Joe Comartin

[Omar Khadr, November 23rd, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, for more than five years, Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen, has been languishing in the U.S. military prison camp at Guantanamo Bay. He was captured and detained at the age of 15 and remains the only detainee from a western country not to be repatriated.

The United Nations has launched a formal protest to the U.S. over Mr. Khadr's continued detainment. Members of the European Union and the international community have spoken out on his detention, and Mr. Khadr's military lawyers have gone to Britain to help secure his release to Canada.

All the while the Government of Canada has refused to involve itself. We have a responsibility as a government to protect our citizens, whether they are here in Canada or in other countries. However ,we see this government reversing the decades-long policy of seeking clemency for Canadians facing the death penalty, failing to make representations on behalf of Canadians detained abroad, and allowing children to languish in solitary confinement in a U.S. military prison. It begs the question: Why?

[Tackling Violent Crime Act, November 23rd, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I know the member for West Nova was not on the committee as this went through. I do not know if he knows much of the history of that part of the bill, which deals with the dangerous offender designation. When the bill was originally introduced as Bill C-27, the spokespersons for his party spoke very strongly against it, along the same lines of what our amendment intends to do, which is to ensure it complies with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Then at committee that same spokesperson, the member for Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine, heard the same evidence I heard from all the experts, all the people with legal backgrounds, with the exception of justice officials and the minister, that this would not pass muster as far as the standard set by the charter.

Is his party's unwillingness to support the amendment motivated entirely by the fact that this is a confidence motion or is there some other reason why it is opposed to it?

[Tackling Violent Crime Act, November 23rd, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, in terms of my comment, we do not have a great relationship with the Senate. I do not know if the Minister of Justice appreciates that. It is rather difficult for us to pick up the phone and call the senators since we do not talk to them. We just want to abolish them.

With regard to the reverse onus section, without exception in committee, except for the minister himself, every witness who came before the committee who had any legal expertise at all made it very clear that the reverse onus section would not survive a charter challenge. We did not have one person tell us otherwise.

I am asking the minister on what basis he is saying this other than his own opinion. I respect his opinion. He and I are graduates of the same law school, the best law school in the country, at the University of Windsor. I respect his opinion, but I think that on this one he is wrong. I am wondering if he has any other opinion from a constitutional or charter of rights expert who says this will survive a constitutional challenge.

[Tackling Violent Crime Act, November 23rd, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, that is just too simplistic. I do know the member is from Sherwood Park, as my son is living in his riding. I have a great deal of respect for him but his analysis is too simplistic. Our courts have made it clear that this section is to be used rarely because of its consequences.

I want to give one example of the deficit in this bill. A provision in the bill says that a person must have been convicted of three offences for which the person must have received more than two years in prison. One of the offences that is included in the list in Bill C-2 is assault causing bodily harm. That can be a fairly minor assault. I do not want to take away from it because any assault, obviously, is extremely offensive to the individual victim, and I recognize that, but we get situations where people get into bar room fights or disputes with their neighbours and there is an injury. It may be a fairly minor one such as a black eye or bruising to the face and that kind of thing.

Usually, because the person has an alcohol or drug problem, they will have a series of these assault charges and, ultimately, the judge will send the person to prison for more than two years, then a second time and then a third time, but these people are not dangerous offenders. They are really petty criminals. There is a real exposure within these amendments being proposed in Bill C-2 that will result in a large number of people ending up going through these designations and having to prove why they should not go in. That is not the way the system works and it is not the way the system should work.

[Tackling Violent Crime Act, November 23rd, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I am always proud to say that our criminal justice system is as good as any in the world and maybe the best in the world. However, from a number of studies, including a book that was published by one of the professors at the University of Windsor law school, the reality is that discrimination enters into our system. It is systemic. It is not overt. It is subtle but it creeps into the system.

I will not suggest, by any means, that all cases are like this, but what happens is that the police, prosecutors and, yes, the judiciary on some occasions come with a hidden bias and the process starts. Unfortunately, because of the general economic status in which our first nations find themselves, they end up being disproportionately found.

All of the experts, psychologists and psychiatrists with whom I have spoken have absolutely rejected the suggestion that the ratio of serious violent offenders is any greater within the aboriginal population than it is within the general population. We saw that in the Callow case in Toronto. The prosecutors for the province of Ontario in that case should have brought a dangerous offender application against him and they did not.

