Mr. Speaker, let me first thank my colleague from Halifax for her extremely poignant speech, not from the perspective of a technical aspect of a bill but the reality of what it is like to live in a community where a crime that we are talking about, and on which this legislation would have an impact, occurred, and what it means to the community beyond the immediate family of a loved one who lost his or her life. In a very clear way, she has articulated what many of us feel when it comes to mental health, because mental health is such a difficult issue.
In a broader societal context, mental health, for far too long, was something that was pushed into a corner. No one wanted to say out loud that perhaps a loved one, a sister, brother, aunt, uncle, grandparent or parent, may have been suffering from mental illness. It was always the great taboo, “Don't say anything. Say nothing.” There was a stigma attached to it and a great embarrassment for families. As we look at this legislation, we have come a great distance from the day when we did not talk about loved ones who suffered from mental health issues.
No one on this side is suggesting that these acts are not of a magnitude that would horrify us all. All of us would agree that is absolutely true. It is not about saying that if a person is not criminally responsible because of a mental disorder, it would lessen the act. They are horrific acts. For the families of victims who lost their lives, reliving the horrific incident seems to go on and on in some cases. We need to be conscious about how we craft the legislation as it is for only a few people. These acts, thank goodness, rarely occur. Because they occur so rarely, it is that much more difficult to find the balance of how to approach it in law.
I knew a young man many years ago who was schizophrenic. Folks always talk about schizophrenics hearing voices. One day I told him people talked about that. This young man lived in housing with other schizophrenics, where there was support from counsellors and case workers to make sure they took their medications. I knew the young man had suffered from delusions and one day I asked, “When you hear those voices, what do you hear?” Amazingly enough, and I have heard it from other folks because I have been involved with the schizophrenia association for a long time, he said, “It's like 1,000 people standing on the edge of my ear, all screaming at the same time”. He never heard an instruction to do anything, he just heard 1,000 people on the edge of his ear screaming. The only time he got relief was when he slept.
For me, it was a very poignant moment, trying to understand exactly what was happening to that young man. He was about 21 or 22 years old. He does not hear those voices any more. He took his life when he was 23 because those voices would never go away for the rest of his life, and he knew that. He suffered from chronic schizophrenia and he was going to be suffering his entire life. For him, violence was not part of his life, but suffering was.
When we think about this legislation, we should word it in a way that understands schizophrenia because quite often many of the folks who are charged are suffering from it, but we do not then, in turn, point a finger, as the schizophrenia association has said, at all schizophrenics and think that we should avoid them, that they should be put somewhere because they may be a danger to us. We know the reality is that a person would more likely get run over by a bus than be attacked by someone who is schizophrenic.
That is how things might happen to a person, which should never take away from the fact that we are looking at a heinous act and that someone's life is lost.
That is why members have heard from this side, and I hope the Conservatives have heard, that this is a really complicated issue. It is not simplistic. It is about opening a door not knowing what is on the other side and having to deal with it, because it is multi-faceted and multi-layered. The science of mental disorders is ongoing. As therapies and treatments progress and we come to a greater understanding of the diagnosis, we can help folks not get to the place where some of these crimes are perpetrated.
My colleague from Halifax talked about the case just over a year ago. My colleague from British Columbia talked about Pickton and some other cases of a magnitude and scope that is, to use a term I have never used here before, gut-wrenching. When we hear about those cases or read about them in the news, the first thing we feel is ill. It is almost a tangible physical reaction. An individual might be thousands of kilometres away, as many of us were during the incident that happened in the Prairies when the young man was attacked on the bus, or the incident in Halifax a year ago. We may be across the country and not have actual knowledge of the victims or their families, but when we hear about it, we feel our stomachs turn upside down. That is a normal reaction. That is a fair reaction to have initially. However, for us as policy makers, we have to find a way to step back from that first reaction and deal with it. Too often, if we rush in, we may end up with a simplistic response, and there are no simple answers in mental health.
I have had a sense of how mental health works, partly because of some personal experiences around family and from knowing folks who work in it. Members of my family have been psychiatric nurses for a long time. I have been engaged with folks who have mental illnesses for probably going on 40 years now, when I think about my own personal family situation. How do we deal with this very troubling issue that gets pushed aside from time to time, especially in the public health field, which grapples with having enough funding to help the folks who need help? Is there a preventive piece? I am not sure if psychiatrists know if we could have prevented one or two of these incidents from happening through early diagnosis and treatment, constant monitoring, counselling and having a caseworker. We do not know that. Psychiatrists are uncertain as to whether that would happen. Because of that, I would look to the government to say that since we did not do all of that work in advance, this needs to go to committee.
As my colleagues have said earlier, and I know the government heard this, we intend to support the bill to get to second reading, because we want a comprehensive piece that speaks about the victims. They and their families should be paramount in our minds. On this side, we have no less a sense of what happens to the victims than anyone else in this House. No one has a lock on understanding victims. We all get this. I think this is one of those times in the House when we all understand the severity of these situations and what it means to families. However, we want to see legislation coming out of this process that will enable us to do things better than we are doing them now and to do them right.
