Thank you to my colleagues for their comments prior to mine. I want to thank, particularly, the Attorney General and the Solicitor General for their tireless work and dedication to improving our justice system and making Ontario safer.

I’m pleased to rise this afternoon, on behalf of the residents of Simcoe–Grey, to speak to second reading of the Strengthening Safety and Modernizing Justice Act, 2023. Crime is on the rise in Ontario and across Canada, and we know this based on firm data. That’s why our government is taking action to train and attract new recruits, breaking down financial barriers and getting more front-line officers onto our streets. I am pleased to speak to the impacts of Bill 102 on our justice system and how, if passed, it will make Ontario a safer place for Ontarians.

Madam Speaker, as part of this bill the Ministry of the Attorney General is proposing a change to the Provincial Offences Act, or the POA, that will help clarify the existing process in the courts when the Provincial Offences Act proceedings are being judicially reviewed. The proposed amendment would make it clear that it is court staff and not judicial officers who file the judicial review application materials with the courts. I want to be clear: This particular change that we’re introducing is an administrative one and won’t affect any existing judicial review processes before the courts currently.

Along this theme, I would like to discuss some important work this government is doing with the municipal courts. This work includes amendments to allow greater use of technology to deliver justice systems remotely, such as allowing attendance at POA proceedings by audio and video links. Other changes include the authority for provincial offences officers to serve part III summonses on individuals within the province by registered mail, courier or email. Although this is administrative, it will do much to speed up and expedite the processes. Service of a summons on a recipient’s lawyer or paralegal with their advance consent will now be permitted.

We continue to support our municipal partners in the efforts to enforce and collect outstanding Provincial Offences Act fines. We have implemented numerous initiatives to help assist our municipal partners with the collection of these outstanding fines, including improvements to the notice of fine and due date form to encourage defendants to pay their fines on time to avoid additional fees and other penalties, such as a licence suspension.

The Attorney General is also working in collaboration with Bill 177’s municipal working group to implement other reforms to further modernize Provincial Offences Act processes, including implementing other fine enforcement initiatives.

These are just some of the more recent initiatives that the Attorney General has been working on to ensure the municipal court system works swiftly and efficiently to hear so many matters that affect Ontarians daily and to help to clear up the backlog that we have seen collect during the COVID pandemic.

Speaker, I welcome the opportunity to speak about some of the other initiatives the ministry has in the works to move justice forward across our province and to continue to drive change across the system, initiatives that have come to fruition thanks to the ongoing collaboration between all justice sector partners and that support our overarching goals of not only improving processes in the criminal courts system but also that will keep our communities across this province safer for our residents.

The first such initiative is the Criminal Justice Digital Design initiative. Speaker, these changes will help with the ongoing transformation that we are working on in collaboration with our partners across the justice system, from the police to the courts. For several years now the Attorney General has been working with the Solicitor General to transform Ontario’s criminal justice system and enhance public safety in the process. This initiative involves digitizing criminal case records and connecting IT systems so that data flows seamlessly from the police to the prosecution to the courts and, where appropriate, to correctional services.

Already we have implemented a number of processes to help share digital information in an organized, seamless and timely way. Since June 2022, criminal eIntake has been available province-wide. This system allows police and other investigative agencies to electronically send and receive documents and data so that a justice of the peace can consider all the information and allow charges to be laid, where appropriate. This initiative has greatly reduced the time and effort it takes to put information before the courts and has made for a much more seamless and expedited process.

Speaker, there is more. We have also introduced digital evidence management, which makes it possible for police and other agencies to manage, store and share digital investigative or evidentiary files using a consistent set of tools and standards. As of this January, more than 60% of police agencies across Ontario have on-boarded to use this digital system. There is much more work to be done, Speaker, but we have made great strides, and we are committed to continuing that work. The safety and well-being of our communities requires an agile and properly functioning criminal justice system that works efficiently and seamlessly for all Ontarians.

