Mr. Speaker, I represent the inner city of Winnipeg. Winnipeg Centre is the riding name and it represents the core area of the inner city. Like many of our major urban centres, it suffers from some of the stagnation that has occurred in many of our large urban centres. We have allowed our city centres to deteriorate to the point where some people even use the analogy that we have created a doughnut shaped city and left the inner city with a great deal of social and economic problems.
When I canvass the good people in my riding of Winnipeg Centre, the overwhelming number one, top of mind issue for them is crime and safety. It outstrips health care by four to one. It outstrips tax cuts by five or even six to one. Waiting times in hospitals are not the number one issue of the people I represent. To a person, man, woman and child, they cite safety, crime, violence in the streets issues.
I am happy to have this opportunity to join in the debate on Bill C-9 today so that I can share some of my views on this subject. It would be irresponsible of me not to take part in this debate on the number one issue of the people I represent.
Let us be clear. Many of the MPs who have taken part in the debate have expanded what the real subject matter is. As we are all wont to do sometimes, they have deviated somewhat from the actual content of Bill C-9 which deals with conditional sentencing. I have heard members talk about minimum sentences, about any number of criminal justice issues in the context of this debate, but what we are really talking about is quite narrow. It is about reducing the options for the criminal justice system to use conditional sentencing in a series of non-violent crimes.
The government has not made its case very well today. I listened to the Minister of Justice. I listened to the government House leader and a number of other speakers for the Conservative Party. They argued that there is rampant abuse of these provisions of the Criminal Code and that too many judges are giving conditional sentences and no jail time to violent offenders.
Yes, we know there have been isolated incidents, but no one has been able to tell us how many. No one has been able to tell us the extent of the problem, if it is a truly rampant problem that warrants this legislative intervention, or if it is isolated incidents that we all wish would not happen. I have not heard anyone make the argument that we should do away with the idea of conditional sentencing altogether. No one has said that, but they have said that for crimes of violence, crimes with a weapon, et cetera, no one should be spared doing some jail time and that the conditional sentencing option should not be used in those circumstances. That is the status quo.
Judges are not supposed to bypass the sentencing system and then use conditional sentencing in a case where there are victims of violent crime or major crimes. If it has happened from time to time, I agree that it should be addressed. The people in my riding would agree as well. But we should keep in mind the empirical evidence does not bear out that tougher sentences for crime equals less crime. I wish it were true because frankly, we could solve our crime and social problems a lot more readily if it were as simple as giving people longer sentences, throwing away the key as it were. We have to look at the facts. We are duty bound. We have an obligation to come from an informed stance here.
The fact is that the United States has the highest rate of incarceration of any country in the world. Roughly 760 per 100,000 Americans are locked up in prison. Canada is the second highest. We incarcerate more than any other country in the free world of developed nations, except one, the United States, at about 160 per 100,000 people. It is less than one-third of the rate of incarceration in the United States. Most of western Europe incarcerates people at a rate of less than 100 per 100,000, which is far lower than Canada's incarceration rate.
One would think that the United States, in locking up so many people, would have the safest streets in the country, but the inverse is true. I do not want to be simplistic; there are many contributing factors, but the empirical evidence, the facts and statistics, tell us that the United States has more dangerous streets, more crime and more violence, whether it is property crime, physical assaults or armed robberies. The figures are way off the charts in terms of being greater than our figures and certainly greater than those of western Europe.
If I could go back to my riding and say that we can make our streets safer by simply tearing up this conditional sentencing option and putting more people in jail for a longer period of time, I would do it. I would vote for it today. But I cannot in all good conscience say that because it simply is not true.
We started this very important debate based on misinformation, based on the impression people get from a few sensational headlines where, granted, the conditional sentencing option should not have been used. That concerns me because we do not make good law when it comes from a stance of misinformation.
There is one good idea I would like to put forward as an option and which I hope members of Parliament would consider. It appeared in the last Parliament in the form of a private member's bill by a member from the Bloc Québécois whose name I can mention as he is no longer a member, Richard Marceau. His idea was that one way to reduce the incidence of crime is to cut off the profitability of crime. This made common sense.
