- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan
- Alberta
- Voting Attendance: 67%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $170,231.20
- Government Page
- Mar/20/24 10:25:58 p.m.
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Mr. Chair, I want to thank my colleague for his excellent speech and, certainly, for the wealth of wisdom and experience that he brings to the House.
I would like to ask him, based on his knowledge and expertise, what the best way to isolate the Russian regime is and to hold the Russian regime accountable for the crimes that they have perpetrated. We have seen crimes committed in terms of the abduction of children, systematic sexual violence and the crime of aggression in general. What steps does he see as necessary to hold the Russian regime accountable?
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Mr. Speaker, that is an excellent question from my colleague, who always adds a great deal to the debate.
I know there is a great deal of concern, in the greater Toronto area specifically, around increasing crime of various kinds, including property crime and violent crime. The government's approach of saying it is going to reduce sentences overall, and trying to use the rhetorical shield of racial justice as an excuse to reduce sentences for everyone, does not make sense. It is not helping anybody, including those in minority communities. In fact, it is leading to the significant increase in crime that we are seeing.
I very much agree with the fact, as our leader has said, that when a young person makes a mistake, we should seek rehabilitation. People should have a second chance. However, there are instances of the same people, and in some cases a very small number of people, committing crimes over and over. When it is a relatively small number of people who account for a very large number of interactions with law enforcement, that suggests there is a particular problem of repeat offenders, repeat violent offenders, as well as repeat offenders against property. It simply requires a different approach. The only way to really incentivize rehabilitation is to have serious consequences for serious crimes.
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- Jun/9/22 4:30:37 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-5
Madam Speaker, we need to be very clear that there are no mandatory minimums for personal possession-related offences for drugs. Our party does not support mandatory minimums for personal possession for personal use offences. We do believe that it should be against the law to possess drugs for personal use, but we do not support mandatory minimums in those cases.
I am concerned about the fact that this legislation reduces sentences for very serious violent crimes like sexual assault, kidnapping and weapons trafficking. Those are clearly very different cases from the cases the member spoke about.
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- Jun/9/22 4:14:21 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-5
Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to speak today to Bill C-5, a piece of government legislation aimed at reducing sentences for crimes, including very serious crimes such as sexual assault, kidnapping and weapons trafficking. Many of my colleagues on this side have ably spoken to the core issues in this bill, in particular the question of whether lower sentences and conditional sentences are appropriate for these kinds of very serious offences. I am not going to repeat their arguments today. Instead, I want to respond to what seems to be the main rationale that the government is using to defend this legislation.
Comments from government members on this bill have generally avoided reference to the substantive measures in it and, in particular, to the changes to sentences for serious violent crimes. It is revealing that members of the government do not want to actually talk about and defend their decision to lower sentences for serious crimes.
The government's attempt to justify this bill has focused on noting, correctly, how the problem of systemic racism leads to the over-representation of Black and indigenous people in our justice system, but then claiming, incorrectly, that this bill somehow addresses that problem. It is a fact that there is nothing in this bill to address any kind of racism. It contains no measures respecting anti-racism training, no measures to discourage racist behaviour, no funding for communities that are victims of racism and no special procedures to protect the rights of historically marginalized communities when they encounter the justice system.
In fact, while the government evokes the challenges facing Black and indigenous Canadians every time this bill is discussed, the bill itself does not even contain the words “Black” or “indigenous”. A quick search of this bill shows that the bill actually says nothing about race or racism, either. This is a bill that is not about, and says nothing about, the racism facing Black and indigenous Canadians, yet the government's justification for this bill is to claim that it would do something that it demonstrably would not do for those communities.
The government purports to believe that lowering sentences overall will somehow address the disproportionate representation of certain minority communities in the prison population. This seems, on the face of it, to portray a certain misunderstanding of how fractions work. Changing the average sentence for a particular crime from, say, four years to three years would do nothing to change the proportion of people from a particular community who are serving time for that crime. Reducing overall sentences would do nothing to change the proportion of those in prison who are from a particular community. Any mathematically sound strategy for reducing over-representation would obviously need to reduce sentences for the over-represented group only, increase sentences for the under-represented group only, or, best of all, identify and confront the root cause of over-representation in the first place. However, reducing sentences for both over-represented and under-represented groups by the same proportion would not actually address the phenomenon of over- or under-representation.
In fairness to the government's position, it is not always quite that simple. It may be that there are certain crimes where the over-representation of certain communities is greater than other crimes. For example, in the case of drug crimes, there may be certain kinds of drugs that are more prevalent in some communities than others. There are cases and places where offences involving drugs that are more common in minority communities have carried more severe sentences than offences involving equivalent drugs that are more common in majority communities. In such cases, measures to equalize the sentencing for equivalent kinds of substances that are more or less common in different communities would be a step toward addressing the problem of over-representation. However, that is not what Bill C-5 would do.
Bill C-5 would not make these kinds of granular adjustments. Rather, Bill C-5 is a relatively short bill that would lower sentences for broad categories of offences. I see no reason why these reductions in sentencing parameters would impact over-representation in any way.
Perhaps I can make this point clearer with an analogy. We know that Black and indigenous people are over-represented in our justice system and also under-represented in our post-secondary system. We need to address the way that systemic racism leads to over-representation in penal institutions and under-representation in institutions that often lead individuals to positions of power and privilege. If members were to imagine—
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