Speaker, as the Attorney General mentioned earlier, a huge part of creating safer communities is standing up for victims of crime, which includes victims of human trafficking. The Ministry of the Attorney General works very closely with the Ministry of Children, Community and Social Services on their anti-human trafficking-strategy and violence against women services. More recently, we have implemented a program that provides up to four hours of free, confidential legal advice to eligible survivors of sexual assault across the province. It is available by phone, it is available by video chat, and at any point after a sexual assault has occurred. Survivors of human trafficking can also access free legal support to obtain restraining orders against their trafficker and to get advice about using the civil lawsuit system as a tool to hold their trafficker accountable.

Another critical aspect that we’ve seen in our criminal justice system across the province and that is a critical priority for our government is combatting gun and gang violence. Speaker, this government is deeply concerned by the spike in gun crime in Ontario and the impact of gun violence in our communities, and as we heard in our recent debate about the bail reform initiative, this is something that’s become endemic across the province and is only on the rise.

Since 2018, Ontario has invested approximately $187 million under the Guns, Gangs and Violence Reduction Strategy, which takes a comprehensive approach to community safety, with initiatives that deliver strong enforcement and prosecution, proactive gang disruption and intervention, and tailored youth and adult violence prevention. Despite this, gangs in Ontario are growing in strength and expanding across the province. Drug, human and gun trafficking are fuelling gang operations, and gangs continue to recruit at-risk youth and young adults. We are continuously working with municipalities across Ontario to enhance this strategy and are taking critical action to combat gun and gang violence on all fronts.

Madam Speaker, I can speak as a member for eight years of the Collingwood Police Services Board to the impact of this program within our community. We had signed onto that as an enhancement to our OPP contract, and within the first 18 months we had three of the largest drug busts that we had experienced in our community in which large amounts of drugs were seized, large amounts of cash were seized and large amounts of guns.

Speaker, through this work we’ve learned that law enforcement and prosecution efforts are more effective at reducing violence and increasing public safety when combined with meaningful intervention initiatives.

And this gives me an opportunity to speak about justice centres. We know that the traditional criminal justice system can, in certain circumstances, be limited in how it responds to the complex needs of the communities, the victims and the offenders. Justice centres are taking a transformative approach to community safety by moving certain criminal cases out of the traditional courtroom and into a community setting. Justice centres help provide wraparound supports for accused persons through coordination with on-site social, health, mental health, addictions, employment education and housing providers. That is why, since September 2020, our ministry has launched four justice centre locations. We’ve launched them in London, Toronto downtown east, Toronto northwest and Kenora.

The Kenora centre is the most recent and was launched in February of this year, and I had the great pleasure of going up to Kenora, Mr. Rickford’s riding, with the Attorney General for the opening of that justice centre. It is a groundbreaking initiative; in fact, the first of its kind in northern Ontario. It was developed, designed and delivered in collaboration with local organizations, Indigenous leadership and the courts. It was built on lands owned by the local Indigenous bands and is a critical part of our justice program moving forward, not only to address the outcomes of crime but also to look at the underlying causes of crime so that we can prevent recidivism and help to get lives back on track, both for the victims and the offenders. This is an initiative that is truly born from a collective partnership, and it represents a meaningful path forward towards creating safer and healthier communities across this province and in the north.

Madam Speaker, one of the other changes we’re looking at making in order to streamline our judicial processes and expedite matters—where appropriate—getting to trial, just to make sure that we separate and stream matters to the appropriate forum. This is why this government is proposing some changes to how low-value civilian claims are handled in the courts, including Small Claims Court.

We made changes to the claims threshold a number of years ago. The maximum amount of a claim in Small Claims Court is $35,000, and that is helping to separate them. However, we see in a number of cases certain plaintiffs or defendants trying to pursue a matter under $35,000 in our Superior Court, which takes up valuable time both for ongoing civil matters, matrimonial matters and criminal matters that properly reside in Superior Court. What we are now doing is preventing any claims under $35,000 from going to Superior Court and mandating that they go to the appropriate forum, which is Small Claims Court. This will make it faster, easier and more affordable for people and businesses across the province to resolve their disputes in the appropriate forum.