In fact, I am proud to say that the province of Manitoba adopted such a law recently. The proceeds of crime can be seized if the individual cannot prove that the property, let us say, a luxury car, was purchased with legitimate earnings. In other words, if the police and the courts have reason to believe that a luxury home of a drug dealer was purchased by ill-gotten gains, that property can be seized and sold and the proceeds realized from that property can go toward putting more police on the streets. That is a good idea. That is a radical innovation which I think we would have benefited from if we had given it more consideration in the last Parliament.
This practice has already been realized and the last figure I saw was $650,000 in its first year of activity. There were plenty of examples where the police knew full well that certain people had no visible means of income and yet they had luxury homes, luxury cars in the driveway, boats and motorcycles, all believed to be ill-gotten gains. Under this new law the police can seize that property. It is an excellent idea and I would like to expand on that further given the opportunity in some other debate in the House. Perhaps I will reintroduce that private member's bill.
I should back up and start with the history of the conditional sentencing amendment that we are debating in Bill C-9. This is a relatively new concept. Maybe one of the reasons we are still struggling with it as members of Parliament and within the criminal justice system is that it has been an aspect of our justice system for a little over nine years.
At the time it was introduced, there was a clear objective on the part of the government of the day to reduce our prison population. Let us not make any bones about it. That was a stated goal. First, the results of locking people up are not anything to write home about and second, it is a very costly option. Keeping people in prison is no bargain.
Conditional sentencing was used fairly slowly for the first couple of years. In fact, in the total nine years of experience, only about 15,000 people have been sentenced by this conditional sentencing process. That means that many fewer people were being incarcerated and it means that if we pass Bill C-9, we can expect about that many people will be going into our prisons in the next couple of years.
I come from the province of Manitoba and the question comes to mind of who is going to pay for these prisons, because individuals receiving sentences of two years less a day go into the provincial prison system and those receiving sentences of two years plus a day go into federal institutions. In most cases, because of the nature of the crimes that these conditional sentences would apply to, the sentence would be in the former category, the provincial prison system.
As for Manitoba's share and just doing some mathematics here, with roughly 8% of the population, Manitoba could be looking at 1,200 to 1,500 prisoners that it would have to lock up and house. I know that our jails are bursting at the seams already. I do not know where we are going to get the help for this. This sort of takes us down the road of the United States, which is incarcerating so many people that it has actually privatized its jail system.
The United States has actually gone to outside contractors to build the prisons, staff them and even provide programs and services to the inmates. This has become quite a burgeoning industry in the United States, but I do not think many Canadians would have an appetite for going in that direction. However, I can also say that the province of Manitoba is not going to be too excited about building three or even four new institutions to house all these extra prisoners.
A bill brought forward by the former government toward the end of the last Parliament dealt with conditional sentencing. There was a recognition that some fine tuning or adjustments would be beneficial. That bill attempted to address some of the concerns and it reflected to some degree a consensus that had been building among all four parties. Had it moved into second reading and not died on the order paper as a result of the election call, I think we would have seen some unanimity in going in that direction.
What we are faced with today under Bill C-9, put forward by the new Conservative government, takes us much further in that 42 sections of the Criminal Code have maximum terms of 10 years and more where conditional sentences could no longer be used. Our party is having difficulty with the fact that a number of these sections are for crimes that are not at all of a violent nature. We have not heard any speakers in the House today say that we should do away with conditional sentencing altogether, nor have we heard anybody advocate that we should give conditional sentences for a crime of a violent nature.
Many of these crimes we are dealing with are not violent crimes. Many of them are property crimes. Many of them are crimes of nuisance, which I am no stranger to, living in the inner city core of a major city as I do. I know how irritating many of these property crimes can be.
The first one on the list of crimes that are not of a violent nature, that are crimes of a property nature, is theft over $5,000. I ask members to consider an individual breaking into a house and stealing pieces of electronic equipment that would quite easily be rated at over $5,000. It could be a first offence. Under this rule, this individual could be looking at not being dealt with by way of conditional sentencing.
We have heard extreme examples on the one end, where I agree conditional sentencing has been misused, but I ask members to consider a far more frequent scenario, which would be one like I have just outlined here. My colleague from Windsor--Tecumseh spoke earlier. He identified things like cattle theft, forgery of credit cards, unauthorized use of a computer, break and enter with intent to commit an indictable offence, and being unlawfully in a dwelling-house. I am not trying to downplay the seriousness of these crimes and how victims would clearly feel violated by these things, but I am also saying that in crimes of this nature we would be permanently removing the discretion of the judge to apply a conditional sentence even when prison would be a foolish option.
