exact figures, but it is extensively higher in that province, which is not nearly as wealthy as Alberta and Ontario. We are both behind them in the amount of dollars we commit at the provincial levels to rehabilitating youth.

[Sébastien's Law (Protecting the Public from Violent Young Offenders), March 19th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, let me answer this way. It was interesting listening to the minister earlier today saying not to confuse him with the facts. We have always had youth who commit multiple crimes. I practised quite extensively in our juvenile delinquency court, as it was called back in the early seventies, and I can think of a number of my youth clients who had committed multiple crimes. This is not a new phenomenon.

What happened, and it was part of the purpose of the Nunn commission and the McMurtry report, was starting around 2005-06, we had a serious spike in violent crime among youth, mostly from 16 to 18 years of age. What the minister has refused to acknowledge twice today is that there was a spike, but up until that point, youth crime had been dropping, like all other crime. That includes violent crime and repeat offenders.

We hit a spike in 2005, 2006, 2007 and a bit of 2008, but starting in 2007, it began to decline again. That is the case now and I think we will see the same when we see the figures for 2009 and 2010. That has nothing to do with any legislation we passed. It has everything to do with our police officers and prosecutors using different methodologies both to prevent crimes and to apprehend the criminals.

This kind of legislation needs tweaking. Justice Nunn was very correct on that. However, to use isolated cases, whether it is the Sébastien case or the one my friend from B.C. just mentioned, is not the basis on which we do public policy and certainly not the basis on which we amend the Criminal Code or, as in this case, the Youth Criminal Justice Act.

[Sébastien's Law (Protecting the Public from Violent Young Offenders), March 19th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the members of the Liberal Party who were kind enough to switch with me today because I need to get back to my riding for an event this evening.

Bill C-4 is a significant attempt to amend the Youth Criminal Justice Act and the NDP will be supporting it at second reading to send it to committee. However, having said that, we have some significant reservations about the bill in terms of the drafting of it. Frankly, I find it quite clumsy in some areas. Some amendments will be needed just to clean up the language. The other concern is that the wording seems to have two agendas, the one that is on the surface and then the one that is behind it. I will come back to that in a moment.

We need to set in context the bill. The major amendments in the bill coming into effect are not very old. They were made in 2003 when the bill was brought into effect. In my legal career, we have actually had four separate pieces of legislation dealing with youth who are in conflict with society, who have committed anywhere from fairly minor criminal offences to very serious ones, including murder.

As a society, we have been struggling since at least the 1960s to find that right balance between treating them as youth, different from adult criminals, but at the same time recognizing that they are not adults even though they may commit offences similar to adults.

That pattern goes back at least 100 years in this country, probably even a bit longer than that. The original young offenders bill, which was called the Juvenile Delinquents Act at that time, dates back to the early part of the 1900s. However, even prior to that, our criminal justice system accepted that there would be two systems: one for youth, the age being a variable one over the last 100 years; and a separate major one for adults. Our courts and our legislatures, both at the provincial and the federal levels, have recognized that for well over 100 years.

One of the concerns I have with this legislation, and perhaps this is where the hidden agenda may be, is that the government has repeatedly indicated in speeches and in its party platform that it wants to significantly alter the barrier between youth offenders and adult offenders. It became a major issue in the last election.

I want to acknowledge the role that the citizenry generally of the province of Quebec played in attacking the Conservative Party during that election on the proposals that were floated during that election of lowering the age to nothing so that any youth could be charged as an adult and sentenced as an adult. That provoked a serious negative response from the people of Quebec and I want to acknowledge the role and the leadership they provided in that regard.

The other point I want to make about the way we have treated youth crime historically in this country is that it has in fact varied quite dramatically across the provinces. Here, I want to acknowledge again that Quebec has been the most successful province, the most successful jurisdiction, in dealing with youth crime. It has the lowest rates of youth crime in the country. It has the most developed and sophisticated system in the country to deal with youth who are in conflict with the law and actively engaged in anti-social behaviour. Quebec does this better than anybody does in Canada, and I want to acknowledge that.

