44th Parl. 1st Sess.
April 19, 2024 10:00AM
Madam Speaker, I rise today to speak to Bill C‑351, which is sponsored by the Conservative member for Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup. I followed the saga surrounding the transfer of inmate Paul Bernardo from a maximum-security penitentiary to the medium-security facility in La Macaza, because the La Macaza institution is located in my riding of Laurentides—Labelle.
On March 27, at the invitation of the Union of Canadian Correctional Officers , I spent the day inside the institution. What I heard that day had absolutely nothing to do with the inmate in question. We agree that his crimes are revolting, but quite honestly, we are not concerned about his transfer to that facility. What revolts us is what is happening inside the walls of this institution. The correctional officers told me about some things that I want to share.
They told me about the delivery of drugs by drone, faulty and outdated equipment and staff retention issues. They told me about shivs, physical assaults on employees and the list goes on. I spent the day there. Rather than addressing the real problems in federal penitentiaries, since it is not just at the La Macaza facility that we need to take action to ensure the safety of staff who work every day to keep the public safe, the Conservative Party has introduced a populist, sensationalist bill.
That is not taking care of people. When a party aspires to form the government, its absolute priority should be to take care of people. Instead, the Conservatives want to instill fear in everyone by making up problems where there are none. The member for Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo came to La Macaza in early February for a photo op. Unfortunately for him, some of the facts were wrong.
When I went there, it was not to engage in self-promotion. I was there to get input from the correctional officers and all the employees who work to ensure public safety. I was there to understand their reality, to understand what happens behind the walls, to understand this universe that is completely foreign to me, but is important to grasp in order to avoid coming to hasty conclusions and to have a better sense of this critical problem in our democratic society.
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- Apr/19/24 1:13:32 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, certainly ending the week by debating the bill before us provides a certain level of weight for anybody who is recounting the atrocities and the sensationalism that has re-entered public discourse. Certainly, as my Bloc colleague has suggested, I think any discussion in the House needs to be victim-centred. It needs to be survivor-centred. When we propose legislation, I think it is important that we have a duty and responsibility to think about all the ways in which our rhetoric and our communications might be received in the general public and might actually cause some harm.
Before I even begin my remarks, I just want to reflect on, given the nature of the particular reactionary piece of legislation before us, the impacts that Bernardo had in my community. As the member for Hamilton Centre, I know that members will recall that two of his victims were in my region. In the early 1990s, as a young adult of 12 or 13 years, I recall, crystal clear, being at a recreation centre at a karate tournament when the news broke of the atrocities that had happened in the community. As I am sure every member of the House does, when I reflect upon the monstrosities that were committed, I go back through them. Of course, we all know that Leslie Erin Mahaffy, Kristen French and Tammy Homolka were the three victims of the two brutal and vicious criminals.
However, sometimes what is lost is that there were also survivors. There are people who are watching this debate right now who would have had a direct connection, a very violent and traumatic connection, to the atrocities committed by Paul Bernardo. I want people who are watching to know that I and the New Democrats, and indeed many folks in here across all party lines, want to reflect on the fact that they are still living through the horrors that have been expressed in the House, and we want to make sure that any approach we have would be victim-centred.
However, I do not believe that the particular piece of legislation before us is necessarily victim-centred. I do not believe that it would offer victims any of the four foundational principles of victim-centred approaches to things like sexual assault, gender-based violence and the idea of safety and respect. I think that one of the most atrocious, evil and despicable things that a human being can do to another person has been sensationalized and generalized, such that all people caught within the frameworks would be comparable to it. I would suggest that is not the case. I want to honour the survivors who might be tuning in, and I want them to know that if there is any good that comes of the current debate, it is that we should be shifting our justice strategies so that they are not just about crime and punishment but also, again, about victim-centred and survivor-centred approaches.
Let us be clear about what the bill would do; it would amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act to require that inmates who have been found to be dangerous offenders, or have been convicted of more than one first-degree murder, be assigned to a security classification of maximum and be confined in a maximum-security penitentiary or area in a penitentiary for the duration of their sentence. Indeed, it is a reflection, and I think all social scientists would agree, of a failed tough-on-crime approach. The reason is that, within the due bounds of our law, there are scenarios, setting aside the atrocities of Paul Bernardo, where, based on this, people would eventually end up leaving prison.
Therefore the question becomes this: What is it that we are unleashing into our community once these people have been incarcerated for decades of their lives? How are we reflecting upon the impacts of any prospect of rehabilitation lost by the failed social approach, the failed Conservative approach, to tough-on-crime? If we put violent people, deeply problematic people and people who were traumatized into settings that continue to dehumanize them, then eventually we will have to work through what will happen when they return to our communities.
It is not like there are no better examples around the world. We only have to look to what some Scandinavian countries have done when it comes to rehabilitation. Norway's rate of recidivism decreased from a high of 70% in 1992 to the lowest in the world, at 20%, after it started community-based correctional facilities and focused on rehabilitation.
When I say these words, it is important for the public and the members in the House to not conflate the evils and the monstrosities of the worst and the most violent among us and to understand that laws ought not to be a knee-jerk response to individual failings or to individual cases, but actually need to be a collective response to our society's social pressures.
