Bill C-2 (39th Parliament, 2nd Session) committee  My concern is that the whole dangerous offender regime is preventive detention. If we were satisfied with a proportionate sentence, we wouldn't need a dangerous offender designation at all. We have the dangerous offender designation and procedures in the Criminal Code at the moment, but I think I would go back to what was just said, which is that under Bill C-2 as I read it, when the court has found the person to be a dangerous offender, yes, there are those choices, but to read proposed subsection 753(4.1), “the court shall impose a sentence of detention in penitentiary for an indeterminate period unless”, so that there's still a presumption in favour of an indeterminate sentence.

Bill C-2 (39th Parliament, 2nd Session) committee  Yes. What we know is that the cost of keeping that offender in our penitentiaries is approximately $90,000. What we have to ask is whether that $90,000 is best spent on this or on other kinds of measures that this Parliament therefore is ignoring. Thank you very much.

Bill C-2 (39th Parliament, 2nd Session) committee  Thank you very much for inviting me to appear before you. At your request, I'll focus most of my specific remarks on the aspects of the bill that deal with dangerous offenders. But I will place those specific remarks in the context of the concerns that I have with the bill as a whole.

Bill C-35 (39th Parliament, 1st Session) committee  Yes, your point is a good one, which is that part of this does have to do with delay. What we seem to see in more detailed things in Ontario is that there are two problems. One is that the bail hearings themselves are taking longer, and instead of people taking a day or two for the bail hearing, they are actually taking a substantial amount longer.

Bill C-35 (39th Parliament, 1st Session) committee  I think I used the word “impoverished” when talking about statistics in this country in many ways. This is another area. I'm only able to get these data for Ontario. We don't even have these data for women. You would think it would be relatively easy. I have been looking at this issue in another context recently, and the difficulty is that there are shifting definitions.

Bill C-35 (39th Parliament, 1st Session) committee  Well, it's not my study. I've only seen the citations of it, and I don't believe it's a published study, so I don't have access to it. The second problem we're talking about is how many of those people were not just on bail, but also on bail for firearms offences. So I think we have to be careful about who is the target of this, in terms of public safety.

Bill C-35 (39th Parliament, 1st Session) committee  I looked quickly at the evidence from when they were here a few days ago. I believe they were talking in terms of court statistics. The difficulty with court statistics at the moment is that we're already two years behind. They promised to release the 2004-05 court statistics in the third quarter of this fiscal year.

Bill C-35 (39th Parliament, 1st Session) committee  Responding to the issue about the effectiveness of the overall strategy is very difficult, because the overall strategy of the national crime prevention program, it seems to me, has both the strength and weakness of being diffuse, which is that large numbers of programs are being given relatively small amounts of money to do various kinds of community programming.

Bill C-35 (39th Parliament, 1st Session) committee  My position is very simple, which is that the category of 40% of people who commit offences with firearms is a large one. Those are people on probation, people on parole, people on some form of release, people on some form of warrant. What we're talking about today is bail, and the question is what proportion of those are on bail.

Bill C-35 (39th Parliament, 1st Session) committee  I think there are two problems. One is that the idea of punishing people before they're found guilty is something we should be a little concerned about, it seems to me. The second one, from a correctional perspective, is that remand populations are very difficult populations, because the correctional people indicate that they really can't provide appropriate programming for them, for the reasons I've mentioned during my comments.

Bill C-35 (39th Parliament, 1st Session) committee  My answer to that is that what we really want to do is this. If we have a certain amount of money that we're willing to spend on crime prevention, what I would like to do is have a serious debate about how to use that. The evidence that I am aware of is that the police are capable of at least suppressing certain kinds of crime by their mere presence on the street.

Bill C-35 (39th Parliament, 1st Session) committee  The figure that you have is there. In a sense, both John Muise and I would agree that the number of crimes reported to the police certainly went up dramatically for the 20-year period. The drop from the early to mid-1990s is also something that I think we shouldn't deny. I would agree with him completely that one doesn't want, with crime, to cherry-pick comparisons of years and comparisons of particular crimes over years.

Bill C-35 (39th Parliament, 1st Session) committee  The simple answer is that it's not answerable. The reason for that is that the way in which crime is recorded in the United States is very different. In particular, there is a category of crimes called “index crimes”, which are the only ones that the FBI collates across large numbers of police departments.

Bill C-35 (39th Parliament, 1st Session) committee  Thank you for inviting me to appear before you. I'm obviously aware of the fact that this bill has received wide support from various political parties and individual politicians at various levels of government. Notwithstanding this support, I'd urge you, in your decision about this bill, to think about the message that you're giving Canadians about the operation of the justice system.

Justice committee  First of all, on the issue of the Toronto gun crime, for example, which seemed to have galvanized everybody a year ago, again, I don't want to feel like anybody should relax about the seriousness of crime because gun crime might have gone down. My point is that we're not going to fix that.