With regard to this particular bill, we need to set it in the context of it being really a direct outcropping, not so much of the ideology coming from the Conservatives, but of the push from the Nunn Commission of Inquiry in Nova Scotia and the McMurtry report on victim compensation in Ontario.

Justice Nunn, who was appointed to that special inquiry, certainly had the most detailed recommendations. He and his commission had seven specific recommendations that the government is claiming it has responded to.

I want to be very clear that Justice Nunn, both in the report and in any number of interviews he did afterwards, was very clear that the act, as is, is a good piece of legislation. It is a workable piece of legislation. The term he used constantly was that it needed to be tweaked. On the surface that is what it appears the government is doing here, but in a number of areas Bill C-4 has weaknesses. I want to address a few of those.

Before I do that, I again want to point out that we will be supporting this bill because it has at least two provisions in it that are badly needed.

One is that it makes it absolutely mandatory that no youth, no matter what crime they are accused of or convicted of and sentenced for, will spend time in an adult institution. That is a principle the province of Quebec has followed quite diligently. Other provinces have not, sometimes because of an ideological approach to punishment of youth, but more often because they simply do not have the facilities to incarcerate youth in a contained setting, especially in the rural and frontier areas of this country. The government has done nothing to assist the provinces in developing those institutional settings.

When the bill gets to committee, as I fully expect it will, this will be an issue that we will be raising with the Department of Justice and perhaps with the Correctional Service about what they are going to do to help the provinces meet the requirements of the statute not to incarcerate any youth in an adult prison. I do not believe they have done any planning for this.

As is so often the case with the government, especially with its crime bills, this bill provides no specific date when it will come into effect. I am afraid that what we are going to see because of this particular provision is the provinces sitting back, which happened in one of the prior incarnations of legislation on youth crime. I know that in the province of Ontario specifically we went almost a decade without being in compliance with the statute and that we were not providing the necessary facilities, even though we were the wealthiest province in the country at the time.

Hence, I am afraid we are going to have a piece of legislation passed in this House mandating that youth not be incarcerated in adult prisons and a number of the provinces will have no ability to comply with that. It is an issue that will need to be explored at committee. It is a good policy, a good paragraph in the legislation, but we must have the provinces in a position to be able to carry it out.

The other point I want to make, and I have to say that we have had some division over this in my caucus, is that there is a provision in the bill that will allow the courts who are sentencing individuals, particularly for serious offences, to lift the historically solid ban on any publication of the name of the accused or convicted person. That is one provision that we would expect to be used rarely.

While I am concerned about the criteria the government has built in as to when the judge would be able to do that, we can see this provision as necessary in exceptional cases, for the protection of society. I am thinking in particular of an accused person who has been convicted and sentenced as an adult, who has very severe psychological health problems and is not likely to be rehabilitated and who is, in the extreme, even a serial killer. That person should be identified to society, both in terms of the police knowing the individual and society more generally. Those will be rare cases. We may not even get one a year. However, I believe that for the protection of society, it is important that we analyze that, set proper criteria in place, and allow that discretion for our judges.

With regard to the negative parts of the bill where I see some hidden agenda items, I think it is necessary to go back to the last Parliament. Pretty late in that Parliament, in spite of all the other crime bills the government was introducing, some of which were silly quite frankly, and in spite of the fact it had been in power at that point for over three years and the Nunn report had come out, the government finally got around to drafting Bill C-25 and presenting it to the House. It was late in the 39th Parliament and that bill just sat and nothing happened to it. The bill included a provision that the Conservatives claimed was a denunciation, but it also had a very clear provision for general deterrence as a sentencing principle. That flies in the face of the hundred-plus years of our history in this jurisdiction of Canada, and generally in western democracies, of treating youth separately, recognizing that because of their lack of maturity, general deterrence does not work with them, generally speaking. It specifically is of no value when we are dealing with youth. That has been accepted in many courts and in all jurisdictions in the western democracies. However, what the Conservatives were trying to do was to introduce in that bill, very clearly, right up front, a general deterrence principle.