In the U.S., with it's toughness on crime, which the “Canadian Republican Party” has seemed to have adopted, the rate of return is 76.6%. Even the fiscal Conservatives among them, the ones who are truly fiscal Conservatives, would recognize that the cost of incarceration is enormous. There needs to be discretion. There needs to be the ability for those who are honestly taking steps for rehabilitation to be rehabilitated and to go from the institutionalization of a maximum-security prison to conditions that would better match the realities of the outside world so that when they are released, the likelihood of them reoffending drops.
That is not my opinion; those are the facts, but unfortunately, punishment is the only tool the Conservatives have in their tool box when dealing with these issues. Rehabilitation is not even in their vocabulary. Their position in this regard is one that is sensationalist and does prey upon the most basic and base fears of society and is based on the most evil who walk among us. There are exceptional cases of violence in this country. I am not naive to that. There are people who have done unspeakable things, but our system currently deals with that.
Were there administrative errors? Could there be administrative errors from time to time? Absolutely, that could be the case. However, concerning the transfer of Paul Bernardo, Dr. Ivan Zinger, the Correctional Investigator of Canada, in his written submission to the SECU committee on November 27, wrote, “In this case, it is especially important to make clear that Canada's correctional system is based on the principle that the rule of law follows sentenced persons into prison.”
Imprisonment does not mean total deprivation and absolute forfeiture of one's rights. The investigator went on to say, “My Office cannot, and does not, select or decline cases on the basis of one's criminal conduct or notoriety. My Office serves all federally sentenced persons, regardless of their sentence.” That is the underlying principle of the rule of law.
I would encourage members of the House, including the so-called “tough on crime” Conservatives, to reflect on ways, perhaps in the remaining months of this session and in the remaining time we are in this legislature and this Parliament, to shift their thinking and to start actually thinking about the victims and the survivors of crime as the primary priority for our legislative responses. I would like them to think about the material conditions for people currently within our federal prison systems. I would like them to think about the investments that could be made to support people in mental health and to support people in social crisis.
With that, I am thankful for this time. I will take my last five seconds to reflect upon not just the victims who were murdered by Paul Bernardo, but also upon all the survivors who may be watching this. They should know that, as New Democrats, our hearts go out to them, to their families and to the communities impacted by this.
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Madam Speaker, thank you for giving me the opportunity to deliver a final reply in the debate on my private member's bill, Bill C-351, an act to amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act regarding maximum security offenders.
I will not go into the details of the context surrounding the introduction of such a bill. I will simply point out that what prompted it was the news last June that serial killer Paul Bernardo had been transferred from a maximum-security prison to a medium-security one. It was news that shocked the public and forced the families and victims to relive their trauma. This bill seeks to ensure that maximum-security offenders remain in a maximum-security facility, where they deserve to be.
I would once again like to thank my colleague from Niagara Falls, who introduced a similar bill, as well as a motion calling for the immediate cancellation of Bernardo's transfer. Unfortunately, his motion was defeated.
I listened carefully to my colleagues' speeches, in the first hour of reading and today, and I have a few comments to make.
My Liberal colleagues mentioned that we do not care about women. Nothing could be further from the truth. Our Conservative Party has always stood with victims. Unfortunately, when it comes to dangerous offenders, the vast majority of victims are women. I also heard the Liberals say that we are using this bill to fearmonger. They falsely claim that we want to make people believe that offenders like Bernardo could end up being released. That is not the purpose of this bill at all.
The probability that such a dangerous criminal would be out on release is extremely low. However, the fact that he was transferred from a maximum- to a medium-security prison is something we want to prevent. I repeat, the very simple goal of this bill is to ensure that such criminals, given their horrific actions, are kept in maximum-security prisons, not in institutions where they would receive much more generous privileges. Most importantly, we want to prevent the families of victims from having to relive a trauma that no one would want to experience.
Other colleagues have also talked about rehabilitation. I heard someone say earlier that we do not believe in it. That is absolutely not the case. Our party does believe in rehabilitation, especially for young offenders. For some offences, a second chance is the way forward, but in the Bernardo case, for example, I am sure members will agree that rehabilitation is impossible. A second chance for such a monster is out of the question. We are talking about at least 1,000 inmates in Canada who are considered dangerous offenders.
As evidence of the current government's soft-on-crime attitude, the response to an Order Paper question submitted by my colleague from Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo revealed that most of these offenders are serving their sentences in medium- or even minimum-security prisons. There are dangerous offenders in minimum-security institutions. That is what happens when a government does not have its priorities straight, when a government believes that the right thing to do is to offer dangerous criminals the least restrictive environment. That is what happened in 2019 with the passage of Bill C-83, which puts the comfort of criminals ahead of concern for victims' families. That is pure liberalism. That is the legacy of the Liberal government after nine years in power.
On this side of the House, we stand by the victims and not the criminals. That is why I introduced this bill and I am proud of it. Where the Liberals have failed, we will succeed. We will restore common sense in our justice and correctional system.
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