All of the changes I have spoken about and those before me in Bill 102 speak to the importance of the changes in it, how it will streamline our system, how it will make our criminal justice system and our justice system generally more accessible and more expeditious, as well as making Ontario safer for the people of Ontario, no matter where they live, whether that is through support and safety for victims of crime, effective and appropriate responses to perpetrators of crime or reducing the complexity of our justice system.

Madam Speaker, it has been a pleasure today to rise to speak to this matter, and I urge all members of the House to support this worthy act.

It’s my pleasure to rise to speak on behalf of the constituents of Simcoe–Grey on this important motion calling on the federal government to immediately reform the Criminal Code of Canada and strengthen Canada’s bail system to better protect the public and our front-line law enforcement officers.

Those who are repeat violent offenders charged with violent firearms-related offences pose a very real threat to our communities and they need to be kept off the streets—period. In the context of this discussion, that starts with meaningful action and changes to the Criminal Code, an area largely within the jurisdiction of the federal government.

Yesterday in discussion on this motion, we heard comments from across the floor that this motion is largely symbolic, and I reject that proposition, Madam Speaker. We have seen that this is not a new issue. While it is becoming increasingly critical over recent times, in the last eight months in Canada, we have lost eight officers in the line of duty, four of whom died in Ontario. Since 1990, statistics were that we generally lost less than one OPP constable or one law enforcement officer in the line of duty year over year across Canada. We have seen, in this past year, that we have not just a slight blip but a major increase.

But this is also a discussion about public safety. As my friend the member from Cambridge said in his comments, we are seeing public safety threatened, with names like Vanessa and Gabriel, young people with their lives ahead of them whose lives were cut short by needless and arbitrary violence, often at the hands of individuals who, for example, in the case of Gabriel, was wanted for violation of probation and parole terms in Newfoundland and had been wanted for a period of approximately six months.

We are here today discussing what largely has brought this motion into focus. It was the tragic death of Constable Grzegorz Pierzchala on December 27 in the line of duty on his first day as a full-fledged officer of the OPP, having passed his probation period. While making what should have been a routine traffic assist call, he was shot, and a young and promising career was cut short needlessly. The individual who has been charged with his murder was out on bail for violent offences, out on bail for assault of a police officer, out on bail for offences involving firearms and, in fact, had breached his terms of bail, had cut off his electronic GPS bracelet and had been off the charts for over four months. At the time of Constable Pierzchala’s shooting, this individual had been on the streets for four months in breach of his terms for bail.

I echo the outrage of police commissioner Thomas Carrique, who said that not only was his death tragic, but it was doubly tragic because it was needless and it was preventable. That is what is bringing us here today to speak to this motion and the need for change in the bail reform system.

Premier Ford took the action on January 13 of writing to the Prime Minister seeking changes to the bail system and changes to the Criminal Code system to expand the reverse onus provisions that would require an accused to show why they should be released on bail in very certain and specific circumstances, such as violent crimes, intimate partner violence and crimes involving weapons, and particularly guns. That letter was signed by all of the Premiers of the provinces and territories of this country coast to coast to coast, and we heard yesterday how unique that is, how universal the outrage of that event was and how dire the need for change is in that area.

This was not the first call. In October 2022, Minister Lametti met with the provincial counterparts and Solicitors General to discuss bail reform. It has been on the radar, and there has been no action. Even most recently, Minister Lametti, from the federal Liberal government, said that he believes our bail system “is strong and sound” but is always “open to suggestions.” I’m going to suggest that that comment that was made in March of this year is so disconnected from what we are seeing in our communities, in our streets, from law enforcement to civilian safety, that this motion is much-needed to provide the impetus for Minister Lametti to take these calls seriously. We need action; we need changes.