The government has backed off that in this bill. It has dropped that, I think, in part because of what happened in the last election in the province of Quebec. The government has maintained specific deterrents, that is, individual deterrents. I am not sure even those will survive a challenge in our courts. The Supreme Court of Canada, as recently as a few months ago and in a series of its decisions, made it very clear that the sentencing principles to be applied to youth who are in conflict with the law must take into account exclusively that they are youth, that courts cannot use principles of sentencing applicable in the adult setting. The Conservatives have recognized that and have limited the bill to specific deterrents, at least on the surface in one of the clauses.

However, when one looks at the amendments to the act overall, there are a number of other places where it would appear they are trying to get general deterrence in, if I could put it this way, through the back door. There is some really clumsy wording for what a judge does in determining whether a person should be tried as an adult, accepting of course the application from the Crown, and separate criteria as to whether they should be sentenced as an adult.

There is also wording in there that does not appear any place else in any youth justice act that we have had in the past, that does not appear in any parts of the Criminal Code, either currently or, as far as I know, historically. But it basically introduces moral culpability, and this may come out of a court decision that I think they may be taking out of context. It is introducing morality and asking the judges, in effect, to interpret that and to apply it on a day-to-day, case-by-case basis.

Knowing a lot of judges and judges who work extensively in the youth criminal justice system, I think this is going to pose a major problem of interpretation. I am not sure the legislation worded in this way will survive a challenge, because it is so vague. That is always a principle when looking at criminal law, including sentencing guidelines. Therefore, it is a major problem confronting us in dealing with this bill.

I want to address one other issue that came out of the Nunn Commission report and recommendations. The Nunn Commission arose as a result of a specific case in Nova Scotia. Justice Nunn was quite concerned about a limitation in the discretionary powers judges had around the issue of protection of society when sentencing an individual.

I do not want to sound trite here because it is a serious concern and one of the times when Commissioner Nunn said that tweaking was needed, but what the government has done here is not tweaking. I think it is just nothing: it is smoke and mirrors. Under the existing law the protection of society is a set of criteria for what a judge can take into account, and at the bottom of the full text of the paragraph in the bill, it talks about the protection of society. However, all I see the government doing here is moving that paragraph from the bottom to the top.

In the press releases and minister's press conferences, where he trots out one of the victim's family members, using them for photo-ops, he is forecasting and extolling the virtues of the bill, saying that it in fact addresses this issue. I have to say that I do not see that. This simply seem to be window dressing. The government has combined moving that clause from the bottom to the top with some new wording that I believe, if anything, when interpreted by our judges across the country, will further limit their discretion in taking into account the protection of society.

It is an example of what I said earlier about the bill, that is both clumsy and, in some cases, poorly drafted. I think there is some ideology behind this coming from the government rather than the officials in the Department of Justice, because this is not a bill of the quality I usually see coming from the Department of Justice. The department is usually quite good in drafting, if not excellent, but there are some problems here.

There are also a number of places where the government replaces sections. It takes sections out and repeals them and replaces them with others. From my reading of the bill, and this is another reason we will be looking at it very closely at committee, the government has in fact left gaps, and we are going to end up with the judiciary and prosecutors in this country not being able to prosecute and/or move to sentencing of adults, because the government has left gaps in the drafting of the bill. So we will be looking at that at committee.

To conclude, we are going to support the bill going to committee. We have serious reservations about parts of it and strong support for other parts. We will do what we can at committee to strengthen the bill and provide greater protection for people who are victims of youth crime.

[Privilege, March 18th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, just quickly, I am assuming, given the fairness that you always treat these arguments with, that the government will be allowed further argument on this.

