44th Parl. 1st Sess.
October 16, 2023 11:00AM
Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise in this debate on Bill C-325 today, and I am going to be brutally honest: It is disappointing to see the Conservatives bring forward a private member's bill that builds on their campaign to exploit public fears about crime and public safety by emphasizing tragic incidents and tragic impacts on victims and continuing to ignore the evidence about what actually works in criminal justice. Of course, members of the House will know that I spent 20 years working in the criminal justice field before I came here. We know what reduces crime and what improves public safety, but the Conservatives seem to have no interest in any of those measures.
They repeatedly refer to the opinions of victims. I will, of course, agree with them that some victims are looking for harsh punishment for the perpetrators of crimes, but it is not all victims. The one thing that all victims of crime are looking for is that what happened to them does not happen to anyone else. If we look at all the scientific studies and academic studies of victims, we see that this is the one thing that all victims share in common. This means that instead of harsher measures, we need more effective measures to make sure that we do not have additional victims of crime in the future.
The main impact of Bill C-325 is to undo the reforms that were made in Bill C-5. Those were aimed at squarely attacking the problem of high rates of incarceration among indigenous and racialized people, those living in poverty and those living with mental health and addiction issues in Canadian prisons. The overincarceration of marginalized Canadians is not only unjust but also ineffective at improving public safety. Even short periods of incarceration cause major disruptions in people's lives when it comes to loss of employment, loss of housing, loss of custody of children and stigma, all of which make involvement in anti-social and criminal behaviour more likely in the future, not less likely.
The New Democrats have always supported measures that will be effective in improving public safety. This was true when we were talking about bail reform, which, again, is not the subject of Bill C-325, even though people would be surprised to find that out when listening to some of the Conservative rhetoric around it. We supported adding a reverse onus for bail in crimes involving handguns. We supported making community-based bail supervision programs more widely available in all communities, including in rural, remote and northern communities.
Community-based bail supervision will require upfront expenditures, and we have been calling on the Liberals to fund those programs. The John Howard Society runs three of those programs now in Ontario, and they have a 90% success rate. What does that 90% success rate mean? It means 90% of people in community-based bail supervision programs showed up in court when they were supposed to, and 90% did not reoffend in the period before they appeared in court. Why is that the case? It is because they had support and supervision. This is in the bill the Conservatives voted for, and now the Liberals need to come forward with the funding.
Community-based bail supervision programs are not the subject of Bill C-325, but I have to address them because Conservatives continue to act like they are. They save money in the long run because they are far cheaper: Putting people into community-based bail supervision programs is one-tenth the cost of putting them in incarceration. The problem in our federal system is that the federal government would bear the costs upfront of starting these programs, while the provinces would benefit from the savings in provincial correction systems.
Again, Bill C-325 is trying to undo the reforms that were in Bill C-5. What Bill C-5 did was to eliminate mandatory minimum sentences for all drug offences and for certain tobacco and firearms offences, none of which are classified as violent crimes in the Criminal Code. Also, Bill C-5 widened the sentencing options available to judges by allowing them to use diversion programs and house arrest as penalties for a wider number of crimes. Why is this important? It is because there are direct victims of crime, but there are also the families of the perpetrators of crime. What we are talking about there is often spouses and children. The importance of diversion programs and house arrest means that oftentimes families are not deprived of the sole income earner in the family, or they are not deprived of the person who can provide supervision for children.
By using diversion programs and house arrest in additional offences, we can help keep families together and prevent crime in the future by keeping people's ties to the community and the wider family active and alive. This is particularly important in rural, remote and northern communities, where the sentence to incarceration means not only serving time in an institution but serving it in an institution many hundreds of kilometres away from the family and supports people need to prevent them from falling back into the problems that caused them to end up as convicted criminals.
According to the Conservatives' press release, Bill C-325 would “put a stop to the alarming number of convicted violent criminals and sex offenders who are serving their sentences in their homes.” This assertion is false. Even with the reforms in Bill C-5, judges are not allowed to sentence those who present any kind of risk to the public to serve sentences in the community. The statement that the many people who are convicted of the long list of offences the Conservatives like to cite are getting house arrest is not true. Judges are not allowed to grant diversion programs and sentences served in the community to those who present a risk to the public. That is very clear in our systems.
