So V ote

Jun/9/22 10:52:02 a.m.
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Madam Speaker, I think our rules on unanimous consent are for long preambular policy statements. In this instance, where it was unanticipated that we would move to orders of the day, I did not have any opportunity to consult anyone, as I think was the case for the hon. member for Laurentides—Labelle. I understand your ruling, Madam Speaker. I just wanted to clarify that I would never try to claim unanimous consent without having canvassed all other members of this place.

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Jun/9/22 11:02:20 a.m.
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Re: Bill C-5

Madam Speaker, I very much support Bill C-5. I agree with everything the hon. government House leader has just said about the importance of criminal justice actually being effective in deterring crime and not resulting in the disproportionate convictions of people of colour and indigenous people in this country, which is clear on the record. My concern is about using time allocation. It is true that it was started under the previous Conservative government, but I have to say that it has been pursued with a vengeance by the current Liberal government. I do not see any difference in how frequently time allocation is being used. My concern is, as it is with everything in this place, that those things that start as bad habits quickly become rules. We are essentially saying time after time that parliamentary debate and our Standing Orders for how legislation proceeds through this place are just inconvenient and slow things down. I am not without sympathy for the government's point of view, because of the obstruction from other parties, but I will say this. I do not think we have an election looming. The Liberal-NDP confidence and supply agreement does not suggest that if we do not get this bill through before the end of June we will have a terrible calamity in getting the bill to the Senate. I would ask the hon. House leader to reconsider the routine use of shutting down debate in this place.

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Jun/9/22 12:20:59 p.m.
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Re: Bill C-5

Madam Speaker, at points in my hon. colleague's speech, and he may have misspoken, he seemed to suggest that Bill C-5 would mean there are no punishments for these horrific crimes. I support Bill C-5. As a matter of fact, as the member will know, I put forward amendments to include other crimes that now have mandatory minimum sentences. The key point here, and it has been taken up by governments around the world, is that mandatory minimums are not a deterrent to violent crime. They have perverse results, in that they promote the district attorneys and prosecutors having more power than judges, in that they are able to force plea deals, because the mandatory minimums are so severe and a threat to people who have not been shown to be guilty of the crime. We are looking here at making criminal justice fairer and at ensuring the punishment fits the crime, but no one is suggesting these violent criminals should not be punished. We think that judges should decide.

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Jun/9/22 1:58:52 p.m.
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Re: Bill C-5

Madam Speaker, I share the concerns of my colleague from Laurentides—Labelle about having one bill with two goals. I fully support the elimination of mandatory minimum sentences, which do not work and are a problem for our justice system. At the same time, I am absolutely in favour of measures to achieve the objective of Bill C‑5, which is that problematic substance use must be addressed primarily as a social and health issue, not a criminal one. Both of these elements are in Bill C‑5, but as a result, each is weaker in achieving the results we need.

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Jun/9/22 5:14:13 p.m.
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Re: Bill C-5

Madam Speaker, I certainly agree with the point that my hon. colleague from Halifax has made. There have been a number of allegations about Bill C-5 that I find disappointing, because the evidence is quite clear. As well, some of the evidence has not been raised by government members, which surprises me. Some of the evidence is about the cost to provinces, since the effect of mandatory minimums is to overcrowd prisons and to increase the demands on provincial governments to pay for the incarceration of prisoners who might have been able to have punishments that fitted the crime and not be incarcerated for as long. I wonder if my hon. friend, the parliamentary secretary, has any comments on the costs to the provinces of imposing mandatory minimums.

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Jun/9/22 6:32:15 p.m.
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Re: Bill C-5 Bill C-10

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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Jun/9/22 6:41:02 p.m.
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Re: Bill C-5

Mr. Speaker, I absolutely will not apologize. This is based on evidence. In fact, the Canadian Criminal Justice Association, the Canadian Bar Association and the Canadian Sentencing Commission, which met in 1987, have recommended getting rid of all mandatory minimum sentences other than the one for murder. That is because they do not work. They do not deter crime. We want to ensure this absolutely. I am not only a mother. I am also a grandmother, and I completely understand where the hon. member is coming from, but when we dig into the evidence and ask if these mandatory minimums keep our children safe or have any impact whatsoever on someone who is twisted and horrific with an impulse to hurt a child? No, they do not. What we need to do is make sure those people get the punishment that fits the crime. Judges in this country will not let people who abuse children, and who were brought through the criminal justice system and found guilty, walk out of jail.

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Jun/9/22 6:43:26 p.m.
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Re: Bill C-5

Mr. Speaker, I thank my Bloc colleague from Shefford for her question. She is absolutely right. Portugal's innovative model is an example for the whole world. It is clear that we should not treat drug addicts like criminals, but rather take an approach that focuses on public and mental health. We need to make this change here in Canada. We need to adopt the same system as Portugal to protect the lives of citizens who are suffering in our society.

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Jun/9/22 6:45:24 p.m.
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Re: Bill C-5

Mr. Speaker, all of us in this place do not want horrific criminals to walk the streets. It is clear that we want the punishment to fit the crime, and that is the issue here. It breaks my heart when I think about what happened in this place in 2014, when Nathan Cirillo was killed at the War Memorial. I was one of the members of Parliament here. It was horrific to have gunfire in this place. That could have all been prevented. The individual who committed those crimes actually went before a judge and said he needed help and asked to be sent to jail, but he did not get that help. If we take care of people better, we can avoid crimes.

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Jun/9/22 10:30:12 p.m.
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Re: Bill C-21

Madam Speaker, I thank the member for Cowichan—Malahat—Langford for an excellent speech, and particularly for reflecting on the complexity, such that we do not know what we do not know. In looking at the statistics, it is counterintuitive that more violent deaths occur in rural areas in Canada. This is probably legal gun owners and a lot of violence within families. One would think that urban guns were where we were getting more violent crime, but it is actually less than in rural areas. Urban areas are associated with more actual criminal activities, but fewer deaths. It is complicated. I want to come back to the member's closing comments to the member for Elmwood—Transcona. The Canada Border Services Agency is not just short of funds, but it is also short of credibility. It has a very high rate of reports of racist incidents, and it also has no oversight body. Does the member have any comment on the need for an oversight body for CBSA?

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