I am standing only to request that we be given the opportunity to respond, particularly on the issue that the parliamentary secretary has now raised, both in his initial statement and now, with regard to the whole question of national security.

I will only make this one point and would want to reserve our right to argue it more extensively. The argument over national security is one that, given the rights of Parliament, is not to be determined solely by the government. If it were really serious about that argument, there would have been extensive discussions and negotiations after the motion and resolution of December 10.

We have now provided for a system that we believe would be acceptable to the opposition parties, the majority of parliamentarians, in the resolution that was heard from my colleague from St. John's East.

Mr. Speaker, I simply will terminate by asking you to give us the opportunity to respond once the government has come back with its full argument.

[Criminal Code, March 16th, 2010]

Madam Speaker, there is no doubt, having learned from the prior debates on this bill and again this evening, that this is an extremely difficult issue for all of us to confront as parliamentarians.

It is a private member's bill, so it will be a free vote for all members of Parliament, and all of us as individual members of Parliament must make our decisions. I know most of my caucus are opposed to the bill at this time, but there are certainly other members who, in good conscience, will vote in favour of it.

That division in attitudes comes from a philosophical basis, from a religious basis and from a moral basis on both sides of the issue. I have taken a somewhat different approach in my opposition, because I am opposed at this time. I cannot rule out that at some point, our Canadian society should in fact have a provision that would exempt this type of death from the Criminal Code's definition of murder, but we are not there today. I am quite convinced of that. In all good conscience, again for my colleague from the Bloc, I have serious problems with the methodology in the bill. I will come back to that if I have enough time at the end.

My approach is one simply of analyzing where we are as a society, both in Canada and at a somewhat more extended level, in some of the countries and jurisdictions that have introduced the concept of assisted suicide in whatever form or methodology they have done it. In terms of all the work I have done on this, I have come very definitely to the conclusion that it would be premature for Canadian society, at this time, to move down this road. Again, we may never move down this road, but we certainly should not at this time, for two primary reasons.

First, it is quite clear that as a society, we do not have the medical professionals ready, trained and equipped to deal with pain control. One studies the curriculum in medical schools and the position that doctors take when they are out of medical school and practising, whether they are general practitioners or specialists. It is quite clear that the knowledge out there on pain control has nowhere near permeated 100% of our medical profession.

I say this from a good deal of experience in my own community. I believe we have the best hospice in the country. I think it is 25 years old now. One of the programs we instituted about four years ago, or a bit longer, was a mentoring process by a pain specialist, who is now retired. She conducted a mentoring program, funded by the provincial government, for general practitioners. We now have put about 30 general practitioners through that process, educating them. These doctors are practising, some for a good deal of time, but they have to learn, for the sake and benefit of their patients, how to control their pain. It has been very successful.

The director of our hospice tells me that she does not get requests for assisted suicide. This woman has worked in this field for over 20 years in the Windsor area. The hospice is able to provide them with the resources, the pain control and sometimes the setting, so it is not necessary for individuals to have to make that decision of ending their own lives earlier than what would naturally occur. They are able to do that, yet still have full dignity of living out their lives to the fullest, both in time and in quality of life.

The other reason I believe this is premature is we do not have anywhere near the services in palliative care in hospices that we should have. The statistics I have on this show quite clearly that only about 20% of the regions are fully covered by full palliative care in hospices. We have perhaps another 15% or maybe 20% where we have partial coverage. We have a long way to go, and we should be concentrating on that.

I must admit I get to be critical of the government. One thing that happened, not in this current budget but in the two budgets before that, was the money to assist in setting standards for those palliative care centres and hospices was cut. There is no money left in the federal budget for the type of research and the setting of standards that would help the provinces in those areas.

We need to finish building the infrastructure before we move to considering whether we are going to have assisted suicide. We then need to look at other jurisdictions. What has happened there is not what I think we see in the common viewpoint of the average Canadian.

