Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak in the debate on Bill C-9. I consider it to be a very important bill. If we look at it more closely, it gives us an indication of the direction this government is intending to take in terms of the type of society we want to gradually build.
Before talking about Bill C-9, I think we must first look at what it is meant to be solving. Members from the Conservative Party should be telling us what the results of conditional sentences have been since 1996, or at least learning what they are first.
We are given cold, hard figures about the number of murders, armed robberies and other crimes, but nothing about the progress that has been achieved with conditional sentences.
But as one of my colleagues pointed this out this morning, since 1996, that is, between 1996 and 2003, recidivism has fallen 13% in Canada. The only year since 1996 when there was a slight rise was the 2% increase in 2004-05.
That was my first point, because I neglected to mention that I will be splitting my time with the member for Richmond—Arthabaska. I had promised to say that, but I forgot to when I started to speak. I will be splitting my time with him.
The second point that must be noted, and what the bill is also meant to be solving, relates to what prison terms lead to. In 10 years, we have cut prison terms back by 55,000, while at the same time, in my view, the Canadian judicial system operated very effectively.
The Conservatives therefore need to tell us why they want to dismantle all of this, and what they are trying to accomplish in doing it. Otherwise, it amounts to moving away from the kind of society we have been building in recent years, and moving toward something that looks much more like American justice and the direction taken by the United States in recent years.
I would point out that Bill C-9 adds dangerously to the list of offences for which a judge will no longer be able to impose a conditional sentence. The judge will be de facto required to operate on auto-pilot in the case of many prison sentences, several hundred, as we saw in the speech this morning, thereby adding thousands of prison terms.
Before 1996, there were no conditional sentences. We must therefore look back to the primary concern addressed by this 1996 measure, which the Bloc Québécois also approved at that time. It was to enable judges to assess mitigating circumstances.
Earlier, in a question, I indicated that we are not all equal in society. Let us look at our fate in terms of our social status or the vagaries of life or even our defence before the courts. Criminals can get off if they have good counsel. The same situation occurs when we are faced with a crisis or a crime. There are some people with a past, a career in crime, who have to be assessed on the basis of not only what they did at the time in question, but also what they did previously.
In our opinion, people who have run into difficulty in their lives or slipped off the straight and narrow must not be treated the same way.
I would like to give an example here. I could provide dozens of them. I had occasion to work quite a bit with volunteer centres, the resources to which judges directed individuals to serve their sentence in the community. I will speak of two young people, today aged 24 and 25. They were 9 or 10 when tragedy occurred. Their parents were killed in front of them. I do not have to tell you that these children remained troubled.
They are now young adults. One of them committed an offence that is considered serious here, forgery. With Bill C-9, this person would automatically have been sent to prison. And yet, this person had what it takes to succeed in life. Under the Criminal Code, it was a major offence. Had this person been sent to crime school, their life would have been very different. However, this young person was directed to a community resource and went there for over a year, while under house arrest. At that community resource, the young person was considered very valuable and someone who contributed a lot. In addition, it was felt that this person had developed the potential to succeed in life.
I could give more examples, but I will stop there since the sister of that person ended up in a similar situation. Why send these two people automatically to prison? Simply because their case fell under a small provision of Bill C-9 and the only school that could bring them in line was the school of crime? Today these two people have succeeded after suffering the same type of hardship.
In this House, if we look back on our careers we will see moments in life, to varying degrees, when we strayed from the straight and narrow.
In the list of crimes for which judges will no longer have the authority to hand down conditional sentences we find theft over $5,000, credit card fraud—a crime usually committed by someone who has not killed anyone—theft from mail, disguise with intent, false prospectus and forgery. The two people I was talking about committed forgery; they did not hurt anyone. They did commit a crime that is punishable by law, since they went after people who had other rights in their society.
The justice in conditional sentencing is intended to ensure that we have restorative justice and that the offender participates in righting the wrong that has been committed.
Since this morning I have listened closely to the arguments from the Conservatives to justify Bill C-9. None of these arguments highlight the principles we have just described here, namely to ensure that we end up with restorative justice and not repressive justice.
