Mr. Speaker, I rise to address some comments to Bill C-35, a government bill that at its essence introduces the use of the reverse onus to a number of new offences under the Criminal Code and provides a framework within which that reverse onus would be applied in our courts.
Bill C-35 is typical of the government's agenda. It has consistently presented short, individual issue bills to the House that have tied up debate in the House quite extensively. This certainly has tied up the justice committee very extensively and has put us way behind in coping with those bills.
It was not necessary. This is all about a political and ideologically driven agenda of the government. If it were really serious about dealing with crime and these particular issues of crime, in this case gun related ones, we could have been moving much more quickly, effectively and efficiently by having a number of these bills combined into an omnibus bill.
I am happy to say that I have carried on some discussions with the new Minister of Justice. I am hoping that we may in fact get a more positive response from him than has been reflected by his predecessor or by the government to this point, so that Canadians can have assurances that gun crimes and other crimes, serious ones in particular, are being dealt with as effectively as possible by the House and by the government, and that the criminal justice system will serve them to its absolutely peak of efficiency.
That is not the case with the government, because to a great extent, and there are some elements in the bill that I think reflect it, the government really is not serious about getting tough on crime. What it really is serious about is using the misfortune of so many victims of crime for its own political ends: to get elected and to try to form a majority government. That is really what this is about. That, quite frankly, is to the government's shame.
Having said that, I note that this bill, like so many others that have been introduced, has some basically solid elements to it, but again like so many, our position on it is that the government may have very well strayed over into the extreme, which it has a very strong tendency to do. I think the government is repeating that here.
Because I think the bill is fixable in committee, even though the government is sending it to a legislative committee rather than the justice committee, I believe it can be amended to bring it into line and to make it more effective and more usable.
I think it is important to make this point, and again, this is to perhaps repudiate some of the sales job that has gone on from that party and the government around this particular bill. The point needs to be very clearly made because oftentimes I hear members of the Conservative Party who do not really understand our existing law trying to portray this new one as covering fields that have already been taken care of.
The reverse onus already applies in the situation whereby an individual accused has been charged with an indictable offence and released on bail and then is charged again. On the second time, the reverse onus applies to that, so they are not released on a second offence unless they can establish to the satisfaction of the court that they are not a safety concern for society as a whole. That is already in our existing law, as is the reverse onus in a number of other types of crimes. Organized crime, terrorism and certain drug trafficking, drug smuggling and drug producing offences all have the reverse onus already applied.
We could go on. A number of them are applicable at this point, as are some of the more serious ones such as murder, treason and war crimes. All of these have reverse onus already applicable. What this bill is proposing to do is to extend it to more serious offences. I believe the government's number was eight offences.
Again, the government may very well have crossed over the line on some of these. Our courts, all the way to the Supreme Court, have made it quite clear that reverse onus can be used in appropriate circumstances. Where it has been tested up to this point, the courts have supported its use in the sections of the code that I have already mentioned. The government may have crossed the line with some of these, so it will be important at the committee stage to take evidence to try to ascertain whether the government, as it has so often in the past, has taken an extreme position and whether we have to bring it back somewhat from that.
However, certainly there are areas in which we do need to use the reverse onus more extensively than we have up to this point, so we will be supporting the bill with the expectation that at committee we will be able to make the proper amendments.
The other thing that I think is really important to appreciate is the fact that the whole bill of course is open to an attack under the charter, so we have to be very careful with regard to the way it is drafted. There is some wording that is unusual, let me put it that way, wording that I have not seen in the Criminal Code in the past at any time. There may very well have to be some amendments made to make sure that it is not so general and so vague that it will be subject to an attack under the charter and therefore struck down. There may be amendments along those lines. I can see a couple of areas where that is probably going to be necessary in the course of the work that the committee will do.
There is another major point, and again I think it is to the shame of the Conservative Party, which constantly brings forward this kind of legislation without understanding, or perhaps caring, about the circumstances. In this bill, there are going to be some consequences in terms of additional pressure on our courts, on our police officers because of the additional time they will probably end up spending in court testifying, and certainly on our prosecutors and our judiciary.
In all of those cases, the costs of those additional judges, the extra courtrooms, the prosecutors and, in a number of cases, the costs of the defence counsel through the legal aid systems in the provinces, are borne by the provinces. Up to this point in the roughly one year that this government has been in place and has been introducing these bills, we have seen a total disregard on the part of the government to take into account those consequences.