The Conservatives also claim that Bill C-325 would go after offenders who repeatedly violate conditional release orders. It is important to note that the provisions in Bill C-325 are about parole violations, not conditional release orders. There is nothing about bail conditions in this bill despite the Conservatives continually mixing the rhetoric about catch-and-release bail provisions with the provisions of Bill C-325. What Bill C-325 would do is make all parole violations a new criminal offence and require parole officers to report all parole violations, no matter how minor, to the police and the Parole Board. This would only result in the early termination of parole.
What does that mean? People say it is a good idea because people broke the rules and their parole should be revoked. With the revocation of parole, people end up back in institutions, and at the end of their sentences, they go into the community unsupervised. Therefore, by ending parole early, we end the period during which we supervise people's behaviour, which is to make sure they present less of a threat to the public, and let them out at the end of a sentence with no incentive to complete any of the rehabilitation programs, any of the mental health and addiction programs or any of the things that would keep them from being further involved in criminal activity.
Let me conclude my remarks today by reminding people that what we need to do is support measures that are effective at reducing crime and reducing the number of victims in the future. Bill C-325 would do nothing to advance those goals and instead would further contribute to the overincarceration of racialized and indigenous people and those living in poverty in this country. The New Democrats were proud to support Bill C-5 to try to make sure that we do what is effective when fighting crime and reducing the number of victims in this country.
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Madam Speaker, it is my pleasure to rise today to speak to Bill C-325, an act to amend the Criminal Code with respect to the conditional release system. This is the private member's bill of my friend and colleague, the member for Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, and I am happy to support it for the few reasons I will detail in these remarks.
The main reason is that our criminal justice system needs a serious overhaul to prevent violent offenders from committing further violent crimes, and this bill would work to combat that societal harm. One of our Conservative Party pillars is to bring home safe streets. To do this, we need to take serious action to reverse the precipitous rise in violent crime that has transpired over the last eight years with the Liberal government.
Data from Statistics Canada in August indicated that the national homicide rate has risen for the fourth consecutive year and is now at its highest level since 1992. This is largely due to gang violence. Violent crime is up for the eighth year in a row. The per capita victims of violent crime have increased 60% since 2013. Fraud is twice as prevalent as it was 10 years ago, and extortion is five times higher. It is a country-wide problem, not restricted just to our biggest cities. As an example, an article from the National Post from the past summer stated, “Reports from Newfoundland—which experienced one of the steepest rises in crime last year—reveal a growing sense of fear and abandonment among those living in St. John’s downtown core.” Our communities feel less safe. Crime, chaos, drugs and disorder are common, and the Liberal government is responsible for making the situation worse.
The common denominator here is the Prime Minister and his lenient approach to violent crime. The measures to reverse this trend in Bill C-48, which the House passed unanimously on September 18, were but a start to the serious overhaul necessary to create real change, to borrow a phrase from the Prime Minister, who used it eight years ago.
Bill C-48 does not go far enough to reverse the damage that the Liberals have done with their catch-and-release laws that let repeat offenders back onto our streets to cause more crime and chaos. It started with Bill C-75 and continued with Bill C-5, which had a soft-on-crime approach. That is why I am here to support Bill C-325, as it would take further measures to combat the violent crime waves.
Bill C-325's summary states:
This enactment amends the Criminal Code and the Corrections and Conditional Release Act to create a new offence for the breach of conditions of conditional release imposed in relation to certain serious offences and to require the reporting of those breaches to the appropriate authorities.
It also amends the Criminal Code to preclude persons convicted of certain offences from serving their sentence in the community.
Namely, Bill C-325 would strengthen the conditional release regime by creating a breach-of-condition offence in the Criminal Code at section 145, for breaches of condition on parole or statutory release. It would be an indictable offence and would be liable to imprisonment for a maximum of two years, or an offence punishable on summary conviction.
The bill would also amend the 1992 Corrections and Conditional Release Act to require parole supervisors to report breaches of conditions. It states that if a breach exists, parole supervisors must inform the Parole Board of Canada, the Attorney General and appropriate officials of the breach and the circumstances surrounding it. It is currently not the case that probation officers are required to report breached conditions. This provision would go a long way in reducing recidivism among violent criminals.