I was a member of the Standing Committee on Justice Policy, and I was there for the vote on MPP Jones’s motion that we study bail reform and report back to this House. I can say that throughout the witnesses over the time that we heard—and this was timely. If we consider that Constable Pierzchala died on December 27 and that motion was brought on January 18, and this committee sat through January hearing evidence, and we heard evidence from over 30 witnesses—a few were written submissions, but most attended in person. You can find the witness list on page 29 of the report to this House. It’s an exhaustive list. It contains law enforcement, senior captains and commissioners. It contains witnesses from the Elizabeth Fry Society, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, the Canadian Mental Health Association, the Canadian Prison Law Association, Congress of Aboriginal Peoples, the Criminal Lawyers’ Association, the Federation of Ontario Law Associations, and the Institute of Criminology and Criminal Justice. It was a very extensive and thorough hearing because this is an issue that this House and this committee took very, very seriously.

The discussion that came up on many occasions was whether we were broadening the net for bail restrictions or whether we were trying to focus in. What we heard through the evidence that was elicited through the hearings was that there are 2% to 3% of the criminal population, those hardened criminals, who will commit violent offences no matter what the circumstances are. It is this 2% to 3% that we are trying to target. I will talk later in my comments about some of the statistics we heard during those hearings, but it was very compelling, and it was very clear that there is a very small and hardened core of our criminal population who would seem beyond dissuasion, to the extent that, while being out on bail for one offence, potentially a violent offence involving a gun, they will do it again.

We heard instances in Ontario that were referred to by my colleague opposite in his comments yesterday, that there are instances in Toronto of about 60% of those who reoffended while out on bail once and then twice would actually commit a third offence involving a firearm and a violent offence. That is simply unacceptable.

We are not broadening the net in this exercise. We are trying to focus in, with a laser focus on making sure that we can identify who those potential offenders are and make sure that when we get to the bail process, we are putting forward the best case.

Also, we are asking the federal government to make sure that they expand the reverse onus provisions to cover those types of offences so that those individuals will come to their bail hearing not with a presumption that they are going to get out on bail—unless the crown can prove otherwise under the three principles, under the ladder principle and the R. v. Antic decision—but that they must prove to the satisfaction of the court why they do not pose a threat.

If you have committed a violent offence with a firearm or violent intimate partner battery, it seems to me that the balance needs to shift so it is the individual accused that has to show why they pose no threat to the public, as opposed to the current system, where the crown must establish why it is this person poses a threat to public or why potentially their granting bail may bring our justice system into disrepute.

This is what this motion is about. It is a very narrow motion, but it is one of the important recommendations that this standing committee made. There were 12 recommendations made in this report, seven of which apply to the federal government and five of which are for consideration by the provincial government. This particular reverse onus provision is one of the recommendations, and it is this recommendation that is the thrust of this motion.

What this motion being brought forward by our Solicitor General asks the federal government to do is to make changes to the Criminal Code to expand and enhance the reverse onus provisions so that people charged with these types of offences will not be released on the street unless they can establish why it is that they do not pose a threat to public safety or to the administration of justice in our province.

To the comments that we heard from the members opposite yesterday, my point is that this motion is asking for a very narrow, defined remedy that only the federal government can provide and that we think this is a necessary step that should be done immediately.

Constable Pierzchala died on December 27 of last year. I have to say, I was at his funeral in the Sadlon Arena in Barrie, and it was a very sombre and powerful event with thousands of law enforcement personnel and civic mourners from across Ontario. I would like to say that this is the type of event that we hope we only have to attend once.

However, it was my second attendance at the Sadlon Arena for a funeral for front-line law enforcement officers who died in the line of duty. In October of last year, two South Simcoe police officers, Constable Devon Northrup and Constable Morgan Russell, were both ambushed on a domestic disturbance call and died in the line of duty. That’s two funerals too many of this type.

We also have heard of the threat and risk of harm to our population, our residents across Ontario, as depicted by the stories of Vanessa and Gabriel most recently in the subway station in Toronto.