We have not seen any analysis in the previous bills that we have had before the justice committee. Whatever analysis we had on costs was drawn out by the opposition parties. I will take some particular credit for that, but all of us have looked at it and have drawn some of it out so that we understand the consequences of passing this legislation.
Because the analysis has not been done, there have been no arrangements made by this federal government to in effect subsidize or in any way financially assist the provinces in meeting these cost commitments that we impose upon them. That of course is having a deleterious effect on the relationship between the provinces and the federal government, as we have seen in a number of other areas in the past when we as a federal legislature pass laws that commit the provinces to spending money and provide no assistance for them to do that.
I have to say with regard to costs that my biggest concern is the number of additional incarcerations. We have to expect that this will happen. It is an inevitable consequence of this bill and is what the bill is intended to do. There will be additional incarcerations and those incarcerations will be in institutions that are owned and operated by the provinces.
We have no idea of how many there will be. We attempted to see if the minister had any sense of how many when he was addressing the House this morning. As is so typical, the government has not done the analysis. That will have to come out of the work the committee does. This is probably where the major cost is going to be. It is a cost that is borne entirely by the provinces. At this point, the provinces will have no idea of how much that is going to be because the analysis has not been done at the federal level.
There is another point, though, with regard to that. We know from evidence before committee that all of our provincial institutions in every province, without exception, is either at capacity or has an overcapacity for most of the institutions that house alleged criminals pending their trials. They are all overcrowded or at best are at capacity. By adding additional bodies to those institutions as part of the incarceration group, we will be taxing the facilities beyond their ability to respond.
That is significant in two ways. A judge looking at that situation will be much more prone to say that he or she is going to release the person, that the person may in fact be a danger to society but the judge is going to release him or her because there is really no capacity to deal with the person. The provinces have not been able to afford to expand the physical plants, says the judge, so he or she is going to release the person simply because of that.
Or, what is much more common, and which causes one of these unintended consequences that the government never thinks about, is that we are going to have the situation whereby a person is ultimately either pleading guilty or is convicted and is before the court during sentencing after conviction saying that he or she had to spend six months, a year and maybe even longer in some cases in a facility that was totally inadequate by Canadian standards. We know that is going on right now. Those convicted persons are given extra credit for that time.
If the sentence is for five years, the court may very well say that the person has already spent a year incarcerated so the court is going to give credit for that. Plus, as a bonus, because the incarceration was so bad and the circumstances were so bad and the system is so poor, the court may give the person credit for another year or perhaps even more. That is beginning to happen. It is quite common to get two for one credits, but now the arguments are coming for three to one credits.
If we build this legal infrastructure without taking that into account and providing the financial resources to the provinces to provide adequate housing for people who are accused of crimes, that is going to be the consequence. Thus, at the end of the day, we are going to have people getting out of our federal institutions--that is where they end up if the sentence is for more than two years--at a much faster rate, which is the complete opposite of the intention of the government, certainly, and I think of most of us who are looking at this bill and at what we want for the criminal justice system.
We are in the situation where that needs to be looked at by committee. The bill is now going to a special legislative committee. This is obviously another attempt by the government to speed up the process of bills going through. It would be much faster if the government used my suggestion, which I have made repeatedly, of using the omnibus bill approach, but even there the reality is that the legislative committee cannot sit at the same time as the justice committee.
Again, I do not know if either the Minister of Justice or the House leader appreciate this, but the legislative committee cannot sit at the same time as the justice committee because it is a justice bill. We will be scrambling to try to find slots of time whereby those of us who are sitting on that committee, and I am assuming I will be one of them, will be able to fit it into our schedules. It probably is not going to save any time. It is going to be a slower process in many respects than if the bill had been sent to the justice committee.
I would point out again that this was done without consultation with the opposition parties. Again, this is a reflection of a course of conduct of just how serious the government is with regard to dealing with crime in this country.
At the end of the day, as a party we will be supporting this bill at second reading to go to committee, but at committee we will be expecting in some cases minor amendments and in other cases some fairly serious amendments to ensure that this does comply with our existing criminal justice system standards, the charter in particular, and also to get more background material so we fully understand the consequences of this legislation.