We can go through any number of cases and ask why they did not. That is really where the solution is to the use of this, not in trying to force individuals with the reverse onus to show why they should not be held. There is that subtle discrimination and so we end up with that kind of a statistic.

[Tackling Violent Crime Act, November 23rd, 2007]

moved:

Motion No. 2

That Bill C-2 be amended by deleting Clause 42.

Mr. Speaker, thank you for the ruling on this amendment indicating that it is within the proper scope of the rules and admissible.

The amendment deals with the specific section of a very large bill, an omnibus crime bill, and specifically with that part of the bill that deals with the dangerous offender designation in the Criminal Code.

Just quickly, the balance of Bill C-2 encompasses five separate pieces of legislation that were before this House in the previous parliamentary session. The dangerous offender section at that time was Bill C-27. It has now been incorporated into Bill C-2.

We had commenced work on that in a special legislative committee prior to prorogation. The prorogation by the government of course ended that bill, as it did the other four, three of which by the way were in the Senate, and the fourth one was out of committee at report stage in the House.

So now, because of what I think is a very foolish decision but a very political decision on the part of government, we are having to go back through all of those four bills and we have wasted a significant amount of time.

The government is historically very proud to stand in this House and accuse the opposition parties of delay. Of course, what has happened here has been entirely on its desk and it is something of which the Conservatives should be ashamed.

To come back to Bill C-27, as it was then and now that part of Bill C-2, the dangerous offender section of the Criminal Code has a history going back in this country to 1978 at which time it was incorporated.

I do not think there is any disagreement about this no matter which political party one belongs to, that there are individuals in our society that we are not able to cope with in terms of rehabilitating them. They commit serious, oftentimes heinous, violent crimes against other residents of Canada. When we use our traditional attempts to deal with them by way of prison terms, oftentimes psychiatric or psychological treatment programs, they are not successful.

Our psychiatrists, our psychologists and our best experts admit there is a very small number of individuals that we simply, as a society in terms of our psychological and psychiatric treatment modalities, are not able to treat and rehabilitate to the point where they are no longer a risk to society once released from our prisons. The dangerous offender section was introduced into the Criminal Code to deal specifically with those individuals.

Based on some very good research from the Library of Parliament, since 1978 we have had 384 individuals, up until the spring of 2005 so it is a bit more now, all male, designated as dangerous offenders. It is interesting to note that of those 384, 333 as of April 2005 were still in custody, still in prison. Only 18 had been released and were on parole. The balance of approximately 33 died in prison. I think this is the point that we need to recognize.

This designation, unlike a conviction for first degree murder and a life sentence, is in fact a life sentence in the 90 percentile of the cases. These individuals never get out. It is a recognition that we are not capable of dealing with them. They stay in custody, in prisons, for the balance of their lives and literally, as I have said, die in prison. That is what we are dealing with when we are dealing with a dangerous offender designation.

As I indicated earlier, there are no women who have been designated, up until April 2005. There are a couple of applications outstanding against women currently.

One of the other points that I would make that comes out of the research done by the library is that a full one-fifth, 20%, of all the individual criminals who have been designated are from the aboriginal population, from our first nations.

There is no question, and we see this more when we look at statistics in the United States, that subgroups within our society often times are individuals who are more targeted and receive greater punishment.

I am not going to suggest for a minute that the designations in those cases were inappropriate; they may or may not have been. However, that is the reality, given that our aboriginal population in this country is roughly 3% of the population but slightly over 20% are designated as dangerous offenders.

We know that this is a section of the Criminal Code that we would use, obviously, very sparingly. The issue of the constitutionality of this section has been to the Supreme Court on a number of occasions and reviewed also by a number of our appeal courts at the provincial level.

The message that comes out very clearly is that it is to be used sparingly, that it is to be used with extreme caution, that the individuals who are confronted with this are to be given the greatest amount of doubt as to the usage against them because of the consequences.

I want to repeat that the consequences in more than 90% of the cases are that these individuals, once designated as dangerous offenders, will stay in prison for the balance of their life. They will never get out.

Faced with that, if we look now at the bill that is before us, Bill C-2, the government has introduced into clause 42 a provision for a reverse onus. For those in the public who do not have a law degree and do not fully appreciate this, that is saying, under these circumstances, to the individual criminals, “If you meet this criteria, you have to prove to the judge who is hearing the case for the designation of dangerous offender why you should not be held in custody in prison until the rest of your life”. That is really what they will have to do.