I would like to use some of my time this afternoon to talk about what we heard from the police chiefs and senior police officers we heard from during the course of the hearings at the justice policy standing committee on bail reform.

We heard, as I said, Commissioner Carrique’s comments that the death of Constable Pierzchala was tragic and needless because it was preventable and avoidable, and that his death, in Commissioner Carrique’s opinion, was not an isolated incident, but rather the consequences of a dysfunctional bail system. Commissioner Carrique further testified that it’s not rare to see violent offenders with a history of crime continue to break the law while on bail.

As I said before, this is not coming on the radar, from the police chief’s perspective, just because of recent events. Commissioner Carrique testified that the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police identified this issue almost 15 years ago and called on the federal government to strengthen bail and sentencing laws back then. And we know from the discussion we’ve heard in this House that the federal Bill C-75, in fact, eroded our bail system and has led and contributed to where we find ourselves today.

The data we saw and heard at the Standing Committee on Justice Policy indicated that in 2021 and 2022, 587 repeat violent offenders who were free on bail committed bail violations that resulted in 1,675 charges for failing to comply. Of those 587 violent offenders, 464 were involved in serious violent crimes while out on bail and 56 of these serious violent crimes involved a firearm.

We also heard from Chief Demkiw from the Toronto police force that in Toronto, they actually were arresting individuals who were out on bail for violent offences, not on one, but on two occasions and were committing a third offence. Speaker, that’s unacceptable. We have to find a way to tighten the net—not broaden the net, but tighten the net to make sure that these 2% to 3% of our criminal population are held in remand pending their trials.

We also heard the impact on our police force from what has been termed a catch-and-release approach to bail. We heard from John Cerasuolo, president of the Ontario Provincial Police Association, who read a statement from a retired officer:

“Catch and release is a very appropriate phrase describing what is happening out there. Over the many years, many of my officers have complained bitterly to me about having to apprehend the same criminals time after time when the criminals were once again released, rather than being held in custody until their charges were dealt with.”

The president of the Police Association of Ontario, Mark Baxter, shared his frustrations with the catch-and-release approach to bail by saying the following:

“Our members are frustrated to work within a system that is not prioritizing community safety. They are frustrated by apprehending a known offender one day and being called on their next shift to the same place, for the same reason, to arrest the same person.... Too often, with each release, the offender’s behaviour has worsened, and their negative choices emboldened, until the day comes that the individual becomes violent, or more violent, and the result is that someone in our community is injured or killed.”

Jon Reid, the president of the Toronto Police Association, was quoted saying his members of the association are “beyond frustrated” with the catch-and release approach to bail and said the following:

“If our bail system is designed and/or interpreted to justify releasing individuals into these circumstances, what message does this send to the community that they’re serving? The simple answer is this: It sends the wrong message to the people who protect our communities and those who seek to live in a peaceful and just society. It erodes confidence in the administration of justice.”

Speaker, our role in this House as legislators is to strike that correct balance to make sure that our public is protected, their safety is respected and that we arm our police officers, our front-line police enforcement, law enforcement personnel, with the appropriate tools to make sure that they can do their job, which is to serve and protect.

We know that we have the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in our country, and we understand the balancing act that requires. But with all that we have seen in the past five years, with the calls going back to 2015, with the most recent events, eight police deaths in the line of duty in the last 10 months across Canada, four of those in Ontario—we’ve seen violent crimes and deaths amongst our civic population, the population that we are elected here to represent, and we need to make sure that we have the tools in place for our law enforcement and for our courts to make sure that our public is protected, while respecting the rights of the accused.

We believe that a requirement for change is necessary at the federal level to change the provisions of the Criminal Code to expand the reverse onus provisions so that bail will be granted to those who have earned it or deserve it, and that is to be determined in the circumstances. We need to arm our front-line crown prosecutors with the tools to make the best arguments to protect our residents. We have lost too many lives needlessly in this province, both in front-line law enforcement and among civilians. It’s time to act.