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Decentralized Democracy

House Hansard - 85

44th Parl. 1st Sess.
June 9, 2022 10:00AM
Context: House Hansard - 85 - Jun/9/22
Ms. Elizabeth May (Saanich—Gulf Islands, GP)
Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise virtually to speak to Bill C-5, a bill I support, although it does not go far enough in the two areas it proposes to address. Other members today in debate have wished that the bill had been proposed as two separate bills, but in any case, what we have is a bill that deals in the first part, and in the main, with removing certain sentences that are referred to as mandatory minimums, and the second part in dealing with the ongoing crisis of drug poisonings. I do not refer to them as overdoses any longer. The more I learn about what is going on in the opioid crisis with the fentanyl contamination of drug supply, the more I realize this is a poisoning crisis in which many people die. The bill in this case introduces a second section called “Evidence-based Diversion Measures”. There really is not anything in common between the first part and the second part of Bill C-5. Let me address the first part first. I hope I can fit in all my comments, because there are many. The use of mandatory minimums, as many Conservatives have pointed out in the debate, is not entirely a legacy of the government under former prime minister Stephen Harper, but I was here in the House during the debates on the omnibus crime bill, Bill C-10, which introduced many more mandatory minimums. Let us say, just to get it out of the way, that former Liberal governments under former prime ministers Pierre Trudeau and Jean Chrétien did bring in some mandatory minimums. Others were brought in under Bill C-10 while I was serving in this place. Even as we brought in the mandatory minimum sentences that were under Bill C-10, it was well understood that there was no competing literature from experts in criminology and proper sentencing practices about the impacts of mandatory minimums. It was not that there were two different sources of evidences, as there was only one. All studies that looked at mandatory minimums concluded they did not work. All of them concluded that. Jurisdictions around the world that had brought in mandatory minimums, including in the state of Texas, were getting rid of them because they did not affect the crime rate, but they did have many serious negative effects on our criminal justice system. Let us try to walk through some of those. We certainly know that Canada's crime rate has not been rising dramatically, as has been suggested by some in debate here. The last statistic I could find of our homicide rate is 1.95 homicides per 100,000 people. Obviously that should be zero. It would be ideal not to have any homicides in our society. Our rate is approximately two times the rate of the European Union, but three times lower than our neighbours to the south. The United States has an appalling rate, as we all know, of gun crime and murder. It is something that legislation we will be talking about even later tonight proposes to deal with. We do not have a crime wave, but we do have a problem that mandatory minimums have exacerbated. Certainly, the courts have been very busy because so many of the mandatory minimum sentences, as we argued in this place as opposition members when Bill C-10 was brought in, violate the charter. We could see that it was going to violate the charter. We argued that at the time. Currently, there have been hundreds of charter challenges against mandatory minimums in Canada: 69% of such challenges related to drug offences have been found to violate the charter and 48% of those related to firearms have been found to violate the charter. Bill C-5, when I talk about it not going far enough, does not even eliminate all of the mandatory minimums that the courts have already struck down. Let us look at those negative side effects. We have heard primarily, and I think it is a huge issue, that mandatory minimums are one of the reasons there is a disproportionate number of people of colour and indigenous people in our prisons, which exacerbates systemic racism against members of those communities. However, that is not the only problem with mandatory minimums. Mandatory minimums clog up our court dockets by removing the incentive for the accused to plead guilty early in the process. Mandatory minimums take away a judge's discretion to look at the person who has committed the crime before him or her and decide that this person would benefit far more from being diverted into a program that helps them with mental health issues. However, under this mandatory minimum, they have to sentence them to, for example, five years. We know that mandatory minimums and longer incarceration times increase the risk that someone will be coming back. Mandatory minimums and longer incarceration times take someone who may have had one offence that was serious, and that one offence may lead them to basically getting an education in crime from spending time with criminals in prison and not having the opportunity to rehabilitate and get back into normal, civilian, non-criminal life and out of jail. Prosecutors have a problem with dealing with mandatory minimums in that they are then the ones who take the discretion, taking it away from the judges. There is a lot wrong with mandatory minimums, including overcrowding prisons, and they have a knock-on effect of increasing the costs for the provincial governments that have to deal with prisoners. Overcrowding in our prisons is another big problem. In the time remaining, I want to turn to the second part of the bill, which is about evidence-based diversion measures. For the first time, this is to say that, for the law enforcement officer who comes upon someone who has a relatively small amount of prohibited drugs, it encourages that law enforcement to think about whether, in that instance, it would be better to divert this person from criminal justice to a different set of programs for mental health and to give them a warning as opposed to prosecuting them. I have been very educated in this crisis we are facing of deaths due to opioids by one of my constituents who is extraordinarily brave. Her name is Leslie McBain. She lost her son in he opioid crisis, and she is one of the founders of a group called Moms Stop The Harm. There are now hundreds of parents who are active in that group. It breaks my heart every time I talk to someone who has lost a child in the opioid crisis. This tiny little measure in Bill C-5 is okay but not nearly what is required. In the same way for Bill C-5, I brought forward amendments for which have I been pilloried. Members would not believe the words used against me for introducing amendments to get rid of more mandatory minimums. Let us be clear. Getting rid of mandatory minimums is not about letting prisoners walk free. It is about making our communities safer. It is about ensuring that the punishment fits the crime, and it is up to a judge to decide that. People are not going to walk free out of prison if they have committed offences without a mandatory minimum, but they will be sent to jail for the time appropriate to their circumstances and the offence they have committed.
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Context: House Hansard - 85 - Jun/9/22
Mr. Brad Vis
  • Jun/9/22 6:59:10 p.m.
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  • Re: Bill C-5 
Mr. Speaker, that was a very good question. My office is adjacent to a shelter in Mission, British Columbia, and I speak to a lot of people who are both suffering from opioids and who live on the streets. A lot of them do not have access to care. A lot of them do not have access to wraparound services. A lot of them do not have access to housing. In British Columbia, before the agreement between B.C. and the federal government, we already had de facto decriminalization. What we need to see are real and concrete investments. I know investment would cost a lot of money. In fact, it was one of the big platform commitments of the Conservatives. We need a national approach to addressing the mental health and addictions crisis in the country, and we need to put real dollars into communities to give people the recovery beds and options for recovery that they are looking for.
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