That flies in the face of the charter. This section will not survive a charter challenge. Under those circumstance, and Mr. Speaker, I see you signalling that I have only a minute left. I thought these were 20-minute sessions. No. That is unfortunate because I had a lot more that I wanted to say.

My amendment, pure and simple, would delete the reverse onus from this bill because it would not survive a charter challenge. We are going to have tremendous litigation on this and at the end of the day one of our superior courts, or even the Supreme Court of Canada, will strike this section down. The amendment would take care of that right now and we could save all that trouble.

[Youth Criminal Justice Act, November 21st, 2007]

I am not quite sure, Mr. Speaker, but I think the member was addressing the other bill that is coming tomorrow or the next day on the drug issue.

There is no question that the use of diversion, the use of restorative justice and the use of treatment facilities have a higher rate of success than simply incarcerating people and throwing the key away. The ratio of incarceration in the United States--

[Youth Criminal Justice Act, November 21st, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, just to be blunt, the member is wrong.

We have dropped the youth crime rate in this country over the last 20 years by roughly 12% to 15%. The system as it is now has had that effect. That moved away from exactly the kind of system where we used incarceration much more extensively. It was a training ground for people to come out better criminals than when they went in.

The member is wrong when he says that it is not working. He is also wrong when he says that the youth have serious knowledge. We can find, in any community, particularly in our big cities, the odd individual who will say that he or she will be treated more leniently because he or she is a youth and not an adult. That knowledge is in a very small group and usually within the gangs.

They know that but how do we deal with it? We do in fact. People can be incarcerated under the Youth Criminal Justice Act for up to 10 years. We do have the penalties in those more extreme cases and our courts are using them. The problem is not there.

The problem is that we do not have enough police officers. The government has not complied with its promise to the Canadian people to put 2,500 more police officers on the streets. It has not put one new police officer on the street. If the government had done that, it probably would have driven down the youth crime rate, especially the serious, violent ones involving gangs.

[Youth Criminal Justice Act, November 21st, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to expand a bit more on the use of deterrence and denunciation. They just simply do not have any place in the framework of this act or how we deal with youth. As I have repeated now about a half dozen times, deterrence does not work. It is of absolutely no use for youth crime.

The denunciation allows the court to, in effect, say that the crime was so heinous that it will add some more time on. It is really not necessary, especially when we look at what the principle is here, which is to ensure the individual, hopefully before he or she turns into an adult, will be rehabilitated.

It is all about getting proper treatment, not about having youth spending more time in custody. Many of these cases involve drug abuse, alcohol abuse and substance abuse generally, or serious mental health problems that have not been captured when the person was younger and perhaps, as a society, we would have been able to deal with it much more easily.

I have one final point. With regard to the point that was made earlier today by the member from the Liberal Party on what came out of the Nunn report on this need to change the sentencing provisions in the Youth Justice Act that would incorporate the concept for a judge to take into account sentencing with regard to the principle of protecting society, that is very much one of the amendments I would like to be able to support when it gets to committee.

[Youth Criminal Justice Act, November 21st, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, if there has been any polarization on this issue, it certainly has not come from my party, but much more from the Conservatives.

I have two quick answers. The bill does not do anything at all to add a tool to the toolbox of our police or our judges. Deterrence does not work, particularly in youth crime, so why put something in that will not work?

In terms of the ability of the people who work in the system with regard to restorative justice and those methodologies which underline, to a great degree, the act as it is now, the chief of police of this city would say to the member that restorative justice can in fact work in every case. That has been his experience, even in serious, violent crime.

I want to make a final point with regard to this. There is not an overall increase in youth crime in this country. There is in a very small area. It is a very significant and troubling area, but the answer to that is better enforcement.

With regard to the $22 million that the member said would be spent, when the Minister of Public Safety and the Minister of Justice were in front of committee about a year ago, shortly after the Conservative government was elected, they promised to spend $10 million. They had no idea where they would spend it but they had begun to spend a little bit of it at that point.

However, the analysis that my party did in advance of the 2006 election, speaking to the people who were working in the field, including the police, criminal justice experts, people working in restorative justice and in corrections, was that we needed $100 million a year. In our platform we said that was the amount we needed to spend if we were to have meaningful programs.