Bill C-325 would also restore the former version of section 742.1 of the Criminal Code, which was repealed in 2022 by the Liberals' Bill C-5. This would reintroduce a list of serious offences for which a shorter sentence of less than two years cannot be served in the community via house arrest. This includes kidnapping, sexual assault and some firearms offences. Bill C-5 should never have been allowed to pass, as it puts communities at risk with violent offenders serving sentences for serious crimes in the comfort of their own homes while watching Netflix. This includes, for example, drug traffickers serving their sentences at home. How convenient is that? This also includes sexual assault offenders who are serving their sentences in their homes in the communities where they have victimized and can now revictimize.
To avoid an argument from my opponents off the bat, I will say that this bill would not bring out stronger sentences or raise rates of incarceration for the sake of it. Breaches of conditions imposed during conditional release, which is after sentencing, are often committed by a minority of offenders. However, when parole conditions are breached, it can be frustrating and damaging to the victims of the crimes committed, not to mention to the community at large in which they live.
The Canadian Police Association said that it is important to effectively target repeat offenders because, as frontline law enforcement officers know all too well, a defining reality of our justice system is that a disproportionately small number of offenders are responsible for a disproportionately large number of offences. In fact, our leader, the member for Carleton, often cites the example of Vancouver, where 40 criminals were arrested a total of 6,000 times in a year.
It is important to note as well that offenders designated as long-term offenders would not be covered in this bill. They are already covered by breach-of-condition language in the Criminal Code.
We need this bill because of offenders like Myles Sanderson. He had been granted statutory release in August 2021, after serving a five-year sentence for assault, robbery, mischief and making threats. He had 59 previous convictions, one of which included assaulting a police officer. He had been charged for 125 crimes, with 47 cases filed against him in the province's criminal courts. He violated his parole conditions 28 times. In February 2022, following a hearing, the Parole Board did not revoke his statutory release despite these violations. He stopped meeting with his case worker in May 2022, which led the police to look for him. Unfortunately, they did not find him before he and his brother murdered 11 people and injured 18 others in a mass stabbing spree on the James Smith Cree Nation and in Weldon, Saskatchewan in September 2022. This horrific tragedy broke the heart of the nation and devastated these communities. It would have been utterly preventable had Bill C-325 been in place and Sanderson had been indicted for violating the conditions of his parole.
While it is important to minimize the potential harm to our communities, we must still respect the rights of those involved. The law currently provides that federal offenders sentenced to a fixed term of imprisonment be released under supervision when they have served two-thirds of their sentence. Statutory release is a statutory right and not within the Parole Board of Canada's decision-making authority. The conditions on parole that may be violated include a prohibition on communicating with a person, often a victim; being in a specific place; observing a curfew; not possessing a weapon; and not drinking alcohol, among others that may apply to the specific case at hand. Sanderson's parole conditions included a ban on weapons and a ban on alcohol and drugs. As records indicate, he had a history of drug use since the age of 14 and a history of rage and violence against his partner.
Tragedies like this can be prevented. Our justice system should not allow violent offenders to serve their sentences at home. This view is shared by several organizations, all of which support Bill C-325. The president of the Canadian Police Association, the Fraternité des policiers et policières de Montréal, the founder of Montreal's Maison des guerrières, the Fédération des maisons d'hébergement pour femmes, the Murdered or Missing Persons' Families' Association, the Communauté de citoyens et citoyennes en action contre les criminels violents and others have all expressed their support for Bill C-325. Tom Stamatakis, president of the CPA, says, “The Canadian Police Association has long advocated for statutory consequences for offenders who commit new offences while on conditional release, and this proposed legislation is a common-sense solution that effectively targets those very specific offenders.”
The bottom line is that we absolutely need to be doing more to protect our communities and increase public safety. This is not an issue of partisanship, but a shared need for action on a common goal: a safer and better Canada. We were elected here to uphold the principles of peace, order and good government, but we cannot claim that we are doing so if Canadians do not feel safe in their homes and communities. We have a responsibility to our constituents and the regions we serve. They deserve to be safe and protected. We need to bring home safe streets, and this bill would be an excellent stepping stone on the way to doing so.
I hope all my colleagues share this goal of increased public safety and that they vote to support Bill C-325 on its way to committee.
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