The average Canadian thinks the person who will have an assisted suicide is the stereotypical sufferer of Lou Gehrig's disease, that type of debilitating and terminal illness, those people who near the end of their lives will be unable to do anything to end their lives themselves and so they need assistance. That is the image out there. That is what shows up in the opinion polls.

If we study every jurisdiction that has moved to assisted suicide, that is not the person who is primarily using the system. It is almost overwhelmingly, and I am talking very high percentages, 75%, 80%, 85% of the cases, the frail elderly and, in some cases, younger people suffering from severe disabilities. It is not someone suffering from Lou Gehrig's disease.

Until we are in a position to complete the building of the medical infrastructure that we need to support patients, we cannot go down this road. We have to think about the unintended consequences every time we pass legislation, and this is certainly a classic example of where we end up with an unintended circumstance. We think what we are doing is helping a patient, a citizen of our country, but what we are doing is severely terminating lives of this much larger group in the form of the frail elderly.

Again, I have looked at all the jurisdictions, of which I am aware, where they have legislation. We heard from my Conservative colleague about the minister who moved the legislation through the Parliament in Holland. In 2009 the minister went public, supporting exactly the position I set forth before Parliament tonight. She recognized they did not have anywhere near a full system of palliative care in Holland. She has recognized, by the statistics that are coming out now, that it is the frail elderly who are overwhelming being euthanized. It is not what was intended. This was a consequence that resulted. She has made it quite clear that if faced with the decision today, she would not have marshalled that legislation through her legislature until that system was built.

This is not an easy issue, but it is very clear to me that the bill is so premature. We are at a stage in our development of our society where we can build the rest of that system. It will require some additional financial resources, but it is not great and we can afford to do it. That is what we should do and put off this type of legislation for quite some time into the future, if ever.

[Afghanistan, March 12th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, the government is in denial. It continues to claim this is not occurring any more, but continues to hide documents that would in fact show it continues. Ministers' offices are given preview copies of what is to be released and frequently send them back to be censored.

This is a government that still believes that what Tommy Douglas did in the 1930s is a state secret.

Will the government not at least admit today that torture, sexual abuse and killings are common in Afghan prisons, and why will the government not admit the obvious?

[Afghanistan, March 12th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, this government handed detainees over to the governor of Kandahar, a known torturer who has his own private prison.

A number of our allies have stopped transfers to Afghanistan's NDS, but this government continues to do so despite the fact that the NDS is known to use torture.

Only the Conservatives refuse to acknowledge that torture is common practice in Afghan prisons.

Why do they insist on continuing to transfer detainees to the Afghan secret services?

[Afghanistan, March 12th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, a report yesterday from the U.S. State Department says that conditions are horrific in Afghan prisons and that torture was and is common. Beatings with scorching bars and flogging by cable were reported. Police frequently rape female detainees and prisoners.

Yet the government has repeatedly told the House there is no credible evidence of torture and it continues to hand over the detainees to the NDS.

Is it the government's position today that the U.S. State Department is not a credible source, and why is it refusing to release the documents on what is going on in Afghanistan?

[Olympic Athletes, March 4th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, like other members today, I rise today to celebrate the proud accomplishments of our Canadian Olympians. In particular, I want to recognize the gold medal performances of two extraordinary athletes from Windsor and Essex County, namely, Tessa Virtue and Meghan Agosta.

Tessa, who went to high school in Windsor and is now at the University of Windsor, skated her way to gold with her partner Scott Moir in the ice dance competition.

In addition to winning a gold medal, Meghan Agosta, who was born in Windsor and played for the Windsor Wildcats of the Ontario Provincial Women's Hockey League, was named MVP for the Olympic women's hockey tournament. Meghan set a new scoring record for Olympic women's hockey netting nine goals and six assists in just five games.

Congratulations to Tessa and Meghan and congratulations to all the Canadian athletes who proudly represented Canada at the Vancouver Olympic Games.