We should not simply say that we should incarcerate someone because that will be a deterrent. I hate to say it, but someone who is suffering from mental illness would not understand what a deterrent is. Therefore, a longer sentence would not deter anyone.I understand that in sentencing those who have the ability to understand the crimes they have committed, we have sentencing that could perhaps deter. Criminologists can have that debate. I am not a criminologist. I will leave it for those experts to decide. However, I think we can all agree that those who would be found not criminally responsible would never know that there was a deterrent. In fact, the reason they are not criminally responsible is that they do not actually know that they have committed a crime and would therefore hardly see the deterrent as something in the way of their committing a crime.
We need to sit down and take the time. If the bill needs to be extended in committee, I think this House would agree to extend the time to study it. The bill needs to be looked at in a holistic way, from many perspectives. Good amendments should be welcomed by the government. This is a piece of legislation we should get right. When it is enacted, we should all feel good that we have done the right thing and have helped victims, because that is part of what I think this legislation should do.
This legislation should enable victims to understand that we as individuals have a great outpouring of emotion toward them. We cannot understand their anguish and hurt, because we have not suffered as such ourselves. As my colleague for Halifax quite clearly articulated, a whole community can grieve in a profound way because of the victims. We can all feel that and have a sense of standing with them and helping them rebuild after what has happened to a family member. At the same time, we understand our obligation to the broader society when it comes to the law, which is never easy to do, and I do not pretend that it is.
I know that we and the other side from time to time go back and forth about who is tougher. This is not an issue of who is tougher but of whether we can get the legislation right because of the complexity of someone being declared not criminally responsible because of a mental disorder. It is such a difficult issue. We all need to understand and be supportive, otherwise, when it comes to the broader community, there will be those who will say that the legislation either goes too far one way or does not support victims on the other side. I am hearing from all my colleagues here that this is not what we want to have happen. What we want is legislation that tells victims that we understand how they feel.
At the same time, in a legal way, we have to get it right when it comes to persons being tried and not convicted, because the reality is that they would neither be convicted nor acquitted; they would be found not criminally responsible. For those of us who are not lawyers, what does that mean exactly? Does it mean that they are neither here nor there, because they are deemed to be not criminally responsible? That is why this needs to be looked at so clearly.
We have talked about what the numbers are. The Schizophrenia Society of Canada has told us that 0.001% of those who have been charged with Criminal Code violations are deemed not criminally responsible by way of mental disorder. By now writing a law for such a small number, are we casting the net too wide? This number has been put out there a couple of times.
When people are deemed to be not criminally responsible, and they then receive a great deal of treatment while still under some form of incarceration, the rate of recidivism is much lower than it is for the general population in the criminal system in this country. It is anywhere from 2.5% to 7.5%, whereas the rate for the criminals in the regular system is 41% to 44%, which points out that those who are treated with the appropriate treatment are less likely to reoffend.
This week, when the Canadian Police Association was in town, I had the great joy of talking to a number of officers from my region. One of them was talking to me about mental health and what happens when officers come in contact with folks who have mental health issues. They have not committed or perpetrated crimes like this. Quite often it is public disorderliness. They may be in the middle of the street holding up traffic. Usually they have had a psychotic episode and they are off their meds for a while and need to be taken to the hospital. The officer was saying that the police need professionals to deal with those folks, because the officers are not the appropriate people. There has to be a level of expertise from professionals to help with folks who are more of a danger to themselves than to anyone else. What he pointed out to me was that it is not necessarily the police department that should have a major involvement inside the mental health system. It should be mental health professionals.
That is where the link has to be. I do not think we see that in this legislation. When we talk about the justice system, policing, mental health professionals and the health system, where do they intersect to help prevent these crimes in the first place? We need to find a way to work on that system to determine how we then deal with those folks in an appropriate manner. I was grateful for that conversation, because in my mind, it really crystallized for me where it is we should head with this piece of legislation.
We need to look to all of those folks who are already telling us that they want to work with the committee. They want to come forward and help by offering good, sound advice. They do not want to tear the legislation apart and throw it away; they want to help improve it and make it a good piece of legislation that truly works. If at committee the government would look for those answers and advice from those folks, even if they may not always have the answers people are looking for, it may find that when we are finished writing this legislation, we will be able to say that we have done the right thing for the victims, who are first and foremost in our minds.
As my colleague from Halifax pointed out, a year later the victim, through his community and his family, is still reaching out saying that we need to find a sound solution to the problem, not rush to any sort of judgment that ends up with legislation that would not help but might hinder.
I am not saying the legislation in its present form would, but we certainly want to ensure it works for all parties involved and actually gets through the justice system in a way that would make it a better place for it to do the work it needs to do.
As I said at the very beginning, ultimately the victims have to be paramount in minds of members. I know they are in ours.
