Mr. Speaker, I am going to follow two routes in my speech. One is the bill itself and the other one is the procedures that have been followed in getting the bill before the House.
This is not a trivial issue. We are talking about murderers, people who have been convicted of first degree premeditated murder. There is no one in the House who does not understand that.
We also know that this has been an ongoing debate. In the speech by our colleague from Manitoba we heard some of the history that has led us to the process that is followed in our courts today. It involves the debate around the death penalty and the debate about dealing more appropriately with the families of murder victims than we have done historically and how we best protect our society from future murders, from future violence by removing individuals from society.
That debate inevitably, and I say inevitably because it is true in every democracy that I have looked at, leads us to what is the appropriate period of incarceration in order to achieve the goals of public safety, protection of the public, protection of victims' rights. How do we best achieve that? That is what this debate is about. It is what Bill C-36 and its predecessors is all about.
We often hear government members in the House and in public raise fears in the families of victims, which I think is to their eternal shame in many respects, as opposed to dealing with the facts. We then get to the process that we went through in getting the bill back to the House for third reading.
I want to make this point. There were two types of evidence that came before the justice committee. One was anecdotal, based on perceptions and emotion in many cases. That was the preponderance of what came before committee, anecdotal evidence. There was a little bit of factual evidence. I cannot help but conclude that this process with this bill in particular is faulty. It is faulty more so than with any other crime bill that has come before the House by the current administration since 2006.
The minister appeared before the committee. He was asked a number of questions about how the system works and he was not able to give us factual information. Those are his own words. I am not reading anything into it.
We were told by the minister and his officials from the justice department that the information we were seeking of how the system really works resided with the Department of Public Safety, and specifically within the corrections division of that department.
I had checked to see if Statistics Canada's Juristat had the factual information as to how these sections of the Criminal Code dealing with the faint hope clause worked. It did not gather that information. It also advised me and other members of the committee that it all resided in corrections.
We needed a number of pieces of information. One of the more pertinent pieces of information that the government should have had, given the Conservative Party's long-standing claim of being the champion of victims rights, was how many family members of victims actually used the process. I can say unequivocally today that that information never came before the committee.
With all the research that I have done, with all the enquires that I and other members of committee have made, I can say that information does not exist. We received anecdotal analysis, but in terms of public policy, there was no factual evidence.
We do not know exactly how many applications are made. We do not know factually how many applications are made on the first opportunity, that is, at the 15 year mark of incarceration. We do not know how many applications are made at the 17 year mark, the 19 year mark, or the 20 year mark. We do not know, for instance, at what age people are released under this process. I could go down the list.
We do not have all sorts of information on recidivism, the small number of people who are released and commit another crime and are incarcerated again. And they may not have committed another crime, but they may have breached the terms of parole, which are very stringent.
We do not have any specific answers to that list of items.
In spite of that, the government is going ahead with this bill based entirely on anecdotal evidence at best and almost exclusively on the, and I hate using the word “demagoguery“, but it is accurate, of their speeches as the Conservative Party, as the Alliance Party and as the Reform Party. None of this is based on fact.
A report in 1999 gave us some of the factual answers to the list of items I just enumerated. That information is now 10 years out of date. We know from some of the evidence that things have changed. There have been other amendments. There has been some tightening up of the process by the judiciary and by the Parole Board. We know it has changed somewhat but we do not know how much it has changed in this 10 year period. No additional work has been done. No additional work was done by the prior Liberal administration up to 2006, and the Conservative government has not brought that information up to date.
I will come back later in my speech to how flawed the process was in getting us here. I want to make one other point on something that I find really offensive with this legislation.
When we look behind the government's agenda, we find that this is really about an ongoing attack on our judiciary. In this case, it is also an attack on the jury system. It undermines the credibility of both of these institutions that have stood us in good stead in this country and in the Westminster style of democracy for hundreds of years. Is it perfect? I will be the first one to say that from my years of experience in the courts that it is not perfect, but it is a very solid system. It is a system that is deserving of the respect of the legislators of this chamber. This bill seriously undermines our system.
Under the present system an incarcerated individual convicted of first degree murder has to wait 15 years before he or she can apply to be considered whether he or she can apply for parole. The individual is not applying for parole but is just applying for permission to apply for parole. A judge in the area where the murder was committed has to screen whether or not that individual has a reasonable possibility of convincing a jury that he or she should be allowed to apply for parole.
