Madam Speaker, I am happy to explain the position I shared with my NDP caucus colleagues as public safety critic, although “happy” is not the right word considering the sensitive and tragic nature of this bill.
Let me just thank the member for St. Albert—Edmonton for sponsoring the bill in the House.
Before I go any further, I think the most important thing that needs to be said on this matter is that all of us in this House, and certainly I speak on behalf of the NDP caucus, offer our thoughts and prayers to the Wynn family in the tragedy of the murder of this police officer who died in the line of duty defending us. That is certainly a sacrifice that we all recognize and is important to be mindful of when we debate the bill.
I also want to say, while I will share some of the concerns we have with the bill, and some are similar to the government's concerns, we will nonetheless support it at second reading. We feel that the intent is important enough and good enough that we need to at least hear from experts in committee and have that debate and discussion and get a chance to go through some of the issues that we do see in the bill.
It is important, given the tragedy that led to the presentation of this bill, both in this Parliament and by my colleague's predecessor in the last Parliament, that we give it a fulsome debate through the committee process. That is where we are at on that particular point right now.
I would like to take a moment to talk about each of the changes this bill makes. Although this is unusual for me, I am going to take the time to read them, because I think it is important to really understand them.
First, the bill adds two grounds to justify detention in custody when the justice of the peace is considering the judicial interim release of an offender. The two grounds are as follows: that the offender failed to appear in court when required to do so in the past; and that the offender has been previously convicted of a criminal offence or has been charged with and is awaiting trial for another offence.
The other aspect of the bill has to do with the authority and responsibilities of the crown. At present, the crown has the discretionary power to provide any evidence it considers legitimate in the case. However, the changes brought about by this bill require the crown to lead evidence as part of the bail application hearing proceedings.
We are talking here about establishing that the accused has previously been convicted of a criminal offence or has been charged with and is awaiting trial for another criminal offence. We are talking about proving that the accused has previously committed an offence under section 145, including escape, being at large without excuse, failure to attend court, or failure to comply with a condition. The circumstances of the alleged offence, particularly the probability of conviction of the accused, must be proven, and finally, it must also be proven that the accused has failed to appear in court when required to do so.
The parliamentary secretary mentioned that obtaining the necessary information could be challenging. My colleague from St. Albert—Edmonton seems to think that such information is readily available, and it would be nice if that were the case. Unfortunately, that is not what the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police told the committee.
David Truax, Superintendent at the Ontario Provincial Police and member of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, told the Senate committee that he supported the bill, but he also had concerns about the burden to send information being placed on the judicial system and police forces, given that some jurisdictions may find it heavier to bear than others. However, we must also consider the various provincial jurisdictions, from one province to another, because the documentation currently available in CPIC is clearly inadequate.
When we look at this mechanism, we have to ask ourselves: are we jeopardizing public safety by creating a situation where the burden on the judicial system might lead to the adjournment of proceedings and result in the release of an accused who, even before such a bill was passed, would have been detained? Are we not in a way undermining the bill's very objectives? That is a question we have to ask ourselves, something we would like to get into further in committee.
The other point, and it is a key point when it comes to judicial proceedings and our criminal justice system, is the challenge we have of the over-representation of populations in Canada. We know that it is a very serious issue, one that we discuss regularly at the public safety committee. The issue is the over-representation of aboriginal people in our federal penitentiaries.
The reason I raise that point is because it was a point raised by Senator Sinclair during the debate on this bill. He said that he was concerned that while this bill would certainly be some common sense legislation, when we look at the tragedy around the murder of Constable Wynn, we have to ask ourselves whether this bill would lead to more nefarious effects and impacts on less dangerous offenders who should not necessarily be kept in custody.
Is this going to lead to the continuing issue of the over-representation of certain populations, in particular the aboriginal population, in Canada? It is certainly something that we have to ask ourselves, and is a point that we hope to raise at committee to get a better understanding of the impact.
An important question comes to mind when trying to better understand this impact. It is easy to come to the conclusion that this bill could have prevented the tragedy that occurred in the case of Constable Wynn. Our great challenge is to make political decisions based on the facts and data available. In this specific case, this bill could be an easy solution, but generally speaking, things get complicated given the dearth of statistical information on detention in custody and crimes committed by people who are not subject to detention in custody.
I have an interesting example. I read a U.S. report that can nevertheless inform this debate.
The title is, “Assessing Pretrial Risk without a Defendant Interview”.
The report was published by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. I would like to read an excerpt from this report that I find particularly interesting.
It says, “Although the use of pretrial risk assessments has increased in recent years, the proportion of jurisdictions”, in this case in the United States, “employing these instruments remains low, and is estimated to be no more than 10%.” This is in part because they are costly and time-consuming.
Once again, this is an American example, but it does apply to Canada. When we read this report, we see that the challenge is to be able to measure the crime rate or the crimes committed by accused persons who are released after such proceedings. Again, I do not have the answer. It is a question that we are asking and that we would like to have answered in committee.
The tragedy of Constable Wynn, I can only imagine. I do not yet have kids. I want to have kids one day. It is heartbreaking and mind-boggling to imagine what it must be like for the late constable's family to go through these circumstances and to think they could be avoidable.
Given the possibility these could be avoidable, we feel it is important that we at least do our due diligence and support the bill at second reading, bring it to committee, and study it with the caveat that we do have some concerns. Some of them I raised in my speech, and others the parliamentary secretary raised. We need to ask those questions and make sure that when we finish this legislative process, we will know that we did not let an opportunity to avoid that kind of tragedy go by without proper study.