In addition, there are the following: theft from mail; bringing into Canada property obtained by crime; false pretense of property over $5,000; obtaining credit by false pretense; forgery; many white collar crime issues; and wilful mischief. I think there are about 20 offences, all of them property crimes. For some of them, frankly, one would question why we would even have a maximum penalty of 10 years, because nobody ever gets that kind of penalty for these kinds of crimes, but now they would all be listed in this new category where conditional sentencing would not apply because in extreme cases that type of crime could get 10 years. That is the cut-off point.
When we first saw this bill, people in our caucus who are knowledgeable about these issues, such as our justice critic, for instance, the member for Windsor--Tecumseh, made a prediction. He said that crown attorneys are going to have a look at this bill and they will immediately start making deals with the defence counsel. Of those 15,500 cases, somewhere around 5,300 or 5,400 are going to be excluded. These statistics are from the Department of Justice, so we are not just speculating on this. This is how it would probably break down. About one-third of these 15,500 offences that we have each year are going to be excluded now.
One of the things that is going to happen is that crown attorneys are going to start making plea bargain deals with defence counsel in our courts so that some criminals will get through in other ways. While we are closing one door, we may be opening two others for all we know, in the perverse consequences of our actions.
We have to anticipate the predictable consequences. We heard the parliamentary secretary mention in his address that one of them would be allowing for suspended sentences. I think we would rather see a conditional sentence than a sentence suspended altogether. That is not a good alternative in dealing with this type of crime.
Let us take this from a pure business case point of view. We do have to be practical, especially coming from a province like mine, where it costs about $125 per day to keep somebody in our provincial prison systems. It varies from province to province, but that is the mean average. If we do the math, per day per convict who is now going into the system, we are in the range of $200 million to $250 million more per year by eliminating these options of conditional sentencing. I am not saying that Canadians would not be willing to pay for that. We do not really know how they would react to it, but I think they should be aware that there is going to be a considerable cost factor if we adopt this particular policy stance.
We listened as well when the Minister of Public Safety made some comments publicly about how the money is not specifically earmarked but has been set aside in the budget. We do not really know where. We have looked at that budget and I did not see where $250 million is earmarked for this in particular, except for the vague reference that we are going to build more prisons. It must be the only budget in Canadian history that actually cited more jails as one of the objectives, one of the stated goals.
We have a situation in which I think the government slapped this bill together to meet some of its election campaign promises that it is going to get tough on crime. As I said, coming from an area where it is a number one issue, getting tough on crime is okay with me. I support that idea, but I want it to be for things that will actually produce the right results, the consequences that we are after, and that means safer streets.
I suppose there will be fewer people on the streets when they get their two years less a day rather than conditional sentences, but only for two years, because one of the things we do know is that the rate of recidivism in the provincial jail system is even worse than for those who are housed in the federal system. Two years less a day is almost like con college. There is very little rehabilitation. There are very few programs.
I see that I am almost out of time, but I note my concern that with all the best intentions the Conservative government may have brought us a bill that will compound the problems rather than solve them. Getting tough on crime may feel good. Revenge feels good, but when sentencing there have to be other objectives as well. One is rehabilitation, because hopefully some day these people are going to come back into the community, and we want them to be better people, not to be carrying on with their old practices.
On behalf of the people of the riding of Winnipeg Centre, who are very anxiously looking for ways to make their streets safer, I have to raise these cautions and these concerns that Bill C-9 in and of itself may not lead to safer streets. It may cost us a lot of money. It may saddle provincial governments with another couple of thousand people per year that they have to house, clothe and feed. I am not convinced that it is advantageous.
I will close the way I began. The number one concern of the people of Winnipeg Centre, their top of mind issue, is crime and safety and making their streets safe. If I thought for one minute that this legislation would in fact lead to safer streets, I would vote for it in a heartbeat, without question. I am not convinced of that. Serious time for serious crime is something I endorse and we all believe in, but I do not think the idea of taking away the option of conditional sentencing from judges in 42 new categories is going to help us.