With this bill, we would be undermining that and taking it away. First of all, we would be making it harder because the test for the screening process will be tougher and, of course, ultimately it will do away with the screening process completely because it will do away with the faint hope clause.
That is bad enough, but we also go right at the jury system and say to the jury in the bill, “We do not trust you, the jury,” the 12 men and women picked from the area or community where the murder was committed. We do not trust the jury to look at the facts and the individual who is applying and to make a determination based on all of the facts whether the person has rehabilitated himself or herself, although it is almost always himself, to the point where we believe that person should be allowed to apply for parole. We do not trust the jury to make that decision any more. We are taking it away from the jury.
That is what the bill would do. It is a serious undermining of the jury system to which every legislator in this House should be paying very clear and solid respect. It would strip both the judge and the jury of that responsibility. It is shameful that we would pass a bill like this.
Following my own and the Bloc's representations on the justice committee, we had arranged for the head of the Correctional Service of Canada to appear before the committee, because we were told by Juristat and the office of the Minister of Justice that correctional service staff were the only ones who could answer factually some of the questions we had raised.
We arranged for Mr. Don Head to appear before the committee. He came before the committee without anything prepared and took questions, including a series of questions from me and the member from the Bloc. In the course of that questioning, it became clear that the information was not compiled in any way. For instance, he could not tell us how many victims' families had asked to make a victim's statement and he could not tell us the specifics of the recidivism rate. He only had generalities that he could talk a bit about to us. He could not tell us at what ages most people were convicted and most individuals got out of prison.
We could go down the list. There were at least a half dozen very specific points that he confirmed the Correctional Service of Canada could give us answers on. He said to me and the member from the Bloc and the chair of the committee that the information could and would be available by the time we got to clause by clause consideration of the bill, scheduled for November 16. Mr. Head appeared before the committee on November 4. It was very clear that he could do it in that period of time.
The week of November 9 was a break week for the House to commemorate Remembrance Day in our ridings, but we were back on November 16. I asked where the information from the Correctional Service of Canada was so that we could do clause by clause in a meaningful way. I was told it had been sent to our offices.
I have subsequently learned that other members of the committee, both from the Bloc and the Liberal Party, with similar questions about where it was were told the same thing. We all jumped to the conclusion that somehow we had missed that information in our offices, and so we went ahead with clause by clause. The bill went through committee stage and, of course, it is now back in the House for report stage and third reading.
After November 16, I again told the clerk that I did not have the information in my office and asked if it could be sent to my office again. Yesterday morning when I arrived at my office, it was not there. We called again at that point and were advised that in fact it had never been sent either to my office or to anyone on the committee, because it had been sent to the office of the Minister of Public Safety and that it had at least been there by November 16.
That information was never provided to the committee. The committee went ahead with clause by clause without all of that factual information, which was our only source of such information.
Yesterday, I was advised by the Conservative deputy House leader that in fact the minister had that information on his desk and had not seen or approved it. I have to say as a sidebar that he has no right to approve it; this is not a situation where he gets to vet that information. If committees are going to work in the House, they must have access to information without it being censored, deleted or affected in any other way by the decisions of the political masters in our legislature.
I still do not have the information. I had wanted it yesterday, as I had expected to speak on this bill then and to use some of data to try to convince the House to vote against this bill. I still do not have it. I was advised by the Conservative deputy House leader yesterday that I might get it in another week.
We know that if that happens, this bill is going to come to a vote before we ever get the information, and I am certainly not going to be able to use it today in my arguments for why we should defeat this bill. The minister should not have done that.
I want to be very clear after having gone through the blues extensively. When Mr. Head was before the committee, he committed to the member for the Bloc and to me that he would have that information for us by the time we got to clause by clause on November 16.
I pushed him about it again just as he was leaving his seat at committee and the Conservative chair of the committee received a commitment from him that it would be back to the committee, not to the minister. There was no discussion of any of this going to the minister, nor should there be. He said it would be back to the committee by November 16. The blues show that.
Something has to happen, as we cannot allow this to continue. Therefore, I move that:
Bill C-36, An Act to amend the Criminal Code, be not now read a third time but be referred back to the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights for the purpose of reconsidering Clauses 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 with a view to making any amendments which may be called for as a result of information undertaken to be placed before the Committee by departmental officials on November 4th, but which the office of the Minister of Public Safety failed to provide before the Committee considered the Bill at clause-by-clause.
Just to conclude, we cannot—
